In the short story cow pats the children’s ‘boots weren’t any too good’, the children warmed their feet in newly dropped cow pats, and the man on the city streets warmed his hands in a cleaners bucket of suds. Together they symbolise the pain between them, the children and oldman symbolise poverty. At the beginning of the story the children ‘didn’t know any other sort of life’, but when the youngest children returns from the city ‘his brothers reckoned he come back a bit to flash for a trick like that’, the youngest child had seen the old mans trick to keeping warm an