Happily Ever After Annotated

The content of Happily Ever After is fairly clear although there are nuances that only those familiar with boarding school life might note. A widowed single parent decides to sacrifice her possessions and perhaps status in order to send her only son to boarding school around puberty, hoping this will ensure his success in life at the same time that she stifles her own emotional solitude. But the son's success comes with a price, unease with the open expression of emotion, a side effect of incarceration in an all­ male, highly competitive, environment.

The structure of the poem is hybrid. It has three 9 line stanzas, with varying syllables and no rhyme scheme although there is sporadic word play, a few alliterations ( provider-protector) and occasional rhymes, ( shouted, doubted;climb, vine;neck, back, Jack). Each stanza has a metaphor, a virus breeding resistance, the twisted vine

In 1938 at age four my mother and father took me to India when my father became the sales manager of a large tea company. They left my brother, aged eleven, behind in boarding school and, after the Second World War began a year later, he never saw his mother for five years and his father for seven.

Meanwhile in Calcutta I developed amebic dysentery in the days before antibiotics. After recovering, at age five, my parents were advised to send me away far from contagion in the city to boarding schools in the hill country. This was a three day journey by train after which my mother kissed me farewell until the next school holidays three months away. Altogether I remained in all male boarding schools from age 5 till18 when I was drafted into the British Army. I thrived in boarding school, excelled academically and at sports, becoming the first member of my family to go to University (Cambridge). My mother became an alcoholic and my father remained an emotionally detached but fair minded successful