Text 1: The map in my pocket, by Amina Dyer

An original contemporary memoir extract.

On the morning I started secondary school, Mum ironed my blazer twice. While she attacked the sleeves with clouds of steam, I unfolded the school map on the kitchen table and tried to memorise it. Science was in B14, lunch was in the North Hall and my form room was somewhere called the Cedar Block. By the time we left home, my stomach felt as tightly folded as the map in my pocket.

Outside the gates, a river of navy blazers carried me away from Mum. Everyone else seemed to know where to go. They called to one another across the playground, swapped stories about their holidays and moved around me as confidently as if they had been practising all summer. I pretended to examine a noticeboard while secretly searching for the Cedar Block.

‘You look as lost as I feel,’ said a voice beside me.

A boy called Sam was holding his own map upside down. Together, we followed signs, climbed the wrong staircase and arrived at our form room just as the bell rang. It was not an impressive entrance. Sam tripped over a chair, I dropped my pencil case and thirty people turned to stare as pens rolled across the floor.

Then our form tutor, Mrs Khan, crouched down to help me gather them. She checked how to pronounce my name instead of guessing and showed us two empty seats near the window. ‘You have made it,’ she said. ‘That is the difficult part done.’ A few people laughed, but kindly this time, and the tight feeling in my stomach began to loosen.

By lunchtime, my map was soft at the folds and covered with notes. Sam and I still went to the South Hall instead of the North Hall, but a girl from our form waved us over to her table. She made room on the bench without turning it into a grand act of generosity. It was simply understood that we could sit there.

At the end of the day, the corridors were still confusing and the bell was still far too loud. Yet when Sam called, ‘See you tomorrow,’ I realised that tomorrow no longer sounded like a threat. I put the map back in my pocket, although I did not think I would need to unfold it again.

Text 2: My arrival at Ashcombe School, by Edward Vale

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, written in 1881, a boy describes arriving at boarding school for the first time.

14 September. Throughout the journey I repeated Father’s promise that Ashcombe would make me independent. I had almost persuaded myself to believe him when the carriage turned through the gates and the school appeared. It was a vast grey building with narrow windows, more like a prison than a place of learning, and all my borrowed courage deserted me.

The driver placed my trunk on the gravel and departed before I had found anything sensible to say. I watched the carriage until it vanished between the trees. A porter then led me through a hall that smelt of damp coats and floor polish. His boots struck the stones so sharply that each step seemed to announce the arrival of a frightened new boy.

The headmaster examined me over the top of his spectacles. He asked my name, my age and my father’s occupation, but did not ask whether I had eaten or how far I had travelled. ‘You will learn our ways soon enough,’ he said, before ringing a bell for someone to remove me.

In the dormitory, three older boys inspected my trunk. They laughed at the patches Mother had sewn inside my coat and called me ‘the little traveller’. I tried to look unconcerned, though my face burned. When one of them asked whether I intended to cry, I answered that I had left all my tears at home. This earned another laugh, but at least my voice did not shake.

Supper was a thin stew followed by bread. I sat at the end of a bench and spoke to no one until a smaller boy named Price whispered that new boys were expected to fetch the water in the morning. He pushed the last piece of bread towards me when the others were not looking. That quiet kindness nearly undid all the bravery I had managed to preserve.

I am writing this by the light of a candle which will not last much longer. Around me, the other boys are asleep, while the wind pushes rain against the windows. I would give anything to hear the clock in our hall at home. Nevertheless, when the morning bell rings, I shall rise before the older boys can call me frightened. Ashcombe has not made me independent yet, but I mean to give it the chance.

Both texts describe a writer arriving at a new school.

Compare:

• how the writers feel before and after they arrive
• how other people affect each writer’s experience
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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