The Embankment, by Teresa Monti

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

This story is set in Bedford in 1962. Graziella’s family came to England from southern Italy when she was six.

The bicycle cost Mrs Ferraro thirty shillings from a man in Midland Road, and she wheeled it home on a Saturday afternoon in October with her chin up, as though it were a pram with a baby in it that she did not intend to show anyone. It was black and heavy and had belonged to a policeman. Graziella, walking beside her, kept two paces back.

‘You will teach me,’ her mother said that night at the kitchen table. She said it in Italian, as she said everything that mattered, although she understood far more English than she ever risked speaking. ‘Tomorrow. Early. Before people.’

Graziella was fourteen, and she had been in England long enough to speak like the girls at school and to be ashamed of things she could not name. ‘Mamma, you’re forty-four.’

‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘And the bus to the hospital is stopped, and the laundry starts at seven, and I am not walking four miles in the dark all winter. So.’

So at half past five the next morning they were on the Embankment, the river smoking with mist and the swans still asleep with their heads under their wings. Mrs Ferraro had tucked her skirt into the tops of her stockings and tied a scarf hard under her chin. She looked, Graziella thought, like a woman about to go to war with a bicycle.

She was very bad at it. She held the handlebars at arm’s length, as if they might bite, and she looked at her feet instead of the path, and every time Graziella let go of the saddle the front wheel began to wander like a dog after a smell, and then the whole machine went over, slowly, with her mother underneath it.

‘Again,’ said Mrs Ferraro, from the grass.

They went every morning that week. On the Wednesday she took the skin off both palms. On the Thursday it rained, and the brakes, which had been made to stop a policeman in a hurry, locked on the wet path and threw her over the handlebars into the long grass. Graziella ran to her, sick with fright, and found her lying on her back in the wet, laughing up at the sky, a sound Graziella had not heard since they left Calabria.

On the Friday Graziella did not want to get up. She lay under the blankets and listened to her mother moving about the kitchen, very quietly so as not to wake her, and then the back door opening and closing, and then nothing. When she ran down to the Embankment with her coat over her nightdress, her mother was there alone, pushing off from a bench, falling, pushing off again.

‘You came,’ said Mrs Ferraro. She did not sound surprised.

On the Saturday, by the bandstand, Graziella ran behind with one hand on the saddle, and then, without deciding to, without saying anything, she let go.

Her mother did not notice. She went on along the path, upright, the wheel steady, past the bandstand and the boathouse and the second bench, and Graziella stood with her empty hand still held out in front of her and felt something she had no word for in either language.

At the bridge Mrs Ferraro looked back, and saw how far away her daughter was, and wobbled, and did not fall. She rang the bell twice, a sound that went out over the water and woke the swans. Then she turned the bicycle in a wide, careful circle and rode all the way back.

‘Monday,’ she said, breathless, with her scarf over one eye, ‘you can stay in bed.’

“Mrs Ferraro is presented as a timid woman who depends on her daughter for everything.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Mrs Ferraro 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.