Paper 1 Q5: descriptive/narrative writing

The Ferris wheel is the first thing the sky sees.¹ It stands at the end of the promenade like the skeleton of some enormous clock, its gondolas hanging motionless, its spokes cutting the cloud into grey slices. Nothing turns. Nothing hurries.² Even the gulls seem to have decided that this place is no longer worth their attention.

Below it, the stalls have closed their eyes³. Metal shutters, freckled with rust, are pulled down over the hook-a-duck and the candyfloss stand, and someone has scrawled BACK IN MAY across one of them in letters that have already begun to weep. A single plastic duck lies on its side in the gutter, its painted smile fixed on nothing. In the doorway of the ghost train, a drift of crisp packets and dead leaves has gathered, as if the wind has been trying, all winter, to get in.

The carousel is the only thing that moves. A blue tarpaulin has been roped over its horses, but the wind has worked one corner loose, and now it lifts and cracks and falls, lifts and cracks and falls⁴, like a sail on a ship that will never leave harbour. Beneath it, the horses are frozen mid-gallop: nostrils flared, gilt manes chipped, eyes wide with a terror that has nowhere to go. Each time the tarpaulin rises, one of them is briefly revealed – a flash of red saddle, a hoof raised in permanent protest – before the plastic slaps down again.

Puddles have collected in every dip of the tarmac. In them, the strings of unlit bulbs are reflected upside down, a second fairground drowned beneath the first⁵. A drop of rain lands; the drowned fairground shivers; then it is still.

It was not always like this.⁶ In August, this same tarmac was sticky with spilled lemonade and loud with a hundred overlapping songs. The bulbs blazed – cherry red, lime green, a gold so bright it made your teeth ache. Children screamed on the waltzer and pretended they were not afraid; their parents pretended not to notice. The air tasted of sugar and diesel and suncream. The Ferris wheel turned slowly against a sky so blue it looked painted on, and from the very top, so people said, you could see France.

Now the only sound is the tarpaulin and, somewhere beneath the pier, the sea dragging its chains of shingle back and forth. The light is failing. One by one, the street lamps along the promenade flicker on, but their glow stops politely at the fairground gate, as if it knows it has not been invited.

The Ferris wheel waits. Its gondolas sway, just slightly, in a gust from the sea – the smallest of movements, almost a breath. And for a moment it looks less like a skeleton and more like something sleeping⁷: something patient, something certain that, sooner or later, the summer will come back to wake it.

The attic smelled of dust and old rain.¹ Maya had been told to fill three bin bags – ‘Anything mouldy, anything broken, anything you can’t imagine anyone wanting’ – and she had already filled two: lampshades, a cracked fishing rod, forty years of Radio Times that her grandfather had kept as if they might one day be needed in evidence.

The shoebox was wedged behind the water tank. She almost missed it. It was the kind of box that new school shoes came in, its lid softened by damp, and someone had wound brown parcel tape around it so many times that it had become less a box than a fist².

She should have put it straight in the third bag.³ Instead, she sat down on the boards, knees to her chin, and began to pick at the tape.

Inside were letters. Dozens of them, tied in bundles with string, every envelope addressed in the same looping, careful hand to Mr A. Hartley – her grandfather – at the house where she was now sitting. None of them had been opened.

Maya held one up to the bare bulb. The postmark was smudged, but the year was clear enough: 1971. She looked at the next bundle. 1974. 1980. 1993.⁴ The last envelope, thinner than the rest, was dated just six years ago.

Her hands were not quite steady when she opened it.

Arthur, it began. I don’t suppose you’ll read this one either. I’m not well, and I wanted to try once more before I can’t. I think about the river every day. I think about what we said. I was wrong, and so were you, and I’m tired of us both being right. Your brother, Joe.

Brother.⁵

The word sat on the page like a stone dropped into still water⁶, and Maya felt the ripples spreading outward, through Christmases and birthdays and the funeral only a month ago, where nobody – not a single person – had mentioned a Joe.

Something else was in the envelope: a photograph, small and square, its colours faded to the orange of old tea. Two boys stood on a riverbank, arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. One of them was unmistakably her grandfather – the same sticking-out ears, the same crooked grin she had seen in every photo on the mantelpiece. The other had the same ears, the same grin. He was laughing at something outside the frame.

‘Maya?’ Her mother’s voice floated up the ladder. ‘How are you getting on? Find anything?’

Maya looked at the boxes, the bags, the fifty years of unopened envelopes. She thought about how tired her mother had looked all month, how she had said, more than once, that at least Dad had never kept secrets.

‘Nothing much,’ she called.⁷ ‘Just old stuff.’

She tied the bundles back up, slid the box into the third bin bag, and knotted it tightly. Then she took the photograph, and the last letter, and tucked them inside her jacket, against her heart, where they would be safe until she was ready to decide what kind of granddaughter she was going to be.

Below her, the house went on being ordinary. Above her, the rain began again, tapping softly on the roof, like someone who had been waiting a very long time to be let in⁸.