The Top Field, by Rosalind Harkness
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
The feather came through the letterbox on a Tuesday in the summer of 1940, in a brown envelope with no name on it. Lily found it on the mat on her way to school. It was a chicken feather, quite small and rather dirty, and for a moment she thought it was a joke, until she remembered what Joyce Ashdown had said in the playground, and then she put it in her pinafore pocket and told nobody.
Her father was a conscientious objector. She had only learned the words that spring, when he went before the tribunal in his chapel suit and came back with a piece of paper saying he could work on the land instead of going into the army. Now he went out at six every morning to lay hedges and drain ditches for Mr Couchman, and three nights a week he slept at the fire station in the town, in case of raids. None of this, Lily discovered, counted for anything in the playground.
‘Conchie,’ said Joyce Ashdown, whose father was in the Navy. ‘Your dad’s yellow. My mum says he ought to be locked up.’
Lily did not answer. She had found that if she did not answer, it was over quicker.
After that she stopped waiting for her father at the end of Mr Couchman’s lane in the evenings. She went home by the footpath behind the church, which was longer and muddier, so that nobody would see them walking together. If he noticed, he said nothing. At tea he asked her about her spellings, and she answered in as few words as she could, and looked at the jam.
One Saturday in September she took him his flask in the top field, because her mother made her, and found him slicing through a hazel stem with a billhook, bending it over and weaving it into the next. He worked slowly. His hands were scratched all over.
‘Why won’t you fight?’ she said. She had not meant to say it. It came out sounding like Joyce.
Her father finished the stem before he answered. ‘I did, once,’ he said. ‘Not fight. I carried a stretcher, in France, in the last war. Two years of carrying. I made up my mind then that I would never help to fill another one.’ He laid the billhook down. ‘It isn’t easy for you, is it? I’m sorry for that. I’m not sorry for the rest.’
She did not know what to say, so she gave him the flask and walked home by the footpath.
In October Miss Pelling set the top class a composition, ‘The Bravest Person I Know’, and said the best ones would be read out on Friday. Joyce Ashdown wrote about her father’s ship. Most of the boys wrote about pilots.
On Friday Miss Pelling called Lily’s name. She had not expected that. She stood at the front with her exercise book open, and her face went hot, and she could see Joyce at the back with her hand over her mouth already.
‘My father lays hedges,’ Lily read. Her voice was very small. Somebody sniggered. She found her place again and went on, louder. ‘In the last war he carried a stretcher for two years. In this war he goes to the fire station three nights a week, and in the day people say things to him in the street, and he does not say anything back. I used to think that was because he was frightened. I don’t now.’
She read it to the end, all of it, with her hand in her pinafore pocket. When she sat down nobody clapped and nobody laughed, and on the way home that afternoon she waited at the end of Mr Couchman’s lane until it was nearly dark.
“Lily is presented as a girl who is ashamed of her father.”
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.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 1.3.1 Identifying and interpreting themes, ideas and information, 1.3.2 Reading in different ways for different purposes, 1.3.4 Supporting a point of view with textual evidence, and 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.