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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Spies, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class Difference and Social Status
Memory and the Self
Imagination vs. Reality
War, Paranoia, and Belonging
Secrecy
Summary
Analysis
Stephen arrives at his destination and finds that “everything is as it was…and everything has changed.” He gets off his train and walks the familiar path to the old cul-de-sac where he once lived, noticing the different changes to the town. Finally he reaches the cul-de-sac, which he calls “the Close,” with the same fourteen houses that were there fifty years ago. However, his initial feeling of familiarity soon disappears, and he realizes that the houses actually have changed. They are more standardized now, with asphalt and cars, and their own individual uniqueness gone. The privet scent is also gone.
Memory is dependent upon the passage of time, and the Close has changed immensely within the span of five decades. Yet it still retains a familiarity to Stephen that he recognizes from the past. In a similar way, Stephen has completely changed in that same span of time, but he still carries the thoughts and memories of what happened at the Close fifty years ago. Notably, the privet that brought Stephen back to the Close has disappeared from the Close itself.
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Stephen says that even the sky, which usually stays unchanged throughout time, is different now. In the past, the war had painted the sky with searchlights and flares, but now it is “mild and bland.” As Stephen starts to question his return, wondering if he’s been foolish to come back, the familiar sound of a nearby train ushers in a rush of memories of the area. He starts to envision the Close as it was when he was a young boy. The same houses transform back into the houses of the families that lived there before: the Sheldons, the Hardiments, the Geests, the Averys.
The way Stephen’s memories materialize in front of him as he is standing in the Close emphasizes their powerful force and plays with the elusive distinction between imagination and reality. Frayn also mentions the War’s effect on the landscape in order to hint at its larger influence on Stephen’s childhood, which will become more evident further into the story.
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The second house in the line, No. 2, catches Stephen’s attention in the image of his memory. Semi-attached to the Hardiments’ house and the Pinchers’, No. 3 was the house Stephen himself used to live in. Though the house is now remodeled and renamed, it still seems “faintly embarrassing,” and Stephen recollects how “shameful” it used to seem to him. He remembers the dreary gray of the house in his time, and how depressing and messy the lawn used to be, especially because the Pinchers next door had used their garden as a dump for old furniture. Stephen notes that the Pinchers were “the undesirable elements in the Close—even less desirable than we were.”
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Stephen starts to wonder if his younger self would have seen what he sees now. He finally reveals his full name to the reader—Stephen Wheatley—and he recalls his younger self as an awkward boy in colorless clothes, since he remembers himself as he was in old monochromatic photographs. He comments that the name Stephen Wheatley now sounds “strange” to him, and remembers the “delicious silvery serrated texture” of the belt buckle—a metal snake in the shape of an S—to his old school uniform.
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The older Stephen sees his younger self leaving the house, and he describes everything about himself, even his various items of clothing, as “inadequate,” “hopeless,” and “failed.” Stephen wonders if he was aware of his social standing even at that age. Speaking of his younger self, he says “he knows precisely, even if he doesn’t know that he knows it.” Deep down, he can tell that something about him “doesn’t quite fit” with the other neighborhood children of the Close.
Stephen imagines himself going through the neighborhood, commenting on the other children of the Close, including the “sly and treacherous” Barbara Berrill and her sister Deirdre, who has been hanging around with Stephen’s older brother Geoff lately. The girls’ father is away fighting in the war, and “everyone says they’re running wild.” Stephen continues to watch his younger self, who seems “lost in some kind of vague daydream,” and comments on how “unsatisfactory” he seems.
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Next the young Stephen passes the mysterious Trewinnick house, where the blackout curtains are always drawn and some mysterious strangers have moved in. They only come and go at night, and no one knows their names.
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The young Stephen finally reaches his destination: No. 9, the Haywards’ house. In the present, he examines it and says that the house is the same as it was before, neatly maintained with white paint and still called “Chollerton,” as proclaimed by a copper plate near the door. He sees the younger Stephen waiting at the door, trying to tidy up his appearance. His friend Keith opens the door and Stephen enters. The Stephen of the present proclaims that this is where his story begins, on the fateful day when Keith, his best friend, uttered the six words that “turned our world inside out.”
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Stephen wonders what the inside of the Haywards’ house looks like now. He describes how it looked before: dark oak paneling and different pieces of art and furniture. He explains that he now can picture the color of his and Keith’s belts (which he previously remembered in monochrome). Keith’s belt was yellow and black, the colors of the local preparatory school, while Stephen wore the green and black belt of the school he and his brother attended, which he describes as the “wrong school.”
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Stephen expresses how even then he knew how lucky he was to be Keith’s friend. He describes their relationship, in which Keith was the leader and Stephen his loyal follower. They had conducted many projects, all led by Keith because of his “intellectual and imaginative superiority.” He then lists Keith’s various fantastical projects, like creating an “underground railway” for traveling via “pneumatic tubes.” Keith’s projects are ingenious and successful—or would be successful, Stephen says, “as soon as we put our plans into effect.”
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For example, Stephen states that it was Keith who discovered that the Trewinnick house was occupied by a secret, sinister organization called “the Juice,” who are “behind all kinds of plots and swindles.” Stephen says that Keith would have discovered the secret passageway the Juice used—if only Keith’s father hadn’t called him inside.
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Stephen now imagines the two boys standing back in the hall of the Hayward house, deciding what to do. He explains that they could do the chore Keith’s father had instructed Keith to finish, which usually was to oil his special bicycle. Keith rode his bike to school, while Stephen took the bus—and Stephen comments that “cycling’s plainly the right way to go to school,” and the bus is “plainly the wrong way.”
Alternately, the boys could play in Keith’s playroom, which was filled with expensive toys (and which Stephen painstakingly catalogues). Or they could play in the garden (which contains all kind of fantastical adventures that Stephen describes), or take a walk to the golf course, where Keith claims he’s seen a talking monkey and a crashed German plane.
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Although all these different pastimes were equally viable options, Stephen states that going to his own house was never a possibility. Unlike Keith, Stephen shared a room with his brother Geoff. While Keith had a separate playroom, Stephen had to play and do homework in his bedroom. He tries to imagine the unlikely scenario of Keith asking his mother to visit Stephen’s house; Stephen believes that Keith’s mother would have deferred to Keith’s father, and Keith’s father would have given Keith another chore to avoid allowing his son to come over. Stephen wonders why Keith’s parents even allowed Keith to play with him. He notes that Keith’s mother would only refer to Stephen indirectly, and says that Keith’s mother rested all the time, spending most of her day on the sofa or in her bedroom—or she would post letters several times a day.
Stephen then describes Keith’s father, who spent most of his time working around the house and the garden. However, his private abode was the garage, where he would do wood- or metal-work. Stephen describes the Haywards’ car, which was kept in pristine condition without its wheels until it could be driven after the war’s end. Keith explained to Stephen that the wheels were taken off to keep invading Germans from stealing the car, and the wheel nuts were hidden away with the revolver that Keith’s father had used in the Great War.
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Keith’s father was a man of few words, except for the occasional “old boy” or “old bean” that he used to address Keith. Stephen notes that Keith’s father did not acknowledge Stephen’s existence and never addressed him. However, Stephen also never spoke to him directly, because he was too intimidated by Mr. Hayward, who had won a medal in the Great War for killing five Germans. Keith said he killed them with his bayonet, though Stephen privately wonders how Keith’s father fixed the bayonet to his revolver. Keith’s father then carried the bayonet fixed to his belt when he went away to the Home Guard on weekends (though Keith claimed he was really in the Secret Service).
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Stephen was the only person in the Close whom the Haywards let willingly into their home. They did not interact with anyone else in the neighborhood, except for Keith’s mother’s sister, Auntie Dee, who lived three doors down. Stephen describes Auntie Dee as being the opposite of Keith’s mother, who was tall, unhurried, and calm: Auntie Dee was short, reckless, and cheerful. Keith’s mother did the shopping for Auntie Dee, who was often busy looking after her daughter, Milly. Unlike the Haywards, Auntie Dee directly addressed Stephen. Stephen recounts a time he followed Keith to Auntie Dee’s house. He says that Keith had a look of disapproval, much like his father’s, because of her messy house.
