“What did I do to deserve such a pack”

“What did I do to deserve such a pack?” is the father’s recurring complaint about his children in the family memoir. Its significance lies not only in the accusation it makes, but in how the words travel: spoken as a grievance and threat by the father, then taken up and reshaped by the children in private. Through repetition, a line that makes them feel like a burden becomes material for their solidarity and mockery.

The Complaint and Its Threats

The father’s refrain gathers several forms of pressure into one performance of grievance. He asks what he has done to deserve the children, then imagines putting them in a bag like Toby and carrying them to the flagstones, or sending them beneath the arches of Cootehall Bridge. The threatened destination shifts from the bridge to an orphanage, where, he says, nuns and brothers will bring them to their senses and teach them manners. He contrasts this imagined discipline with the supposed mercy of keeping them at home: another man, he says, would lock the doors and drive them out to eat grass. The line therefore casts the children as a misfortune imposed on him while presenting his own threats as evidence of forbearance.

The complaint is repeated so often that the narrator compares it to the refrains of the Rosary. Its recurrence makes the words part of the household’s ordinary soundscape, rather than an isolated outburst. The repeated question carries an accusation without requiring an answer: the children are made to stand as the explanation for the father’s dissatisfaction, while his threats give that dissatisfaction a physical and institutional edge.

That rhetoric belongs to a wider pattern in which the children are taught to understand themselves as burdens. The father tells them that he has made sacrifices to bring them up; the narrator later recalls sincerely repeating that belief to a priest who knew the family. The priest challenged it, telling the narrator that responsibility for the children belonged to the father, who had chosen to bring them into the world. The narrator did not pass the correction on to his father, but says it changed how he saw both him and the children. Against that background, the refrain is more than a curse: it helps establish the distorted account of obligation that the children have learned to accept.

The Children Turn the Refrain into Play

The children answer the father’s complaint by staging it themselves. When they feel safe, they hold impromptu concerts and assign the refrain to imagined instruments. Monica plays the imaginary piano and repeats the threat to put them in a bag like Toby and sail them under Cootehall Bridge. Rosaleen takes up the drums, changing the words to a threat to send them to the orphanage and asking God for patience. The narrator plays the trumpet, turning the complaint into mock solemnity about having committed a great crime in a former life and being saddled with such a pack. Each performance preserves the recognizable pattern while making the father’s aggrieved voice available for imitation.

Their parody does not erase the danger behind the words. The father once finds them in the room while they are performing. They are so startled that they do not scatter; he demands to know what is happening, and the narrator says they are fooling and play-acting. Monica adds that they were only codding. The father answers by asking whether there is work to be done and reminding them that the carrots had to be weeded and thinned. He then returns to his familiar complaint, varying it into questions about deserving such a crowd and walking into such a life, before threatening to teach them a lesson. The interruption shows how quickly their play can be pulled back under his authority, and how easily the refrain joins complaint to a demand for work and the promise of punishment.

Repetition, Secrecy, and Solidarity

The performance changes the balance between father and children without ending their fear of him. After he catches them, they post a sentry before playing again. Later, they sometimes break into an impromptu performance without warning, especially when they know he is away. Their caution records the real risk of being overheard; their return to the game shows that the father’s language has become something they can handle together. The narrator names the change plainly: “We were mastering our master.” The refrain that had marked the father’s dominance becomes a shared script through which the children can expose its repetitiveness and absurdity.

Participation is not universal. Breedge, who adores her father, does not join the concerts, although she understands what could follow if she openly sided with him. The narrator’s brother and Dympna are too young. These absences make the play a particular alliance among the older children who can recognize both its joke and its danger. Elsewhere, the father continues to scold a daughter at every turn even after a fright has ended his physical beatings of her; the children learn not to trust his moods and to respond as they come. The private performances belong to that adaptation: they offer a limited, improvised form of agency inside a household where his temper still sets the terms.

Variations and Meaning

The wording changes as it passes from the father to the children. His “such a pack” becomes Monica’s “such a cross,” Rosaleen’s appeal for patience, and the narrator’s mock prayer for rescue. When the father catches them, he changes the complaint again, asking what he did to deserve “such a crowd” and what he did to walk into “such a life.” The variations preserve the complaint’s structure while revealing how readily it can be recognized, quoted, and turned back on its speaker.

The refrain’s force thus depends on repetition rather than on a single decisive confrontation. It first makes the children sound like an unfair burden and supplies the father with a ritualized language of threatened punishment. Reperformed as music and comedy, it lets them name the pattern without openly challenging him in words of their own. Their laughter remains guarded, their performances are interrupted, and some siblings stay outside them; nevertheless, the repeated line helps the children build a bond in opposition to the voice that had tried to define them as a pack.