The Bottom Pond

Text 1: Dry Year, by Philippa Ashdown

An original novel extract.

No rain since April. The radio said so every morning, as if it were news. Ruth walked down to the bottom pond after milking, though she knew what she would find, the way you press on a bad tooth.

The water had shrunk to a brown eye in the middle of the clay. Around it the mud had dried and split into plates, each curling at its edges like old paper, and between the plates the cracks ran deep enough to swallow her fingers. The reeds stood grey and brittle. A heron lifted off as she approached, slow and unhurried, too well fed. In the last of the water something silver flipped and turned, and flipped again, and lay still.

She stood there a long time. The sun pressed on the back of her neck like a hand. Somewhere up the hill a cow bellowed for water, and then another, and the sound carried flat and dry across fields the colour of straw. Ruth thought of the bank letter on the dresser, unopened. She thought of her mother, who had kept this farm through the summer of 1976 and talked about it ever after as a war. Then she turned and walked back up, because the troughs still had to be filled, and there was no one else to fill them.

How does Philippa Ashdown use language and structure to show Ruth’s despair about the drought?

You should use relevant subject terminology to support your answer.