Young Mungo

“She knew it was the bones of him that had become a dead weight.”

Mungo’s low self-esteem is so evident that even his mostly uncaring mother notices that he seems to have trouble carrying the weight of his body around. The language is telling: The description characterizes Mungo’s depression as skeletal and possibly fatal. The only way Mo-Maw can register Mungo’s downward spiral is as physical decline, since men in the community are not supposed to express any emotions besides anger.

“Apparently there could be some distance between what a person was saying and what you should be seeing. Jodie said he was gullible. Mo-Maw said she wished she had raised him to be cannier, less of anybody’s fool. It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.”

Mungo struggles to understand how people veil their intentions. His sister characterizes him as “gullible” and his entire family is worried about his naivete. This concern implies that there is something in the world that Mungo should fear, and that Mungo is at risk of putting himself in vulnerable situations because he lacks street smarts. There is irony in being “a disappointment because you were honest”—a quality praised in the Catholicism that surrounds Mungo so thoroughly that it is the source of his name is not reflected in the necessities of day to day life in East End.

“Mungo and his brother and sister called this slack version of her Tattie-bogle, like some heartless, shambling scarecrow. No matter how her children stuffed her with their love or tried to prop her up and gather her back together, she took in all their care and attention and felt as hollow as ever.”

In this quote, Stuart reveals the effects Mungo’s mother’s alcoholism has on the family. They call her drunk persona “Tattie-bogle”, a Scottish slang term for “scarecrow”, as a way of highlighting her emptiness.