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Stephen attributes Auntie Dee’s recklessness and untidiness to the absence of her husband Uncle Peter, who was a bomber pilot off fighting in the war. Stephen describes how everything in the house reflected the “glory” of Uncle Peter, who seemed almost holy because of his role in the war. Other fathers in the neighborhood were off fighting, but only Uncle Peter was in the RAF (Royal Air Force) and flew on secret missions over Germany.
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Stephen then thinks about his own family and asks himself if he ever loved them. He disregards the question by considering love to be a kind of inevitable obligation, and then he compares his family to Keith’s seemingly perfect family, noting that he was able to appreciate the Haywards because of his own inferior family—Stephen was “encumbered with a brother,” for example. He specifically compares his father with Keith’s father. Stephen’s father was an unremarkable man, who spoke few words and worked a dull job (something to do with “controls on building materials”) at an office. He even went away on a work trip for a whole year once. Stephen’s father never calls Stephen “old bean” or threatens to cane him, unlike Mr. Hayward with Keith.
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Stephen describes his father’s unkempt appearance, which was as “unsatisfactory” as Stephen himself. He mentions, in particular, the strange language that only his father used. Stephen’s father would call his and Geoff’s messy room a “coodle-moodle,” and whenever Stephen would say something nonsensical, his father would call it “schnick-schnack.” Stephen was embarrassed by these words that his father used. Stephen then recalls telling his father Keith’s theory about “the Juice” moving into the Trewinnick house. Stephen’s father looked thoughtfully at his son, but seemed relieved to learn that this was only one of Keith’s wild imaginings.
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Stephen answers his previous question again, saying that he must have loved his family because it was the “ordinary” thing to do. But he admits that he longed to be at Keith’s house. He especially loved being invited for tea and enjoying their chocolate spread and lemon barley. He offers a description of a Wimbledon couples trophy on their mantelpiece—Keith said his parents would have been world champions if they hadn’t been cheated out of it by “members of the same sinister organization now entrenched at Trewinnick”—and Uncle Peter’s photograph on the sideboard.
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Stephen then describes how he once went into Keith’s mother’s sitting room and thanked her for inviting him over; even as an adult, he feels immense gratitude to her for letting him come over. Stephen then addresses the reader and everyone else who played a part in the “drama” of his life, saying, “thank you for having me.”
Stephen returns to the subject of the “disconcerting scent.” In the present he is slowly walking down the street to figure out the smell’s source, and he stops at No. 4, the remnants of Miss Durrant’s house, which used to be called “Braemar” and was destroyed by a German bomb. He notes that he and Keith spent a lot of time hiding in the hedges of Braemar, which had grown wild, and describes the place as “our Arcadia, our Atlantis, our Garden of Eden.” Stephen then finally reveals the identity of the smell’s source: “plain ordinary privet.”
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Stephen then returns to the story he began earlier, which takes place at the tea table in Keith’s house. He recalls the sound of beads clinking against a glass jug—but then realizes that the wind was causing the clinking, so they were outside, not inside. He confirms his correction with an auditory memory of the trains on the railway. He has troubling recalling the exact order of events, the “vivid particulars” of his remembered sensations and the connections between them.
Stephen recounts a time when a policeman arrived at the Close to apparently arrest Keith’s mother. But Stephen then corrects himself again, and resituates the memory to an earlier time when a policeman paid Auntie Dee a visit over a complaint about her failure to comply with the blackout. Stephen then thinks of the suspicious look of guilt on Keith’s mother’s face at the time, and wonders if it planted “the idea” in Keith’s head. But Stephen thinks that those six fateful words came out of nowhere, and were simply the product of Keith’s wild imagination. Those six words were: “My mother is a German spy.”
