Week 13 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Wisp, a barefoot boy made of starlight, has visited the attic bedroom of the Hartley children one night. Having shown Idris, Junie and Otto how to ride on the backs of great migrating cloud-geese, he persuades them to leave their beds and follow him on the long journey to the Hollow Above the Clouds.

The Hollow Above the Clouds

'Left at the lightning, right at Tuesday, and down when it starts to rain.' That, Wisp had told Junie, was the way to the Hollow Above the Clouds, though even a goose with a map could not have found it from those directions. Wisp, you see, simply said whatever drifted into his head.

At first the children trusted him completely, and so great was the thrill of riding that they wasted whole hours circling church spires and weathervanes and any other tall, interesting thing that caught their eye. Idris and Otto raced their geese around a lighthouse, Otto getting a head start he did not deserve.

They remembered, with something like scorn, that not so long ago they had thought themselves terribly clever for managing to hover half a foot above the attic floor. Not so long ago — but how long, exactly? They were crossing open sea by the time this question began to trouble Junie seriously. She thought it must be their second night away, or perhaps their third.

Sometimes the air was warm and sometimes bitterly cold, and sometimes they were unbearably hungry, though it was hard to say whether this was real hunger or only Wisp's peculiar idea of feeding them. His method was to send the geese diving after star-larks that carried seed-pods in their beaks, snatch the pods away, and then let the larks snatch them back again, so that everybody went chasing each other companionably for miles before parting on the best of terms.

Certainly they did not pretend to be sleepy; they simply were, and this was dangerous, for the moment sleep caught them they slid straight off their geese and dropped. Wisp found this endlessly funny.

'There he goes again!' he would call out happily, as Otto tipped sideways and plummeted towards the sea below.

'Catch him!' Junie would cry, watching in horror. Wisp always dived down and scooped Otto up a heartbeat before he struck the water, but Junie had the strong impression that it was his own cleverness that interested him, rather than the saving of an actual life. He could sleep in mid-air himself, quite safely, simply by floating flat on his back.

'Do try to be kinder to him,' Junie whispered to Idris, during a lull in a game of Follow the Leader.

'Then tell him to stop showing off,' said Idris.

In Follow the Leader, Wisp liked to skim close to the great, coiling storm-serpents that lived inside the thunderclouds, touching the tip of each serpent's tail as he passed, a trick the children could never quite manage themselves, after which he would look back over his shoulder to crow about how many tails they had missed.

He could also vanish out of sight far faster than they could follow, to have some private adventure of his own, and come back later with frost-flowers clinging to his hair, quite unable to explain where he had been or what had happened to him. This was rather galling to children who had never once seen a frost-flower up close.

'And if he forgets us this quickly,' Junie pointed out, 'how can we possibly expect him to go on remembering us once we've gone home?'

Indeed, sometimes when Wisp came back from one of his adventures he plainly didn't recognise them at all, or not well. Junie was quite certain of it. She saw the effort of recognition cross his face each time, as though he were sorting through a drawer of half-forgotten names; once she'd even had to remind him what hers was.

'I'm Junie,' she said, a little agitated.

He was terribly sorry. 'I say, Junie,' he murmured to her afterwards. 'If you ever catch me forgetting you again, just go on saying "I'm Junie", and it'll come back to me.'

This was not entirely satisfactory, but to make amends he taught them, at last, how to lie flat and still along a strong tailwind, the way the geese themselves rode it, and this proved such a comfortable improvement that they tried it eagerly and found they could sleep quite safely after all.

After what felt like a great many days, they drew close to the Hollow. Dawn broke as they arrived, spilling a curtain of gold light across the island below and picking out its shape for the children to see.

Strangely, the children knew the place at once, as if it were a home they were returning to after a long absence rather than seeing for the first time. Having landed, they recognised one familiar feature after another.

'Otto, there's the frozen waterfall!'

'Junie, look — the singing stones, just like in the stories!'

'And there's my treehouse, Idris, exactly where I always imagined it!'

Wisp was faintly put out that they already knew so much, but his moment of triumph came soon enough, for as the gold light drained away, the Hollow darkened and turned threatening in an instant. It was the stillest silence the children had ever heard, and yet, hidden beneath that silence, the whole island seemed to be crawling with life.

And that hidden life included pirates of the sky, and chief among them, gaunt and terrible, Captain Rooke.

He rode at ease in a black iron chariot drawn by a pack of storm-hawks, which he urged onward with a long silver whistle he wore about his neck, as one might drive a team of dogs. His hair, worn long and unbound, coiled about his shoulders like curling smoke from a snuffed candle, and his coat, though badly faded, was cut in the grand old style of a naval officer from some forgotten war. His eyes were dark as coal, his voice, when at last he spoke, carried an unhurried, courteous menace, and in his bearing he held a strange resemblance to the portrait of a long-dead admiral that hung, half-forgotten, in the Hartley children's own front hall. Such was Captain Rooke, the bitterest enemy that Wisp had ever known.