The house
Nuala described their house as, ' We were living then in a crumbling rectory with lovely drawing rooms and an overgrown garden with a dog's graveyard behind the apple trees, and stone flagged sculleries full of spiders.' The description of the house contains visual imagery.
The narrator has built imagery by the use of adjectives to describe features of the house. These adjectives are crumbling to describe the rectory, overgrown to describe the garden and stone flagged to describe the sculleries.
Fairies
After school, Nuala would go into a field that contained a barrel. She would look into the barrel and see fairies. The fairies are described as, '...I would see lovely little fairies, with straight partings in their blonde hair and pink ballet skirts. They were about the size of flies.' The narrator has created visual imagery in the description of the fairies.
Adjectives have been used to bring out the characteristics of the fairies. These adjectives include; little to describe their size, blonde to describe the color of their hair and pink to describe the color of their skirts. The adjectives build the imagery in the description of the fairies.
Portmarnock
Portmarnock is described as, '...that sand drifted across them and collected on them. In winter, great wild waves crashed up the sand at Portmarnock and broke over the road, and across the dunes there was a little wooden pub and some holiday shacks, and then fields.' The narrator has built imagery in the description of Portmarnock by using adjectives such as great wild to describe the waves in winter and little to describe the wooden pub.
The convent
Nuala was sent to boarding school in a convent. On her first day of school, she describes the convent school as, '...we went to mass together, and then he brought me up to the grey granite building and left me with the mother superior. There were shards of ice on the lake in front of the school and motionless swans on the black water.' The narrator created visual imagery in the description of the school.
The visual imagery has been built by the use of adjectives such as black to describe the color of the water, grey to describe the color of the building and granite the material used to make it. In addition to that, the narrator tells the reader of the motionless swans and ice in the lake.
