Boys and Girls

NEB Grade XI Optional English Note | Chapter 1 | Lesson 7 | Boys and Girls | Alice Munro

Summary

Narrated from the perspective a young girl, ‘Boys and Girls’ tells us about the lives of a boy and a girl on a fox farm and shows how the girl discovers the roles of brother and sister change once they mature as a boy and a girl. The story shows cultural differences between the boys and the girls.


The narrator, an eleven-year-old girl lives on a fox-breeding farm with her parents and younger brother, Laird. The girl's father is a fox farmer. Her father has hired a man named Henry Bailey to be helped. The father kills the foxes that he raises and sells their pelts. All her father’s work is a normal and everyday part of life to the narrator. However, it disgusts her mother.


The narrator and her brother are uneasy in their upstairs room at night. Her brother sings himself to sleep and she tells herself stories about the world which presents opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice. Both the narrator and her brother help her father with his works. She is proud to be the part of her father’s work. Her mother tries to get the things for her to work inside the house but the kitchen is the place she finds depressing and rushes out. She complains that once her son gets older her father will get support from him and she can retain her daughter in the kitchen.


One winter the family has two horses in the stable until they are killed for meat for the foxes. They are named Mack and Flora. Mack is an old, black and indifferent horse whereas Flora is a sorrel mare. When the spring comes, the narrator’s father decides to kill Mack so he can feed his foxes. She feels very uneasy about the death of the horse. Two weeks after it will be time for Flora to be killed. When Flora is brought out of the stable, she breaks away from Henry. She runs free in the backyard. The men shout to the narrator to run and close the gate. Instead of closing the gate, she opens it as wide as she can.


In a truck, the men along with Laird pass through the gate to catch Flora. The girl thinks that she will be in trouble for letting the horse out. During dinner, when her brother tells everyone what happened. Her father asks her what she did that for. She is overcome. Tears flood her eyes. She waits to be sent away from the table. But, her father only speaks the words “She is only a girl.”