Polwenna, 1951, by Rosemary Tregarthen
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
Ruth Penhaligon told me on the harbour wall, her voice so low that the gulls nearly took it. Her Auntie Lil, who met her from school in a headscarf, was not her auntie at all. She was her mother. She had had Ruth at seventeen, before she was married, before anything, and Ruth’s nan had brought Ruth up as her own so that nobody in Polwenna would ever know. ‘You’re the only one who knows,’ Ruth said. ‘Promise.’ I promised. I meant it, too, for very nearly a whole day.
The next afternoon Sheila Bassett let me stand with her crowd by the school railings for the first time. They were swapping secrets, and I had nothing to offer, and the silence was waiting for me like an open door. So I walked through it.
I remember how they turned to look at me. I remember the little gasp, and Sheila’s hand on my arm, and the lovely warm feeling of being, at last, somebody worth listening to. It lasted until bedtime. It went out like a match.
By Sunday it had gone all round the village, from the railings to the bakery to the chapel steps. I sat with Mother in our usual pew and watched Lil Penhaligon come in late, and I watched the women in her row lean their heads together and then, very slowly, shift along, so that there was a space on either side of her. Nobody said a word. Nobody had to. I stared at my hymn book until the lines swam.
On Monday Ruth was sitting on the step of the coal shed, looking at nothing. When she saw me she did not look away. That was the worst of it. She did not look angry. She looked as if she had simply been told the answer to a sum.
All week what I had said sat in my stomach like a stone I had swallowed. On Friday Lil smiled at me by the gate and said, ‘Hello, Joanie, love,’ as kindly as ever. She did not know it was me. Of course she did not know.
That night I wrote Ruth a letter saying sorry, and tore it up, and wrote another, and tore that up too, because every word in them was about me. I never sent one. I am an old woman now, and I have said a great many things I regret, but I have never again been so ashamed of a silence I failed to keep.
How does the writer show Joan’s thoughts and feelings after she breaks her promise to Ruth?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.