Thornby School, by Margaret Ellwood
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
The first time it happened, Miss Harker blamed the Fothergill twins.
She had come in at eight, as she always did, to light the stove before the children arrived, and found a name written on the blackboard in a round, careful hand: Agnes Dent. Nothing else. The letters were small and low on the board, as though whoever wrote them had not been able to reach any higher.
She wiped it off with the duster and said nothing. When the Fothergills came in at nine with their usual noise she watched them closely and saw no sign of guilt in either face, only the ordinary guilt of boys who had not done their sums.
The next morning the name was there again. And the morning after.
Miss Harker was not a fanciful woman. She had trained at Ripon, she read the newspaper from front to back every evening, and she had once told the vicar, politely, that she preferred evidence to faith. On the Thursday she locked the schoolroom herself at half past four, tested the door twice, and took the only key home in her handbag. On Friday morning she unlocked it again with the same key. The chalk had been put back in its box. The board said Agnes Dent.
She sat down at her desk. Her hands, she noticed, were perfectly steady, and she took some pride in that.
That afternoon, when the children had gone, she went to the cupboard where the old registers were kept and took them down one by one, blowing the dust from the covers. There had been a school in Thornby since 1871. It did not take her long.
Dent, Agnes. Admitted 3rd April 1889. Age five. In the column for remarks, in a brown faded ink, a previous teacher had written: Absent from 14th November. Then, in the same hand, a week later, a single word, and a line ruled neatly across the rest of the page.
Miss Harker closed the book. Outside, the November dark was coming down over the fells and the rooks were settling, loud and quarrelsome, in the churchyard elms. She thought of a child of five who had been ill and had stayed away, and had never been marked present again. She thought, quite sensibly, that someone in the village must know this story and was playing a cruel trick. She thought of the key in her handbag.
On Monday morning the name was on the board as usual. Miss Harker left it there. At nine o’clock the children filed in and sat down, and she opened the register and began to call it, as she did every day: Ainsworth, Bell, Calvert. When she reached the space between Calvert and Dobson she paused, and then, in her clearest voice, she said, ‘Agnes Dent.’
Nobody answered. Thirty children looked at her, puzzled. She made a small neat tick in the margin, said ‘Present,’ and went on to Dobson.
The name never appeared again. In July, when Miss Harker left Thornby for a post in Harrogate, she wiped the board clean herself, and she found that she had to stand there a moment longer than was necessary, with the duster in her hand, before she could go.
“Miss Harker is presented as a cold and unemotional woman.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
40 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.