Week 29 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

In this extract, which is from the opening of a novel, Cai and his father, Idris, are travelling by narrowboat to Chester. Spend up to 20 minutes on this section.

The Long Cut

Cai tightened the mooring rope around the bollard, and the coil promptly slithered loose again, the way it always did when he tried to hurry. He tried to ignore the sneering look on the face of the man steering, the man he called his father, and the disappointed set to his father's mouth as Idris leaned out from the tiller to watch him fumble with the rope. Nudge, the boat's small brown terrier, tied by a length of string to the roof rail, shadowed Cai's every movement, barking at the swans and leaping about in a frenzied bid to get free, as if trying to make up for Cai's own carelessness. The swans didn't calm down until Cai and Nudge were safely back aboard and the rope, finally, held fast.

Cai was an awkward lad. At thirteen he was already taller than his father, and still growing. But he looked as though he had been assembled all wrong; his knees and elbows seemed to belong to someone bigger, his ears stuck out, and his boots were forever coming untied. There always seemed to be ink on his fingers from a book stuffed hastily into his pocket. All this meant that people — his father especially — sighed at him, snapped at him, and rolled their eyes at him, so that his whole manner had become that of a boy expecting to be told off. He had a soft, round face beneath a thatch of unruly brown hair, and pale grey eyes that people said made him look half asleep even when he was wide awake. But nobody ever saw him properly laugh, or properly cry. People called him slow — a dreamer — and wondered why his father kept him aboard at all. People assumed he felt nothing much of anything, neither loving nor needing to be loved.

How could Cai explain his night terrors to anyone? There was no one to tell except Nudge. He saw water-horses rising pale and dripping from the canal at dusk; drowned bargemen, empty-eyed, waiting under bridges; things with too many joints that clicked along the towpath after dark. He never knew when they would come, to drag at his sleeve, to fill his dreams with cold water closing over his head. Even now, the shadow of the last tunnel they had passed through seemed to stretch out behind the boat, as if it might reach forward again and swallow them.

His father was careful with the lamp oil and only ever lit the one lantern at the bow, so Cai hated being out on deck after dark. He was afraid of the black water, certainly, but that was not the whole of it: he was just as afraid of ordinary dangers, of lock-thieves and drunk bargemen, especially near the old tunnels. And then there were the herons. He hated the way their eyes caught the lamplight from the reeds, and the sudden, heavy flap of unseen wings from the darkness of the towpath hedge.

Option 1: Continue the story, describing the rest of Cai's journey along the canal.

• You do not have to finish the story — just include some interesting details about where he goes next and how he feels about it.