The petition

An original nineteenth-century-style fiction passage set in the 1880s. This is newly written practice material, not a historical extract.

The committee room had been designed, Esther thought, to make visitors feel that they had entered by mistake. The ceiling was twice the height of any useful ceiling, the windows admitted a thin and colourless light, and nine gentlemen sat behind a polished rail as if the furniture itself had passed judgement on everyone outside it. Esther stood before them with the market petition folded in her hand. At the back of the room, her daughter Nell waited beside the door.

Esther was accustomed to making herself heard. Six days a week, she sold apples beneath the market roof, where a quiet offer was lost among rattling carts, arguments over pennies and traders announcing the excellence of their goods. That morning, before leaving her stall, she had told the others not to accompany her. Forty people crowding the borough hall would look like a disturbance, she said. One woman carrying forty-three names would look like a case.

Nell had offered to stand beside her. Esther had refused that too.

The chairman examined the petition without unfolding it. “You claim the market roof is unsafe.”

“I claim that pieces of it have fallen three times this month,” Esther replied. “Last Tuesday, a tile split Mr Dean’s basket. On Friday, another cut the awning above my stall. Yesterday, a third struck Mrs Bell above the eye.”

A councillor with silver spectacles observed that old buildings commonly lost a tile in bad weather. Esther looked towards the tall windows. The morning was still and clear.

“Then the weather inside our market must be uncommon,” she said.

Someone at the back of the room coughed to conceal a laugh. Nell did not. She watched her mother with the solemn attention she gave to a difficult sum.

The chairman unfolded the petition at last. Esther had dictated it at the kitchen table while Nell formed the sentences in her neat school hand. For three evenings, Esther had repeated the words until she could deliver them without pause. She now described the cracks above the eastern stalls, the water that travelled down the iron pillars and the traders’ unanswered requests for an inspection. Her voice gathered strength as she went. The councillors ceased arranging their papers.

“Closing the market would remove the danger,” said the man in the silver spectacles.

Esther felt the answer rise in her before he had finished. “It would also remove our living. We are asking you to mend the roof, sir, not to save us from earning bread beneath it.”

The chairman tapped one paragraph with his finger. “There is a further account here concerning the loose beam. Read it to the committee.”

Until then, Esther had known where every sentence lay. She could see the kitchen table, Nell’s moving pen and the candle shortening between them. But the words on the page were only black strokes now, crowded together like a hedge with no gate. She found the paragraph by its position and stared at it, hoping memory would return.

“The light is poor,” the chairman said, and a clerk moved towards the window cord.

Esther could have agreed. She could have blamed the pale windows, delivered the lines she remembered and left before anyone discovered what the petition could not give her. From her place by the door, Nell softly spoke the first three words of the paragraph.

“Please do not interrupt,” Esther said sharply.

Nell lowered her eyes. The room became very quiet. Esther saw that she had silenced the only person there who knew exactly what she needed. Facing the councillors had made her angry, and anger had carried her forward. Turning towards Nell required something for which anger was no use.

Esther held out the petition. “My daughter will read that part,” she said. Her voice did not fail, although she wished it would grow softer and hide inside the great room. “The account is mine. The reading must be hers.”

Nell came from the door. She read of the beam shifting above the eastern aisle and of dust falling whenever carts passed outside. Her voice was lighter than Esther’s but steady. When a councillor asked when the movement had first been noticed, Nell found the date in the petition and Esther explained what she had seen. They answered the remaining questions between them.

The committee did not promise a new roof. It agreed that a surveyor would inspect the beam that afternoon and that the eastern stalls would remain empty until his report. This was less than Esther had demanded and more than the market had possessed that morning.

Outside, the waiting traders gathered around her. Esther told them about the inspection, the closed stalls and the questions. Then, before pride could alter the story, she added, “Nell read the beam account. I could not.”

Nobody laughed. Mr Dean took off his cap and thanked them both.

As they crossed the square, a clerk hurried after them with a written notice confirming the inspection. Esther accepted it and passed it directly to Nell, although several traders were still watching.

“Read it once,” she said. “Then, when we reach home, show me how to begin.”

A reader said, ‘Esther’s greatest act of courage is not challenging the committee but allowing Nell to help her.’ Evaluate this view. Support your judgement with detailed references to the whole passage.