Pask’s Garage, by Muriel Fendick

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

For four years and seven months the sign over the workshop in Wenham Market had said F. PASK, MOTOR REPAIRS, and for four years and seven months the person under the cars had been Vera. She had learned from a manual with the pages stuck together with oil and from old Mr Thurlow at the forge, who had told her she would never manage and then come round every Thursday to see how she was managing. She mended tractors and the doctor’s Austin and the vicar’s motorcycle. She drove the lorry to Norwich market on Wednesdays. She kept the books in a ledger in her own round hand, and in 1944 the garage had made a profit for the first time since it opened.

Frank came home in the March of 1946, thin and polite, with a kitbag and a cough he had brought back from Italy. The first morning he went down to the workshop she followed him, and watched him stand in the doorway and look at the benches.

‘You’ve moved the spanners,’ he said.

‘They’re where I can reach them.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded. Then he took them down, one by one, and hung them on the old hooks above her head, where they had been in 1941. ‘There,’ he said, and kissed her cheek. ‘You can put your feet up now, love. You’ve earned it.’

She smiled and said that she supposed she had.

Within a month the customers had stopped asking for her. The doctor brought the Austin round and said, ‘Is Frank about?’ although she was standing beside him with a rag in her hand. Mr Thurlow stopped coming on Thursdays. Frank did the books, in his square hand, and when he found her figures he said they were very neat, as though she had embroidered them.

She made his tea. She went to the Women’s Institute. She bought a new pinafore and stood in the kitchen in it and looked out across the yard at the workshop roof, and if she had any thoughts about it, she did not say them aloud.

In May the lorry would not start. Frank was under it for three evenings, swearing quietly, and on the third night he came in black to the elbows and said it would have to go to the big garage in Norwich, and that would cost them more than they could spare.

Vera waited until he was asleep. Then she put her old overalls on over her nightdress and went down the garden in her stockinged feet with the torch. The spanners hung out of her reach. She stood on an upturned crate. It took her forty minutes, most of it lying on her back on the cold floor with the torch held in her teeth, and when she had finished she cleaned every tool and hung each one back on its proper hook, the high one, exactly where Frank had put it.

In the morning the lorry started first time.

‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ Frank said, standing in the yard with the engine running. He looked delighted and baffled. ‘It must have been the damp. It must have just dried out.’

‘I expect that was it,’ said Vera, and poured his tea, and passed him the sugar. She was smiling, and it was not quite the same smile as before.

“Vera is presented as content to return to her old life after the war.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Vera is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.