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Chapter 22: Grieving
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Good Night, Mr. Tom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Biological Family vs. Chosen Family
Civilians in Wartime
Grief and Healing
Talent and Community
Religion
Summary
Analysis
In the Dig for Victory campaign, Tom and Will have uprooted all Tom’s flowers and are replanting the beds with vegetables. One day, Will is wearing Zach’s old red jersey while planting seeds. Then Carrie runs up, flushed, and asks whether Will has “them.” He says they’re in his room. When Carrie suggests they go down to the river, Will asks whether she’s finished her chores, and Carrie smiles as she explains that she climbed out the window—every time her mother sees her with a book, she gives her something else to do. Will says he thought Mrs. Thatcher was improving, and Carrie says that she is, but she still thinks of reading as a lazy activity.
The “Dig for Victory” campaign was a government-publicized movement during World War II in which English civilians turned spare land and flower gardens into vegetable gardens as a way of combatting food shortages. When Will wears Zach’s red jersey while gardening, it emphasizes that he has embraced his memories of Zach and thrown off his abusive mother’s influence (she believed the color red was sinful). Meanwhile, Carrie is still struggling to get the family support she needs to pursue her academic ambitions.
Themes
Will suggests that Carrie go wait in his room till he’s done planting. When he’s done, they can ride the tandem bicycle to the river. Carrie is excited—but then she asks how she can ride a bicycle in the dress she’s wearing. Will suggests she wear a pair of his shorts or Zach’s. Carrie likes his idea—she’s been wanting to wear shorts, though her mother says that she’ll never get married if she wears shorts—but Carrie tells Will that she doesn’t dare. When he asks why not, she asks whether she’ll look like a boy. Will looks at her a moment. Then he says that she looks nothing like a boy—but if she did, it wouldn’t matter. Carrie announces that she doesn’t want to marry and do housework all the time anyway.
Previously, Will abandoned Carrie to her own grief over Zach by refusing to talk about Zach with her. Now, having embraced his own memories of Zach, Will offers to let Carrie wear Zach’s clothes the way Will himself has been doing—suggesting that the children have entered a healthier stage of grief in which they are able to support each other while remembering their friend. Will’s long pause before pointing out that Carrie doesn’t look like a boy, meanwhile, suggests that he may be developing a crush on her.
Themes
A bit later, Will joins Carrie in his room. Will gets her a pair of shorts, a shirt, and Zach’s multicolored jersey. At first Carrie doesn’t want to wear it because it’s “special,” but when Will tells her that Zach would want her to wear it, she takes it. As Carrie is changing, Will sees her developing chest through her undershirt and suddenly wants to touch her arms, but he restrains himself, laughing pointlessly instead. From his bag, Will produces At the Back of the North Wind, A Little Princess, David Copperfield, and Black Beauty for Carrie. He suggests that she bring one of the books to the river, and he’ll bring his sketch pad.
When Carrie hesitates to take Zach’s multicolored jersey because it’s “special,” her hesitation suggests that she doesn’t feel she has as much of a right to Zach’s things as Will does. Will’s reassurances show that he respects Carrie’s friendship with Zach and wants to support her in her grief, while his inexplicable desire to touch her suggests again that he is developing a crush on her. At the Back of the North Wind (1871) is a children’s fantasy novel by Scottish author George MacDonald (1824–1905), A Little Princess (1905) is a children’s classic about a motherless girl at boarding school by English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924), David Copperfield (1850) is a bildungsroman by famous English novelist Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Black Beauty (1877) is a children’s novel about a horse by English writer Anna Sewell (1820–1878). By getting these varied books for Carrie, Will is supporting her imagination, curiosity, and intellect in the face of her mother’s skepticism about her academic ambitions.
Themes
Will and Carrie sneak from the house with the tandem bicycle and ride off. When Mrs. Hartridge spies Carrie, her mouth drops open, and children start laughing hysterically as they ride away. They calm down as they ride, but when they reach the river, Will does an imitation of Mrs. Hartridge, and Carrie laughs so hard she nearly pees herself. Will suggests that Carrie read while he draws her, but after a moment, Carrie asks whether it’s weird that she’s wearing Zach’s clothes. Will points out that he himself is wearing some of Zach’s clothes. Carrie says that she would have expected wearing a dead person’s clothes to be creepy, but it’s nice.
Carrie’s admission that it’s nice to wear a dead loved one’s clothes recalls Tom taking out Rachel’s paint box, Geoffrey using his dead friend’s pipe, and Will learning to ride Zach’s bicycle. In each case, using a dead person’s belongings becomes a way of remembering them with love and honoring their lasting influence.
Themes
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Carrie tells Will that her mother has been awful. Will asks whether Mrs. Thatcher is awful to Ginnie too. Carrie explains that Ginnie likes housework and wants to be a wife. Mrs. Thatcher thinks Carrie is becoming a snob. Carrie asks whether Will thinks this is true, and he says no. When he asks whether high school is still unpleasant, Carrie explains how, when she came in fifth in her end-of-term exams, her classmates were shocked—they thought she was stupid because of her rural accent. Some are nicer to her now that they know she’s smart. Will says she talks differently now. Though at first Carrie is upset, Will says she sounds more like Zach, which makes her happy.
Carrie is an intellectual girl in the sexist society of 1930s England, which still expects women to be primarily or solely wives and mothers. As such, she is not receiving the support she desires from her mother. As a rural village girl at an academic high school in a bigger town, she has also not received much social support from her classmates, who look down on her for her accent. Despite these difficulties, Carrie receives meaningful support from Will, who sneaks books to her and approves of the new way she talks because it reminds him of their dead friend. As such, the novel suggests that Carrie will get the support she needs from Will and other friends, even if she can’t rely on her mother’s or classmates’ approval.
Themes
Carrie reads and Will sketches her with focus and intense enjoyment until it gets dark. They flee back to Will’s bedroom, where Carrie changes into her dress. They sneak out to the garden. Will tells her he feels like he might explode from happiness. She laughs. After she leaves, Will returns home. When he hangs up his hat, he realizes that it’s no longer hard to reach his coat-peg. When Sammy jumps at him, Will pets him, and he remembers how he used to be afraid of Sammy. Will joins Tom, who is looking at the newspaper. He notices how “old and vulnerable.” Tom looks, though he has always thought of Tom as strong. Then he thinks that vulnerability isn’t weakness and announces to Tom with some shock: “I’m growing!”
Will’s enjoyment sketching Carrie and his intense happiness at spending time with her hammer home his developing feelings for her. Meanwhile, when he reflects on his former fear of Sammy and Tom’s increasing age, it shows that he has grown and is still “growing”—that is, he is continuing to move past the fearfulness that his abusive mother instilled in him and coming to appreciate Tom for his vulnerability as well as his strength.
Themes
