Week 48 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The action in this passage takes place in the early 1900s. Thomas Aldous is fourteen years old and is arriving for his first day of work as an apprentice at a printworks. Spend 10 minutes reading the passage before answering the questions.

The Composing Room

He walked down a narrow, sunless street, slick with the night's rain and empty of people at this hour. The printworks crouched low behind its blackened brick wall, three storeys of grimy windows through which nothing could be seen but the huddled shapes of machinery. Thomas Aldous stood a moment at the gate before he made himself go through it, across a yard puddled with ink-stained water, towards a door marked, in faded gold lettering, COMPOSING ROOM.

He knocked, and a gruff voice from within called, "Come!" The room he entered was dim, low-ceilinged, and smelled overwhelmingly of oil and hot metal. A thin man in shirtsleeves and a leather apron stood at a long bench, setting individual letters into a frame with quick, practised fingers, without once looking up. "You'll be the new boy," the man said, not as a question. "I'm Mr Pargeter. Overseer here." He nodded towards a stool. "Sit."

Thomas sat, watching, fascinated despite himself, as Mr Pargeter's fingers moved along rows of tiny metal letters, each smaller than a fingernail, plucking exactly the right one from what looked to Thomas like complete disorder. "Isn't it terribly fiddly work?" Thomas asked, if only to break the silence. "You get used to it," said Mr Pargeter, not glancing up. "Sixty lines an hour, once you're any good." Thomas did the arithmetic in his head and felt his stomach sink somewhere near his boots.

"And how long before I'm any good?" Thomas asked. Mr Pargeter's eyes flicked up at last, sharp and pale in a face the colour of old paper. "That," he said, "rather depends on you." It was not unkind exactly, but there was a bluntness to it that Thomas had never encountered from an adult before — as though he were being addressed not as a boy but as a piece of machinery that might, with proper handling, eventually prove useful.

The door banged open without warning, and a short, energetic young woman bustled in, her sleeves already rolled to the elbow. "You must be the new lad!" she said, before Thomas had a chance to stand. "I'm Miss Kettle — I mind the folding room. Don't let Mr Pargeter frighten you; he frightens everybody the first week, and then you get used to him, same as the noise." She snatched a folded apron from a peg without waiting for a reply. "You'll want one of these, unless you fancy going home black to the elbows every evening. I can send one of the boys for another if that one doesn't fit."

"Oh — it doesn't matter," said Thomas. "No trouble at all," said Miss Kettle, already halfway back out of the door. "I'll send someone directly." Thomas's heart sank further still. Everyone here seemed so certain, so brisk, so entirely unbothered by a room that had, within the space of five minutes, made him feel smaller than he had felt in his whole life. How was he ever going to get on among such capable, bustling people?