Number Forty-Seven, by Joan Hartley

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The hall at Firth Park smelled of floor polish and wet gaberdine. Sixty desks stood in rows so straight they looked ruled, and on every desk lay a paper, face down, with a pen and a sheet of pink blotting paper beside it. Rita Doyle found her number, 47, chalked on a card, and sat down very carefully, as though the chair might report her.

Her mother had said, that morning, buttoning Rita’s coat right up to the throat: ‘Just do your best, love. That’s all anybody can do.’ But her mother’s eyes had said something else. Her mother’s eyes had said the grammar school, and the green blazer in Hallworth’s window, and a job in an office with a carpet, and not the cutlery works, never the cutlery works where her mother had stood at a buffing wheel for eleven years. All of that was folded up inside the word ‘best’, and Rita had carried it all the way here on the tram.

A teacher she did not know walked slowly between the desks. His shoes squeaked. Squeak, pause, squeak. Rita watched the clock above the platform, its long black hand creeping towards nine like an insect on a wall, and she felt that if it got there before she was ready, everything would be lost.

She was not ready. She knew she was not ready. The fractions had gone. She had known them last night at the kitchen table, every one, and now when she reached for them there was only a white, ringing space, like the inside of a bell.

The boy at the next desk was swinging his legs. Bang, went his boot against the iron frame. Bang. Rita wanted to lean across and hold his knee still. She wanted to cry. She wanted, more than anything, to be back on the tram, going home, with the whole thing over and done and unchangeable, even if it had gone wrong.

‘You may turn your papers over,’ said the teacher.

Sixty papers turned with a sound like a flock of birds lifting. Rita turned hers. The first question was about a man who bought four pounds of apples at sevenpence a pound. She read it twice. Then, slowly, from somewhere at the back of the white space, the answer came walking towards her, and she dipped her pen.

How does the writer show Rita’s thoughts and feelings as she waits for the scholarship examination to begin?

You should consider:

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

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