Week 46 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The Hidden Drawer

Theo pulled the high-backed armchair round to face the fire and sat watching the flames dwindle, in no hurry to go up to bed. The evening had turned properly cold, and the old house creaked around him the way it always did once the wind got into the chimneys. He was watching the light flicker over the panelled wall beside the empty bookcase when he noticed that one of the small watercolours hanging there — a faded view of the harbour — was sitting crookedly against the wood. It was a small thing, but it bothered him enough that he got up at once to straighten it.

As he lifted a hand to steady the frame, his fingers brushed against something under the paint — a thin ridge, barely raised, running along the edge of the panel. His curiosity caught at once. He took the lamp from the side table and studied the wood more closely, and after a few minutes' searching he made out a second ridge lower down, and understood, with a small jolt, that he was looking at the outline of a door: a section of panelling built, at some point long ago, to open like a cupboard. The idea of what might be shut up behind it took hold of him and would not let go.

He worked at the crack with the blade of his penknife, but the wood held fast, sealed by generations of paint and polish, and his knife made no impression on it at all. He looked round the room for something better suited to the task, and his eye fell on the poker resting against the fender. Wedging its flat end into the seam, he threw his whole weight against it. For a long moment nothing happened. Then, with a grinding creak and a soft shower of old paint flakes, the little door gave way all at once, and swung open on hinges that had plainly not moved in decades.

The cavity within was narrow but deep, and in the dim light it appeared, at first glance, to hold nothing but a felted layer of dust. Theo's disappointment lasted only a second, though, because as he reached inside, his fingers closed on something small, hard and unmistakably metal, wrapped in a scrap of yellowed cloth. He drew it out carefully and carried it to the lamp, brushing away the dust with his sleeve to reveal, beneath the grime, the unmistakable curved case of a pocket watch.

Theo owned a watch of his own — a solid, handsome thing, a gift from his grandfather on his twelfth birthday, which he had always considered rather fine. He fetched it now from his room and laid the two side by side on the table to compare them, and it was immediately clear that, for all its grime, the watch from the cupboard was the superior of the two. The case was worked with a delicacy his own watch entirely lacked, fine engraved vines circling the rim, and though the glass was cracked and the hands long since stopped, something about its weight and the crispness of its detail convinced him he was holding something rather more than an ordinary timepiece.

Turning it over in the lamplight, he found a small oval plate set into the back of the case, half-hidden beneath a century of tarnish. He rubbed at it gently with the corner of his sleeve until, letter by letter, an engraving emerged: a maker's name he did not recognise, and beneath it, faintly, a date. Theo's pulse quickened. Under ordinary circumstances, he might have dismissed such an engraving as nothing more than a manufacturer's mark of no particular significance — but a watch this fine, hidden for so long behind a sealed door in a room nobody had touched in years, felt like altogether a different matter.

Option 1: What do you think happens next? Write the next part of the story.

• Keep Theo's curious, careful character consistent with how he has been shown so far.
• Use descriptive detail to keep building tension and interest.

Option 2: Some people say learning to play a sport is a good thing to do when you are young. Do you agree with this statement? Give your personal opinion, backing up your points with examples.

• Give real or realistic examples to support your ideas.
• Try to consider more than one point of view before giving your own conclusion.