Week 10 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Cranmoor School, 1889

Frost crept over him like a slow tide. Around him, the grey blankets on the other beds rose and fell in the dark, like the ridge and furrow of a ploughed field waiting for spring. Silas had no notion of what had disturbed him — he was still half caught in sleep — and yet something had dragged him up out of it before the bell. He lay still, listening. He was afraid, without knowing why.

An old oilskin cloak hung from a peg beside the door. It had hung there, unclaimed, for longer than anyone could remember, its buttons gone green, its lining torn to ribbons by years of draughts. In the half-dark it looked less like a coat and more like a drowned man risen dripping from the sea, arms outstretched, waiting. Silas had had more nightmares out of that cloak than he cared to count: the way its sleeves lifted a little in the wind from the corridor, as though beckoning; the way, from the next bed, it seemed at certain angles to have a head, and shoulders, and no face at all; and the way it never, in all these years, dried out, so that the room always smelled faintly of the harbour, though the sea was thirty miles off.

He thought about his sister. This was the only hour of the day when it was permissible to think of a sister at all. Once breakfast came and went, there would be no excuse for it. For Silas to mention Prue to any of the other boys would be like mentioning his old wooden rattle, or the baby tooth he still kept in a tin: something outgrown, something faintly shaming. Secretly, he thought it a kind of disloyalty to pretend she didn't exist, so he kept the habit of thinking of her here, in the grey privacy of first light — Prue, spooning porridge, mending stockings, reading the newspaper aloud to their father in the evenings because his eyes had grown too tired for print. It was the same with homesickness, or tears, or admitting you were afraid of the dark: subjects a boy raised at first light and buried again by breakfast.

With their mother two years in the ground, all such household cares had dropped onto Prue like a fall of soot, dulling her the way soot dulls a mantelpiece. When Silas tried to picture her, he found he couldn't separate her from the furniture of home: her cardigan the same faded brown as the hall curtains, her voice as unremarkable as the tick of the clock. Papery Prue. She did not run to meet him at the school gates any more; she had no time for it. She did not laugh at his jokes, either, not really — only enough to be polite.

Then came the ringing of the rising bell. The other boys began groaning and burrowing further under their blankets, like moles retreating from the light. The porter, Mr Doyle, who came each morning to see that everybody obeyed the bell, was surprised to find Silas already on his feet and lacing his boots. Boys were not, in his experience, so easily persuaded out of bed.

The boys' boots stood waiting in the courtyard, lined up along the cloisters like a row of soldiers left too long on parade. Bare feet slapped across the cobbles and crammed themselves in; the leather was stiff with frost, hard as horn. Boys dragged their jackets on over their close-cropped heads, so that for a moment they looked as if they had traded their skulls for empty sacks, and clumped off towards the hall with their laces trailing loose in the frost, unwilling to lose a single moment more in the cold than they had to. Besides, most of the boys' fingers by now were too numb to manage a knot.