Opening Day, by Glenys Pritchard
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Councillor Idris Probert had waited eleven years for the Abernant public baths, and he intended the whole town to know it. He had argued for them in the council chamber, written to the newspaper about them, and once, memorably, stood on a chair in the Miners’ Institute to describe the benefits of chlorinated water. When the opening day came, in June 1956, he arrived an hour early in his chain of office, his good grey suit and a pair of shoes so polished that the attendant said he could see his own worries in them.
The children of Abernant had been promised the first swim. They sat in rows along the wet tiles in their woollen costumes, shivering and silent, while the councillor climbed to the end of the springboard at the deep end, because, he said, a man should be seen when he speaks.
‘This,’ he began, ‘is not merely a hole filled with water.’
He spoke for twenty minutes. He spoke about hygiene, about the superiority of the breaststroke and about his own boyhood, when he had washed once a week in a tin bath before the fire. He spoke, at some length, about the drains. Twice he flung out his arm and the chain swung out over the water, flashing in the light from the high windows, and twice the children leaned forward hopefully and then sat back again. Near the front, Dilys Rees, aged nine, whispered to her brother that the board was going up and down like a see-saw. Her brother told her to hush.
‘And so,’ said Councillor Probert, stepping forward to the very tip for his conclusion, ‘it gives me the greatest possible pleasure to declare these baths…’
He did not finish the sentence. The board dipped under him, gently, almost politely, and he went into the deep end with both arms spread wide, like a man welcoming visitors. For a moment there was nothing to see but a ring of ripples and one polished shoe, floating.
Nobody moved. Nobody laughed. A hundred children held their breath, partly out of fear and partly because it seemed the right thing to do.
Then he came up. His hair was flat across his forehead and his chain hung round his neck like weed, and the water streamed out of his good grey sleeves. He did not reach for the ladder. He trod water, quite steadily, and looked up at the rows of small white faces staring down at him, and something happened to his face that nobody in Abernant had ever seen before. It began at the corners of his mouth.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That settles one thing. The water is wet.’
Somebody giggled. It was Dilys. Then her brother went, and then the whole front row, and then the sound ran along the tiles like a fire along a hedge, until the high glass roof rang with it. The councillor waited for it to finish, the way he waited for applause at meetings.
‘I declare these baths open,’ he said, and lay back in the water and floated, his stomach rising out of it like a small grey island, while the children of Abernant jumped in around him, shrieking, all at once.
The next morning’s newspaper reported that the opening had gone ‘with a splash’. Councillor Probert cut the article out and kept it in his wallet for the rest of his life, and he never, as far as anyone knew, climbed onto a springboard again.
“Councillor Probert is presented as a pompous fool who deserves to be laughed at.”
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.