The prize day
An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.
The prize book lay closed on the master's desk, its scarlet cover brighter than anything else in the grey schoolroom. Miriam pressed her palms beneath her knees. As the master praised the winning story, every sentence seemed to draw nearer to her, yet she scarcely dared to breathe. Then he spoke her name.
Delight flared through her. The room broke into applause, and for a moment the rows of faces shone together like a field in sunlight. Miriam rose so quickly that the bench scraped behind her. Halfway to the desk, she saw Clara in the front row. Clara usually wrote the stories that everyone begged to hear. She was clapping, but her smile appeared carefully fixed, as if one movement might disturb it.
The book's gold lettering gleamed when the master placed it in Miriam's hands. Its weight, which she had imagined with pleasure all morning, now pulled at her arms. She thanked him and turned towards the class. The applause grew louder. For one moment, she wanted it to continue for ever; for the next, she wished the master had never spoken her name.
Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to present Miriam's conflicting reactions to winning the school prize.
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Support your answer with references to the passage.
456 exam-style questions on Edexcel GCSE English Language 1.3 Content: prose fiction study requirements, covering 1.3.1 Read challenging prose fiction for the unseen 19th-century extract. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.