RCF Model Paper 1: Edexcel Marking Guide

The extract is unusually successful at producing strong feeling, and it manages it by consistently refusing to ask for any. Almost everything that might have been made emotional is instead made factual. Hannah's grief is never named; we are told that the shop was quiet, that the clocks were not going, and that nobody had wound them. The reader is left to supply the feeling, and because the reader supplies it, it is felt rather than observed.

The opening is the clearest example. "The shop had never, in Hannah's memory, been quiet, and the quiet was the worst of it." This is a bereavement described entirely through sound, or its absence, and the sentence that follows - "Forty-one clocks stood along the two long walls, and not one of them was going" - is delivered as though it were an inventory. The precision of forty-one does the work: an approximate number would have sounded like scene-setting, while an exact one sounds like someone who has counted them, which tells us how long she has been standing in that room. The image of her father winding them, "his lips moving as he counted", is affectionate without a single affectionate word in it.

The most effective decision, though, is the choice of what finally breaks her. The writer sets up an obvious candidate and then discards it. We are told that Hannah has already said the words to the minister, to the dairy woman and twice to strangers, and that each time "they had come out quite steadily". What defeats her is not sympathy but its opposite: a customer who does not know, asking a cheerful, ordinary question. "Is he in the back?" is unbearable precisely because it is so unremarkable, and because the reader knows the answer before Hannah has to give it. The sustained, comfortable description of Mr Bewley - "a large, comfortable man", "entirely happy" - makes his ignorance worse, not funnier.

Some readers may find the moment of realisation slightly over-managed. "It went over his face slowly, the way water finds its level" is a fine simile, but it is the one point at which the writer explains an effect that the surrounding detail had already achieved; the stopped clocks at different hours had made the deduction clear a line earlier. It is a small failure of nerve in a passage that otherwise trusts the reader entirely.

That reservation aside, the ending is where the extract earns its feeling. It would have been easy to close on Hannah weeping. Instead the writer gives us a single practical action - she winds one clock - and then one sentence of restrained hope: "But she came to it again on the Sunday evening, after chapel; and after a while she began upon the others." The return to the Sunday routine of the opening closes the extract on the father's habit rather than on his absence, and the phrase after a while concedes honestly that this took time. Because the writer has withheld emotional language throughout, this quiet ending carries far more weight than a scene of open grief would have done. The attempt is not merely successful; the restraint is the reason it succeeds.

The bus had gone. I want to be clear that this was not a small thing, because it was the last one, and the next was at ten past six the following morning, and I was fourteen and forty minutes from anywhere.

I had been told to be at the stop by half past five. I had been told twice. What I had done instead was stand in the doorway of the newsagent reading the back of a magazine I had no intention of buying, and the bus had come along the far side of the green, and by the time I understood that the noise was the bus it was already the sound of the bus leaving.

There is a particular silence that follows a mistake like that. It is not really silence - there was a dog somewhere, and the traffic on the bypass - but everything arranges itself around the fact of what you have done, and the fact sits in the middle and hums.

I sat on the bench. It began, in a leisurely and unhurried way, to rain.

The woman who ran the newsagent came out at about six. I had seen her a hundred times and never once thought about her; she was simply the person behind the counter, in the way that at fourteen you assume adults are permanent fixtures of the buildings they stand in. She locked the door, tried the handle, and then looked at the bench in a way that suggested she had been aware of me for some time.

"Missed it," she said. It was not a question.

I said that I had.

She did not tell me that I should have been paying attention, which I had been braced for and would have deserved. She did not ask why I had not telephoned anyone, which would have required me to admit that I had no money for the box. She stood in the rain, in a coat that was clearly not meant for it, and thought for a moment, and then she said that she went past our village on her way home and that it was no trouble.

It was, of course, entirely trouble. I worked out later, with the particular shame of working something out too late, that it added eleven miles to her journey.

In the car she asked me nothing at all. She put the radio on, at the volume adults use when they want you to understand that you are not required to talk, and she drove, and once she said that the rain was set in for the night, and I said that it looked like it, and that was the whole of our conversation. She stopped at the end of our lane rather than at the house, which I understood even then was a kindness of a different and more precise kind - she had guessed that I would rather my mother did not see me delivered.

I said thank you. I meant it, but I said it the way a fourteen-year-old says it, which is to say inadequately and while already getting out of the car.

She was there for years afterwards. I bought sweets from her, and later newspapers, and I never once mentioned it, and neither did she. I have thought about that far more than I have thought about the bus.