The Yellow Duck, by Albert Cawood

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Mr Lomax came to tea every Sunday that winter, and every Sunday he brought something. Oranges at first, then a tin of toffees with a picture of a castle on the lid, and once, in February, a wooden duck on wheels for my sister Queenie, painted yellow, which quacked when you pulled it along the lino. Queenie was five. She pulled that duck up and down our kitchen until my ears rang, and every time it quacked she looked up at Mr Lomax as if he had invented ducks.

I was twelve, and I had decided to hate him.

It was not difficult. He had a moustache like a strip of doormat and he called my mother ‘Elsie, my dear’, which nobody had called her since my father’s ship went down off the Dogger Bank. He sat in my father’s chair. Nobody had sat in my father’s chair for two years; it was not a rule, exactly, it was simply how things were, and Mr Lomax walked in and lowered himself into it on his very first Sunday as if it had been waiting for him.

I watched my mother laugh at his jokes. They were not good jokes. I watched her put the best cup in front of him, the one with the gold rim, and I felt something hot and sour climb up the back of my throat, so that I could not finish my bread and jam.

‘Bert’s quiet,’ Mr Lomax said.

‘He’s growing,’ said my mother. ‘Growing boys are always quiet.’

I was not growing. I was guarding. Someone in that kitchen had to remember, and it seemed it was only me.

That night Queenie climbed into my bed with the duck under her arm, its wheels cold against my leg. ‘Do you like Mr Lomax?’ she whispered.

I thought of the gold rim and the doormat moustache and my father’s chair. I thought of my mother laughing, and how long it was since I had heard it. ‘He’s all right,’ I said, into the dark, and hated myself, and hated him, and held my sister very tight.

How does the writer show the narrator’s thoughts and feelings about Mr Lomax?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about the narrator
• the writer’s use of language to show his thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.