The Silent Boy

“By thirteen I already knew that I wanted to be a doctor […] when I read the war news, I thought only of the wounded and how if I were a doctor I could set their bones and heal their burns.” 

Katy is influenced by her father’s profession and sees the world through a doctor’s eyes. She is interested in helping people in need, and she finds her father’s work inspirational and meaningful.

“Our cook was named Naomi, and she was also brown. Everything has a color, I remember thinking. I could not think of a single thing that had no color, except the water in my bath.” 

Race is not addressed in the novel other than this one reference to Naomi. Katy notices that she and Naomi have different skin colors, but as we see in this quotation, she has no racist or prejudiced thoughts associated with Naomi. Katy is, at this point, a purely innocent child.

“They had found her out in the garden. That’s what they told Austin: that his mother had gone outside to pick some tomatoes for lunch, and when she looked down, she saw a lovely baby girl there.” 

This is Katy’s first explanation of how children are born. Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Bishop are very concerned with impropriety and do not want the children to know anything about sex, pregnancy, or childbirth. This is very confusing for Katy, who is too smart to fully believe that a baby could grow out of a garden.