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5. Mr Coombes
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Authority and Hypocrisy
Beauty and Imagination
Growing Up
English Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
Roald and his friends’ Form Master sends them to Mr. Coombes’s office. When they enter, they see Mr. Coombes standing in the middle of the room holding a long cane. He tells the group not to argue or plead their innocence and orders them to line up. Thwaites, the first in line, bends over at Mr. Coombes’s command so that his hands touch the floor. As Thwaites struggles to touch the floor and Mr. Coombes widens his stance, Roald thinks about how small his bottom looks. Mr. Coombes hits Thwaites with the cane hard enough to make him jump and scream, but Mrs. Pratchett, who has been sitting in the corner of the office unnoticed by the boys, yells for Mr. Coombes to hit Thwaites harder.
Again, Mr. Coombes forces the boys to line themselves up to be punished. On the surface, the command seems like its purpose is to enforce order on the proceedings, but as each boy is forced to watch the one before him suffer, it becomes clear that there’s sadism at play in this discipline, too. Roald’s notice of Thwaites’s difficulty to position himself for the cane and the smallness of his bottom underlines Thwaites’s powerless cooperation with his punishment. Thwaites’s small bottom makes both Mr. Coombes and the cane itself look larger and more threatening in comparison, and Roald’s attention to this detail emphasizes the unfairness of the beating.
Themes
Roald is disturbed by Mr. Coombes’s violence and Mrs. Pratchett’s enthusiasm. Mr. Coombes hits each of the boys four times with the cane while Mrs. Pratchett eggs him on. Roald suspects that her shouting causes Mr. Coombes to hit them harder than he otherwise would have, comparing him to an athlete responding to a crowd. Roald goes last, and as he bends over, Mrs. Pratchett urges Mr. Coombes to hit him the hardest of all. Roald describes the pain of the cane hitting his bottom as similar to being branded by a hot poker.
Mrs. Pratchett’s yelling adds an entirely new layer of sadism to the situation. Crucially, the adults in the room aren’t just disciplining a group of errant boys—they’re also enjoying the children’s pain, which is what Roald takes issue with more than anything else. Roald’s comparison of the cane’s impact to being branded calls attention to the lasting pain that he experiences from his beatings. The cane leaves both physical and mental scars. The fact that brandings are usually reserved for cattle also subtly alludes to the inhumanity of canings as punishment.
Themes
That night, Roald’s mother sees the bruises on his bottom as he’s undressing to bathe. She asks him how it happened, and he tells her the whole story. As soon as he’s finished it, she leaves the house. She returns an hour later. Roald asks his mother if Mr. Coombes was rude to her, and she tells him that he was, recounting how the headmaster told her that she was too foreign to understand his British methods. Roald’s mother tells Roald that she plans to enroll him in an English boarding school at the end of the year.
Roald’s mother listens to Roald and comes to his defense, two actions that almost no other adult ever takes on his behalf throughout Boy. The showdown between Roald’s mother and Mr. Coombes reveals for the first time how other characters in the story regard her: as a clear foreigner, someone who doesn’t quite belong. Despite Mr. Coombes’s apparent sense of superiority in his British discipline, he and Roald’s mother don’t fight over whether British or Norwegian education is better—instead, they argue about Welsh education as opposed to English education. Mr. Coombes’s violence leads Roald’s mother to conclude that English education must be the best after all. It seems like Roald’s mother thinks that English schools don’t beat their pupils as cruelly as Mr. Coombes does. If so, that is an assumption that underlines how little she really does know about English education.
Themes
