With the mood set early on as one of quiet hatred and fear, Rhys gets us involved in dramatic action as the house is set afire and the mother, her new husband, her two children and the servants must escape for their lives.
We have an image of the mother, Annette, as prone to unhappiness, willing others to step forward rather than making life liveable for herself and her children. When she has used up all her resources to maintain a lifestyle she manages to nab a rich Englishman. When he doesn’t safely take her away from the squalor of the by now rundown homestead, she makes his life fairly miserable. He doesn’t seem to understand the hatred the natives feel for the white people. He doesn’t have the respect for them that she has learned to have to be able to live among them.
Maybe her symbol of freedom is a parrot she keeps. The bird certainly holds meaning to the natives.
I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.
I began to cry. “Don’t look,” said Aunt Cora. “Don’t look.” She stooped and put her arms round me and I hid my face, but I could feel that they were not so near. I heard someone say something about bad luck and remembered it was very unlucky to kill a parrot, or even to see a parrot die. They began to go then, quickly, silently. (p. 42)
The people had set fire to a back room where the narrator’s young brother, an invalid, slept. He was supposed to have been guarded by one of the servants. His mother ran in to save him just as his crib caught fire. Then as they all fled the flames, she tried to go back in to rescue her pet parrot.
The parrot of course couldn’t fly–his wings had been clipped by Mr. Mason, Annette’s new husband. Coco the parrot and Annette; two of a kind, flighty types that depended upon others and were held by that dependence for survival.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology