ret kort referat

In the short story “Sand” by Susan Hill we are introduced to a unsympathetic mother who dictates her children. The consequence of this unconventional behaviour towards her children is extensive. After the mother’s death the children evoke memories from their childhood. The memories which start to arise, jog their memory of their fear towards her. They recall how egocentric and cold-hearted the mother had been and how unwilling she had been to make herself uncomfortable for their sake. Since the mother had died, questions they never had the courage to ask, are left unstated. Nevertheless, even if the mother was still alive, they would be too terrified and might not ask her. Their only optimistic recollection of their mother was on the incident when they one day passed a crying child, and the mother surprisingly helped him. She cleaned his eyes from sand with a handkerchief which she had been fond of. This episode of the crying child made the children very unpleasant and a bit timid. Afterwards the children were hypothesizing whether this episode of the child would change their mother, but to the children’s big displeasure the mother remained cold-hearted. The children got only one positive memory of the mother as a human being, and unfortunately this remained the only throughout their life.