Ageing and control

Text 1: The Escapement, by Ingrid Salter

An original novel extract.

The clock had come in from a farmhouse near Hexham, a tall oak longcase with a painted moon in its arch, and it had not struck for thirty years. Elias Brandt had taken its movement apart on the bench in a single afternoon. That had been in March. It was now June, and the pieces still lay on the green baize in the order he had removed them, each one labelled in his small, precise hand, and he had not been able to put them back.

It was not his eyes. His eyes were still good, with the loupe. It was his hands. They had begun to shake two winters ago, a faint tremor at first, like a leaf in a draught, and now when he lifted the tweezers towards a pivot hole the tip danced and wandered as if it had a mind of its own.

His granddaughter came on Saturdays. She was seventeen and wanted to study law, and she sat on the high stool beside him because she had always sat there, since she was small enough to be lifted onto it.

“Show me,” Lena said.

He did not want to. For fifty-two years nobody had touched a movement on this bench but him. But he pushed the tweezers across the baize, and she picked them up, and he talked. Gently. Lower. Not so much. Feel for it. Wait. Her hands were steady and ignorant, and his voice was shaking and knew everything, and between them, at a quarter past four, the pallet slid onto its arbor with a click so small that only the two of them heard it.

When the clock struck for the first time in thirty years, Elias found he had to sit down. He had not touched it. He had done all of it.

Text 2: Shop Window, by Elspeth Rainey

An original contemporary memoir.

I caught sight of her in the window of a shoe shop on Princes Street: an old woman in a camel coat, stooping slightly against the wind, with a shopping bag dragging one shoulder lower than the other. I thought, poor thing. Then she stopped when I stopped, and I understood.

For twenty-two years I danced for a living. My body was an instrument I had tuned every morning at the barre, and it obeyed me as faithfully as a well-trained dog. I could stand on one foot for a full minute with the other leg extended behind me, the arms held in a long soft line, and feel nothing but a kind of humming stillness. When I told my body to rise, it rose.

Now it does what it likes. My knees have opinions. My left hip announces the weather. I go upstairs one at a time, holding the rail, and when I bend to tie a lace there is a moment, every time, when I am not entirely sure I will come back up.

I stood in front of that shoe shop for a long time. People went round me, irritated. Then, because there was nobody I knew to see, I set down the bag, lifted my chin, drew my shoulders back and down, and turned my head a quarter turn to the left, the way Madame had taught us, so that the light caught the line of the jaw.

The woman in the window did it too. She was still old. But she was standing like a dancer, and for a moment, just a moment, I recognised her.

‘In both texts, ageing is presented as a loss of control.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss how ageing has changed the characters
• explain how far the characters have lost control
• compare how the writers present ageing

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