Week 39 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

In this story the narrator, a girl named Nell, is sent by ship to live with distant relatives in Canada after her family's bakery burns down. She makes a friend on the ship called Ossie.

The Long Crossing

There were perhaps thirty of us assembled on the deck the morning we left Bristol, none of us older than twelve, and gulls wheeled and screamed above the funnels as though they were trying to warn us of something. Nobody said a word. It was a flat, colourless morning, with a fine rain drifting sideways across the harbour, and the cranes on the dockside dipped their long necks towards the ship as we slid slowly past them. That is the last thing I remember of England.

The deck trembled beneath our feet as the engines came alive, hammering and shuddering as the ship turned her nose towards open water, fog closing in around us from every side. We had been told we were bound for Canada, though it might as well have been the far side of the moon for all I understood of where that was. All I knew for certain was that the ship was carrying me further from home with every passing minute. When the great horn sounded again, drowning out even my own thoughts, I closed my fingers tightly around the little brass compass that hung on its cord about my neck — the one Tom had pressed into my hand at the quayside — and I made myself a promise that I would carry it safely until the day I came home again.

I could not tell you now which sea we crossed first, or in what order, for so much of that voyage has blurred together in my memory. But certain things have stayed with me clearly enough. I remember three funnels painted a deep, dull red, and music drifting up sometimes from the first-class saloon, where we were never permitted to go — once, I remember, they played a tune my mother used to hum, and hearing it made me strangely glad. I remember waves taller than the ship's rail, sometimes green, sometimes the colour of a bruise, and once a whole school of dolphins keeping pace with us for the better part of an afternoon, leaping in and out of our wake as though it amused them terribly. And I remember, more than anything, the sheer size of the ocean — how it seemed to stretch away for ever in every direction, further than I had ever imagined anything could stretch. Best of all, though, I remember an enormous dark-winged bird that rose out of a wave one still morning, wheeled once directly above my head, and studied me with an eye so old and so calm that I have never forgotten it.

The ship became, in its way, my first proper home, since it was the earliest one I could clearly remember. We slept two apiece in narrow bunks, a dozen or more of us packed into each cabin far down near the engine room, where the walls never stopped humming with the pounding of the machinery. It was airless and close down there, thick with the smell of oil and damp wool, and often enough with the smell of sickness too, mine included.

I was in trouble almost from my first night aboard. The older boys called me "baby" because I rocked myself to sleep and hummed under my breath, and because I sometimes cried when I thought nobody could hear me. They teased me for it constantly, hiding my shoes, flicking water at me from their cups, pulling faces whenever a grown-up's back was turned. But it was being frozen out altogether that hurt the most — the evenings when they would simply carry on as though I were not there at all, as though I had already ceased to exist. They saved that particular cruelty, I noticed, for the nights when I was already at my most wretched, usually straight after I had been sick.

It was Ossie who kept me going through that whole long, uncertain crossing. He was a head taller than me and full of dreadful jokes, and he took it upon himself, almost from the very first day, to look out for me the way an older brother might. It was to Ossie that I first confided about Tom, and the compass, and how much I already missed home. You need someone like that, I think, when everything around you has been turned upside down — someone to make you believe that things will come right again in the end. Because if you stop believing that, even for a little while, there is a kind of hollow, waiting darkness that opens up underneath you, and once you have felt it, you do not easily forget the shape of it.

Option 1: Write about an exciting journey. Try to make your writing as vivid and interesting as you can.

• Plan a clear beginning, middle and end before you start writing.
• Use sensory detail and varied sentence lengths to build excitement and pace.

Option 2: Write about a person who is important to you. Try to make your writing as vivid and interesting as you can.

• Use specific memories or anecdotes rather than only general descriptions.
• Show why this person matters to you through detail, not just by stating it directly.