Quiet courage

Text 1: Deep End, by Gordon Fairweather

An original short story extract.

The deep end was three point eight metres. It said so in blue tiles on the side of the pool, and Liam had read it so many times over the past six weeks that he saw it when he closed his eyes at night, wobbling under the water like a warning.

He was twelve. Everyone else in the Tuesday beginners’ class was seven, or eight, or in the case of a small fierce girl called Poppy, six and three-quarters. They wore armbands with cartoon sharks on them and they were not afraid of anything, and every week they jumped into the deep end shrieking, one after another, while Liam stood on the side with his arms folded across his chest so that nobody could see him shaking.

“Liam,” said the instructor. She was called Bev and she had a whistle and a voice that could cut through a hurricane. “Your turn, love. I’m right here.”

He walked to the edge. The tiles were cold and slightly gritty under his feet. The water was very blue and very still and the bottom looked close enough to touch, which he knew was a lie. Behind him, the line of seven-year-olds had gone quiet.

He thought about his cousins at the lake in the summer, jumping off the jetty, and him sitting on the bank with a book he was not reading.

Then Poppy, from somewhere around his elbow, said, “You just hold your nose. It’s easy. It’s only scary for one second.”

Liam held his nose. He shut his eyes. He stepped forward into nothing, and the water closed over his head, cold and roaring, and for one second, exactly one, it was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to him.

Then he came up. Bev was there, and the float was there, and the six-year-old was clapping.

Text 2: The 22.14, by Harriet Coombe

An original contemporary memoir.

It was the 22.14 from Euston, the slow one that stops everywhere, and the carriage was half empty: a man asleep against the window, two students sharing earphones, me with a book I was too tired to read, and, three rows ahead, a girl in a school uniform with her bag on her knee.

The man got on at Watford. He was perhaps forty, in a good coat, and there were twenty empty seats, and he sat down next to her.

I noticed because she moved. Not much: she pressed herself an inch closer to the window and pulled her bag tighter. He said something I could not hear. She shook her head. He laughed and said it again, louder, and put his arm along the back of her seat.

I looked round the carriage. The students were watching their phone. The sleeping man was asleep. I thought: somebody should do something, and then I understood that I was the somebody, because there was nobody else.

I am not a brave person. I apologise to people who tread on my feet. My heart was going so hard that I could feel it in my teeth, and my legs, when I stood up, did not feel as if they belonged to me.

I walked down the aisle and stopped beside them, and I said, to the girl, in a voice that came out much higher than I meant it to, “Sorry I’m late. Shall we sit together?”

For a second nobody moved. Then the girl looked up at me, and I saw her understand, and she said, “Yes,” and was out of her seat and past him before he could get his arm back. We sat at the end of the carriage, side by side, and did not speak, and I held my book upside down. When he got off at Berkhamsted, she started to cry, and so did I.

‘In both texts, courage is presented as a quiet, private struggle rather than a heroic act.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters have to overcome
• explain how far their courage is private or heroic
• compare how the writers present courage

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.