Hail on the Orchard

Text 1: The Third Row, by Tobias Lennard

An original novel extract.

By four o’clock the sky over the orchard had turned the yellow of an old bruise. Hesketh stood at the end of the third row with his hands in his coat pockets, watching. Forty years of trees, and every one of them in blossom, the pink and white so thick on the branches that from the lane the slope looked dusted with icing sugar.

The first stone struck the shed roof with a single crack, like a knuckle on a door. Then the knock became a drumming, and the drumming became a roar. Hail the size of peas, then marbles, came slanting through the rows. It stripped the petals in seconds. They swirled down around Hesketh’s boots, a pale, soft snow inside the hard white one, and still he did not move.

His daughter shouted from the kitchen door. He heard her as if from under water. He was counting, without meaning to, the way his own father had counted on the night of the frost in 1962: the Bramleys, the Coxes, the pears by the wall. Ten minutes. That was all it took. When it stopped, the silence rang. The trees stood bare and dripping, and on the grass lay the whole of the year, browning already at the edges.

How does Tobias Lennard use language and structure to show the impact of the hailstorm on Hesketh?

You should use relevant subject terminology to support your answer.