Mid-Term Break Via initial uneasy changes to his daily school routine and dawning reality, Heaney, then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, confronts his four-year-old brother’s death (as result of a car accident in February 1953). He witnesses his parents’ grief. Brought home from school he experiences the moving responses of those around him before finally coming face-to-face with the body of his deceased brother. School has seen fit to segregate the boy in the college sick bay; his mind wiles away the time Counting bells knelling classes to a close (the use of ‘knell’ sounds a foreboding that the youngster has not [...]