Week 17 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The Long Way Home

By the time I judged it prudent to check the hour, dusk had thickened into something closer to night, and I struck a match to see my watch by its brief flame: barely past nine, though it felt far later. I had promised myself I would be well past Foulmire Common before dark, and the lateness of the hour brought with it an unease I could not quite reason away.

Then, from a farm away to my left, a dog began to bark — a hard, urgent bark, quite unlike its usual noise — and within moments another answered it, and then another, until it seemed that every dog on the common had taken up the alarm, carried to me on a wind that had begun, quite suddenly, to hiss through the gorse. At the first of it my pony threw up her head and side-stepped nervously, but I spoke to her steadily and stroked her neck, and she settled, though she kept her ears turned back the whole time, listening. Then, further off still, from the dark line of trees along the ridge, came a thinner, wilder sound — the barking of foxes, dozens of them by the noise of it, calling to one another across the whole width of the common — and this affected both the pony and myself far more than the dogs had done, for I confess I was seized with a sudden, foolish urge to leap down and run. The pony reared twice before I regained control of her, and it took every ounce of my strength on the reins to keep her from bolting outright into the dark.

After some minutes, though, my ears grew used to the clamour, and the pony, too, quietened enough that I could persuade her forward again at a trot. I shook the reins and pressed her on, and we soon left the open common behind and came instead onto a sunken lane I did not recognise, hedges rising close and high on either side until we seemed to travel through a kind of tunnel, the last of the light shut out entirely above our heads.

Here the wind could not reach us directly, but I could hear it still, moaning somewhere above the hedge-tops, and the branches of some unseen tree knocking together with a dry, irregular clatter. It grew colder with every yard, and a fine, cold rain began to needle down, so that within a few minutes the lane and the hedges alike were dusted with a thin, wet sheen. The barking of the foxes had not stopped; if anything it sounded nearer now, though I could see nothing through the dark hedges to left or right. I grew properly afraid, and though the pony seemed calmer than I felt, I noticed she would not stop turning her ears first one way and then the other, as though she, too, were trying to place the sound.

Option 1: Imagine that you are the writer of the passage. Continue the story, describing what happens to you next.

• Maintain the same tense, frightened tone established in the extract.
• Resolve or escalate the danger in a way that feels consistent with what has already happened.

Option 2: Describe a place at midnight. Think about how your setting can be used to create atmosphere.

• Choose sensory details that suggest danger or mystery without stating it directly.
• Use word choice and sentence length deliberately to build tension.