The hailstorm

The first hailstone landed in the open paint tin. It made a small hollow note, almost musical, and Tom looked up from the ladder. He had nearly finished the garden shed. Only the narrow strip beneath the roof remained, and he had promised his sister that they could move her rabbits into it that evening. Beyond the fence, a neighbour was taking washing from the line. Tom balanced the brush across the tin, deciding whether there was time for one more stroke. Another white stone struck the wood beside his hand.

Then the sky emptied its pockets. Hail rattled on the shed roof, a thousand impatient fingers drumming on metal. The neat rows of lettuces disappeared beneath a jumping whiteness. Stones ricocheted from the path, sharp and bright as sparks, while the wind worried the fence until each board shuddered in its frame. Tom's brush fell. A gust caught the ladder and gave it a short, experimental shake. The garden, familiar a moment earlier, had become a room full of thrown objects. There was no single direction from which to shield his face.

He climbed down slowly, one foot searching for each rung. The paint tin swung from its hook and tipped a blue ribbon across his sleeve. At the bottom he put both hands on the ladder and pressed it against the shed. He could hear his sister calling from the kitchen, but the words vanished in the hammering. He wanted to run towards the door. Instead he lowered the ladder onto the grass, where it could not fall through the greenhouse. His fingers were so cold that he missed the latch on the gate twice.

From the kitchen, the garden looked oddly distant. Water ran down the window in trembling sheets. His sister handed him a towel without mentioning the paint on his clothes. They watched the neighbour's empty washing line swing above the fence. Beneath it, one forgotten red sock twisted on its peg. Tom began to laugh, not because anything was especially funny but because the sound of himself laughing was easier to hear than his breathing. His sister laughed too. They stood there until the white movement outside began to thin.

Ten minutes later, sunlight reached the path. The lettuces lay flattened, and the paint on the shed had acquired a rough surface of trapped ice. Tom walked out with his sister beside him. She inspected the rabbit hutch, still dry beneath the covered end of the patio, then pointed at the blue stripe on his sleeve. It matched the shed exactly. He looked at the unfinished strip under the roof. Yesterday he would have climbed straight back up. Today he carried the ladder into the garage and put the lid on the paint.

Read the second paragraph, from ‘Then the sky’ to ‘shield his face’. How does the writer use language to present the violence and unpredictability of the hailstorm? Support your analysis with evidence from this paragraph. You may consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.