The Cinders, by Pauline Kitchin

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Marion Ashby had planned her rebellion for three weeks, and she had chosen Sunday lunch because the vicar would be there.

She had cut her own hair on Saturday night with her mother’s dressmaking scissors, short and ragged at the back like the girls in the music papers. She had borrowed a black polo-neck jumper from her friend Gwen without asking Gwen’s mother. And she had rehearsed the speech in the bathroom mirror until she could say it without her voice going up at the end: she was not going to the secretarial college in Guildford in September. She was going to play the drums in a group called The Cinders, with Gwen’s cousin Raymond, in a cellar in Kingston, and nothing anyone said would change her mind.

She came down at five to one. Her father was carving. Her mother was carrying in the sprouts. The Reverend Mr Tolley was telling a story about the bishop’s bicycle. Nobody screamed.

‘Hello, darling,’ said her mother. ‘Gravy?’

Marion sat down. She waited until the plates were full and the vicar had said grace, which he did at length, and then she put down her knife and fork and made her speech. She said all of it. She did not leave out the cellar.

There was a pause. Her father finished chewing.

‘The Cinders,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Not a bad name. What kit has Raymond got?’

Marion stared at him. She had prepared answers to shouting, to tears, to her mother’s nerves and to the word ‘ungrateful’. She had not prepared an answer to this.

‘A snare,’ she said. ‘And a cymbal. A cracked one.’

‘Cracked cymbal’s no good to anybody.’ Her father turned to the vicar. ‘I played with Billy Marchant’s Rhythm Aces before the war, you know. Two years at the Palais in Hammersmith. My old kit’s still in the loft, if the mice haven’t had it.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Marion. Her voice went up at the end after all.

‘You never asked,’ said her father. ‘Nobody asks their parents anything.’

Then the vicar, who had been listening with great interest, said that he himself had played the cornet in the Salvation Army as a young man and could still manage a hymn if pressed, and her mother said that in that case Marion had better have the front room on Saturdays, because she was not having drums in the bedroom, not with the ceiling the way it was. By the time the apple crumble came round, the whole table was discussing the band. Her father had suggested a change of name. The vicar had offered the church hall.

Marion ate her crumble in silence. It was, she felt, the worst afternoon of her life. Nobody had forbidden anything. Nobody had wept. She had thrown open the door of the cage and found her family already standing outside it, asking whether she would like a hand with her luggage.

After lunch she went upstairs and sulked for a full hour, on principle. Then she went up into the loft.

“Marion’s rebellion is presented as pointless and childish.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Marion and her rebellion are 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.