Week 34 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Read the passage below and answer the questions which follow.

Leaving Millbrook

In the cold half-dark before sunrise, Ma woke Elsie and her little brother Tom and helped them dress by candlelight. Over their thick woollen undergarments she buttoned wool jumpers and heavy coats, and pulled knitted caps down over their ears.

Nearly everything from the house was already loaded onto the wagon, except the big table and the chairs, which Pa said he could always build again wherever they settled. There was a skin of frost on the ground, and the air was still and sharp. Away to the east the sky had just begun to pale, and through the bare trees came the glow of lanterns, as neighbours and cousins arrived on foot to see the family off.

Elsie and Tom stood close together at the gate, holding tight to each other's hands, and said very little. The cousins crowded round, staring, unsure what to say. Grandmother and all the aunts hugged the children tightly, again and again, murmuring their goodbyes.

Pa hung his rifle along the wagon's wooden ribs where he could reach it easily from the driver's bench, and tucked his tools carefully beneath the seat. He wrapped his old fiddle in a blanket and wedged it safely between two pillows, so that the jolting of the wagon would not harm it. Uncle Ezra helped him harness the horses.

All the cousins were told to say their goodbyes properly, and one by one they did. Pa lifted Tom, then Elsie, up onto the pile of bedding in the back of the wagon, and helped Ma climb up beside him on the driver's bench. Grandmother passed up baby Ruth last of all, wrapped in three blankets against the cold.

They pulled away from the little house just as the sun cleared the trees. The wind sighed through the empty rooms behind the shuttered windows, as if the house itself did not want to be left behind. It stood there behind its low fence, beneath the two great elms that had shaded Elsie and Tom's games all through the summer. And that was the last they ever saw of it.

Pa had promised that once they reached the frontier, Elsie would see a real buffalo. "What does a buffalo look like?" she had asked him, and he had said, "A buffalo is a great, shaggy, brown creature, twice the size of any cow you've ever seen."

They travelled a long way through snow-covered woods before they came to the town of Elk Ford. Elsie and Tom had passed through it once before, but it looked quite different now. Every shop door and house door was shut fast, snow had drifted against the fence posts, and not a single child played in the street. Only two or three men in heavy coats and fur hats could be seen anywhere, hurrying between buildings with their heads down.

Ma and the children ate cold bread and dripping in the back of the wagon, while inside the store Pa traded a bundle of furs for supplies they would need further on. They could not stay long, because they had to reach the river crossing before dark. The river itself stretched wide and grey, half-crusted with ice at its edges, though the middle ran fast and black and open.

Pa drove the wagon down to the ferry landing, where a broad wooden raft waited, strung between two thick ropes that stretched from bank to bank. The ferryman and Uncle Ezra led the horses aboard first, then walked the wagon on behind them, its wheels clunking heavily over the loose planks. Ropes creaked and groaned as the raft was hauled, hand over hand, out into the current. All around the wagon there was nothing but grey water and empty sky. Elsie did not like it one bit. But Pa sat steady on the driver's bench, and Old Jack, the family's brindle hound, lay quietly under the wagon; she knew that so long as they were both there, nothing could truly go wrong.

Option 1: Describe your final morning at a place that has been your home for a long time, and the beginning of your journey away from it.

• Include plenty of sensory detail about the setting and how it feels to leave it.
• Keep the number of characters and amount of dialogue limited so the description stays focused.
• Check your spelling, punctuation and grammar carefully.