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Brakey
Agnes Larwood is Brakey’s neighbor and classmate. A Pom, Agnes is part of a large, religious family. While Agnes cannot bring herself to leave her brothers and run away like her sister Margaret, she finds her home deeply depressing, fishing for cobblers every evening not to make money but to escape the house, if only temporarily. Agnes has a steely personality and is surprisingly calm when her home burns down, leading Brakey to briefly speculate whether she set the fire herself. After Agnes’s father dies in the fire, the welfare services take Agnes and her family away. She grows up to become a surgeon in Perth.
Agnes Larwood Quotes in The Turning
The The Turning quotes below are all either spoken by Agnes Larwood or refer to Agnes Larwood. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Cockleshell
Quotes
In the old days, when they were kids, they played together off and on, the way you do when there are plenty of kids about and you find yourself falling in with someone for an hour or so. Cockleshell was bigger then and much more lively. With the meatworks and the whaling station still operating, the string of houses along the shore was full. It seemed that there were kids everywhere and they ran in a loose mob, roaming the bush and the estuarine flats in search of entertainment. Their hamlet had its own sign out on the bay road back then. Cockle Shoal. But then as now people called the place Cockleshell and that’s what Brakey knows it as.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Brakey has the rest of his life to remember Agnes Larwood and the hunger he had for her those weeks the year he turned fifteen. He’ll live to see Cockleshell disappear altogether and the luxury estate, Spinnaker Waters, take its place. Until she dies, his poor lonely mother will punctuate all talk of human affairs with the tart summation that they all leave in you in the end. Yet he often wonders about Eric Larwood, the man who wouldn’t leave. They dragged the charred shell of him out on a vinyl sheet. Agnes and her family bedded down one last time at Brakey’s place but nobody slept. Next day the Welfare people came and they were never seen in town again.
Get the entire The Turning LitChart as a printable PDF.
Agnes Larwood Quotes in The Turning
The The Turning quotes below are all either spoken by Agnes Larwood or refer to Agnes Larwood. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Cockleshell
Quotes
In the old days, when they were kids, they played together off and on, the way you do when there are plenty of kids about and you find yourself falling in with someone for an hour or so. Cockleshell was bigger then and much more lively. With the meatworks and the whaling station still operating, the string of houses along the shore was full. It seemed that there were kids everywhere and they ran in a loose mob, roaming the bush and the estuarine flats in search of entertainment. Their hamlet had its own sign out on the bay road back then. Cockle Shoal. But then as now people called the place Cockleshell and that’s what Brakey knows it as.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Brakey has the rest of his life to remember Agnes Larwood and the hunger he had for her those weeks the year he turned fifteen. He’ll live to see Cockleshell disappear altogether and the luxury estate, Spinnaker Waters, take its place. Until she dies, his poor lonely mother will punctuate all talk of human affairs with the tart summation that they all leave in you in the end. Yet he often wonders about Eric Larwood, the man who wouldn’t leave. They dragged the charred shell of him out on a vinyl sheet. Agnes and her family bedded down one last time at Brakey’s place but nobody slept. Next day the Welfare people came and they were never seen in town again.
