Week 21 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Low Water

It was late summer that year, a stretch of restless, changeable skies. I was of an age when I would wake before the gulls, with nothing but the tide on my mind. Some mornings were so still and clear you could hear the whole estuary breathing, a soft suck and sigh of water over mud.

I kept the coracle tucked up under the boathouse eaves, out of the weather. She was a small, round little vessel, no bigger than a cattle trough, woven from willow and stretched over with tarred canvas so tight you could tap it like a drum. My uncle Silas had built her the winter I turned seven, working every evening by lamplight until his fingers bled, and I painted her a deep, defiant blue every spring to keep the salt from finding the seams. She was the single thing I owned that I would have run back into a burning house to save.

It felt almost like trespassing to drag her down to the water before the village properly woke, with the curlews still folded up asleep in the saltmarsh and the herons standing like grey question marks in the shallows, not yet hunting. I could be down at the mudflats below Cobb's Point before the sun properly cleared the headland, my breath showing white, banging my hands together to warm them. The estuary curled away below the point; the bleached ribs of an old fishing smack, wrecked there longer than anyone in the village could remember, showed above the mud at low tide like the bones of something that had once been alive. It always struck me as a sad thing, that a boat built for water should end up stranded so far from it.

Just beyond the point the sky would sometimes loom, gathering itself into a hard, bruised grey that promised more rain than anyone wanted. If I lingered too long, more likely than not I would end up hauling a coracle half full of rainwater back up the slipway.

It was on just such a morning that everything began. Through the gap in my curtains the first thin orange light was already touching the chimney pots across the lane. I had barely thrown back the blanket before Pepper's tail was thumping against the floorboards below. That spaniel loved the mudflats more than I did, I am quite sure.

By the time I had pulled on my jumper and wellingtons, Pepper was turning circles by the back door, whining softly under her breath, desperate to be let out onto the Bay. There was something quietly thrilling about creeping through the kitchen before anyone else in the house had stirred. My feet knew exactly which floorboard by the pantry groaned, and my hands knew which door hinge needed easing rather than pushing. Pepper, for her part, seemed to understand the game entirely; she drew in her claws and placed each paw with exaggerated care, and it was only the little brass tags on her collar that gave either of us away, jingling like a badly rung bell.

A storm had blown through in the night. Somewhere near dawn it had torn itself out over the sea as suddenly as it had arrived, but not before it had done its damage. Torn leaves and broken twigs from the old chestnut tree littered the whole garden path down to the gate, and the tall reeds along the ditch had been flattened almost flat to the ground. The gusts had driven hard up the estuary mouth and, for a few hours at least, had trapped the outgoing tide against the incoming wind like water held behind a dam.

Option 1: Continue the story: what happens next in the narrator's morning?

• Show what the narrator is likely feeling as they finally reach the water.
• Show an understanding of what might reasonably happen next, given everything you have read so far.