Back to: West Bengal Board Class 10th English Guide and Notes
Table of Contents
Introduction
”Our Runaway Kite”, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, is a heart-touching short story exploring the theme of separation, identity and relationship. The narrator lived with her family and brother, Claude, on the Big Half Moon Island. The story depicts realistically the relationships in today’s separated world and teaches us the value of togetherness.
The narrator, Claude, and their father lived in an isolated island ”The Big Half Moon”. In the winter they used to shift to the mainland due to the freezing of the harbour. There Claude and the narrator got the opportunity of having the company of more people. With the help of a boy, both Claude and the narrator, learns to make a kite.
Once the narrator and Claude asked their Father the reason of not having any relationships to which the father looked so sorrowful that they wished they hadn’t asked any such question.
Every summer the narrator and Claude had some hobby. The last summer before Dick and Mimi came, the narrator and Claude were crazy about kites. A boy on the mainland showed Claude how to make them. Back on the island we made plenty of kites. Claude would go around to the other side of the island and they would play shipwrecked mariners signalling to each other with kites.
The kite
They had a kite that was big and covered with lovely red paper on which they pasted gold tinsel stars all over it and had written their names full on it – Claude Leete and Philippa Leete, Big Half Moon lighthouse. One day there was a grand wind for kite-flying and as the narrator brought the kite from the house, she tripped and fell over the rocks and her elbow went clear through the kite, making a big hole. The narrator and Claude rushed into the lighthouse to get some paper but as there was no more red paper, so they took an old letter lying on the bookcase in the sitting room. They patched the kite up with the letter, and sent it like a bird.
The Re-conciliation
A month later a letter came for their father which made him emotional. Then he sat down beside his children and narrated them his story about his brother and a sister. He had quarrelled with his brother and left home. Years afterward, he felt sorry and when he went back, he found his brother had died and he couldn’t find his sister. The letter father had just received was from his sister, Aunt Esther, mother of Dick and Mimi. She was a widow who lived hundreds of miles inland.
One day when Dick and Mimi were out in the woods, they discovered the kite on the top of a tree and carried it home. When their mother saw the kite patched with the letter, she turned pale. It was the very letter she had once written to her brother. Philippa was her mother’s name and Claude was her father’s. She knew whose kite it must be so she sat down and wrote to Big Half Moon and Father received her letter.
Next day, Father went and brought Aunt Esther, Dick and Mimi with him. The happiest thing was that they all had relations with each other.
