Week 26 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Passage A is the opening of a story written in the style of a classic novel. The narrator recalls a September evening when he travelled to visit his aunt in the countryside.

A Change of Season

It was the last week of September. The long, golden days of high summer were fading at last, and Londoners everywhere — weary of pavements and dust — had begun to dream of woodsmoke, of misty mornings, and of the first fires of autumn.

For my own part, the fading summer left me tired, short of funds, and glad of an excuse to leave town. I had spent the past year rather less carefully than I ought, and my present circumstances obliged me to divide my time, as economically as I could manage, between my rooms above the office where I was, at that time, an articled clerk to a firm of solicitors in Gray's Inn, and my aunt's cottage at Barnleigh.

The evening I set out to visit her was heavy and close; the London air hung thick about the rooftops, and even the rattle of cab-wheels in the street below seemed to slacken and fade languidly as the light went out of the sky, as though the city's great pulse itself were slowing. I closed the book I had been staring at rather than reading, took up my hat, and walked the mile to the station to catch the last train north.

It will be necessary, before I go any further with what I have to relate, to explain that my father had been dead some eleven years, and that my brother James and I were the only two left living of a family that had once numbered six children. My father, a shipwright by trade, had been a careful and provident man; and it was owing entirely to his foresight in setting aside a portion of his earnings every year that my aunt, upon his death, had been left in comfortable, if modest, circumstances.

The evening hush lay trembling over the hillside as I climbed the lane towards Barnleigh, and the last light of the sky had sunk into a deep grey behind the church tower by the time I reached my aunt's gate. I had scarcely lifted the latch before the door flew open, and my old friend Léon Vasseur came darting out to meet me, breathless with delight, wringing my hand as though we had been parted for a year rather than a fortnight.

On his own account, and, I think, on mine also, Vasseur deserves a proper introduction, for chance has placed him at the very beginning of the strange story these pages are written to tell. I had first come to know him some years before, at the drawing classes we both attended in the evenings at the Mechanics' Institute, where he was — I freely admit — a far better draughtsman than I ever managed to become. All I then knew of his history was that he had once held a position at a fencing academy in Lyons; that he had left France for reasons he uniformly declined to discuss; and that he had for many years been respectably established in London as a teacher of fencing and the French language.

Small, neat, and precisely put together, Vasseur was, I believe, the most economical user of space I ever encountered outside a ship's cabin. Remarkable enough by his appearance alone, he was further distinguished among his acquaintance by the harmless eccentricity of his character. The ruling idea of his life seemed to be that he owed a debt of gratitude to the country that had given him a refuge and a livelihood, and that the debt could only be repaid by turning himself, as completely as possible, into an Englishman. Not content with the nation's compliment of an umbrella, a bowler hat, and an abiding fondness for weak tea, he had lately resolved to become a cricketer at the nets on the village green whenever the opportunity arose, persuaded that a fortnight's practice, and very little natural skill, would be entirely sufficient for the purpose.

Reading Passage

Passage B. Tom and his younger sister Bea are searching for their missing cat near the disused railway cutting at dusk, when they notice something unexpected below them.

By the Old Cutting

The torchlight found nothing but nettles and rusted wire, and Tom was beginning to think Whiskers had simply gone to ground somewhere warm and sensible, unlike the two of them. Bea, though, had stopped calling the cat's name and was staring instead down into the cutting, where the old tracks still ran, half-buried under a decade of bramble.

"Tom," she said, in a voice that had gone very small, "there's someone down there."

He followed her gaze. At first he saw only shapes — the dark humps of gorse, the pale gleam of the rails where the last light caught them — but then one of the shapes moved, unhurried, deliberate, and resolved itself into the outline of a figure standing quite still between the tracks, facing away from them, as if listening for something only it could hear.

No trains had run this way in twelve years. Everybody said so. Tom knew it the way he knew his own address, a fact so ordinary he had never once thought to question it — until now, watching a stranger stand on a dead line at dusk as though waiting for one to arrive.

His hand found Bea's sleeve, and he pulled her back into the shadow of the hawthorn, his heart hammering somewhere up near his throat. Below them, unhurried still, the figure turned its head very slowly towards the bank where they stood, and began, one careful step at a time, to climb.

Option 1: Continue the story from where Passage B ends.

• Decide early on whether the figure is a threat, a puzzle, or something else entirely — and let that decision shape the tension.
• Build suspense gradually through small physical details (sound, sight, movement) rather than explaining everything at once.