Private Peaceful: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Back in the present, the teenage Tommo claims that he’s “not sure [he] ever believed in God,” even as a child in Sunday school. He would look at Jesus on the cross and think how much he must be hurting, and couldn’t understand why God wouldn’t help him. Still, Tommo decides that he shouldn’t think these thoughts, because tonight he “very much” wants to believe in God and in heaven.

One evening, Charlie and Tommo go poaching, but they have to go without Molly, as she is still ill with scarlet fever. It is the first time they have gone without her, and Tommo finds being on lookout so dull without her company that he falls asleep. The next thing he knows, a dog is at his face, and old Lambert, the Colonel’s bailiff, is pulling him up and shouting at him. Lambert marches Tommo and Charlie up to the Big House “at the point of a shotgun” and takes them to the Colonel and Grandma Wolf. Grandma Wolf calls the boys “a downright disgrace,” and “common thieves,” and then the Colonel calls them “young ruffians” and promises to beat both of the boys the next day as punishment.

Charlie and Tommo return home and tell their mother everything, to which she promises that the Colonel will not beat the boys, not “over [her] dead body.” She is upset and angry, but she knows deep down that the boys were trying to help, and decides that cleaning out the Colonel’s kennels will be punishment enough. The next day she visits the Colonel’s house, and true to her word manages to persuade him against beating the boys. Instead, they will clean out the kennels every weekend until Christmas.

The boys take to their punishment quite happily, as they like the company of the hunting hounds in the kennels. They have a particular favorite, a dog named Bertha. Tommo claims that Bertha’s big eyes are the same color as Molly’s, so she reminds him of her.

On the last weekend of their punishment, the boys return home to find Molly waiting in their house. Her hair is shorter, and Tommo says that “she wasn’t a girl any more. She had a different beauty now, a beauty that at once stirred in me a new and deeper love.”

Again, Tommo starts feeling left out with Charlie and Molly, because they are outgrowing him. Molly moves up to Charlie’s older class at school, and eventually, both Charlie and Molly leave school altogether. Tommo is stuck in class, but both Charlie and Molly start working up at the Colonel’s “Big House,” which is where most people from the village work. Molly is an “under-parlor maid,” and Charlie starts working in the hunt kennels full-time.

Tommo barely sees Molly anymore because she works so much, and when he does see her she seems different, “more like a little mother to [him] than a friend.” All Molly and Charlie talk about now is the Big House, and Tommo realizes that he is no longer part of their world. One day, he sees Charlie and Molly walking away from him while holding hands, and feels “a sudden ache” in his heart, which he claims is a “pang” of “deep grief.”

Tommo recalls one rare occasion when he felt like a “threesome” with Molly and Charlie again. The three have just been fishing in a field, when suddenly they hear an engine. In amazement, they realize that a yellow airplane is flying above them, and they watch the pilot waving at them from the cockpit. The plane then lands in the field, only “fifty yards” away from them, and the pilot asks where he is. Charlie directs him to the next village, and as thanks, the pilot gives the children some humbugs candies. After he flies off, the three sit in the grass in shock. They can’t believe what just happened, but they suppose that at least they have the humbugs to prove it. Molly says that every time she eats a humbug from now on, she will think of “the three of us, and how we are right now.”

Tommo has his humbugs confiscated at school, and the spiteful Mr. Munnings gives him six strokes of his ruler as punishment for having them in class. Tommo is very proud of himself because he is brave as he is punished, looking Mr. Munnings “in the eye” and staring him down defiantly. He longs to tell Charlie about his little victory, but feels like Charlie doesn’t care about anything that happens at school anymore.

That night, Charlie tells Tommo that he’s in big trouble. He has stolen Bertha the dog, because the Colonel said that he was going to shoot her the next day. Apparently, Bertha is too old and slow to be of use anymore. Charlie asked the Colonel to save Bertha, but he refused, so Charlie rescued her instead, and hid her in a shack in the woods.