Homecoming hopes

Text 1: Back from the Villa, by Jodie Brannigan

An original short story extract.

The flat smelled of damp washing and chip fat, and the lift was broken again, and by the time Shannon had dragged her case up four flights of concrete stairs, with the rain coming sideways through the gaps in the stairwell, Spain felt like something she had dreamed.

Six weeks at her dad’s. A white villa with a pool shaped like a kidney bean, and a lemon tree in the garden that you could actually pick lemons from, and his new girlfriend, Kerry, who called everyone babe and bought her sunglasses that cost more than her school shoes. She had a tan that stopped exactly at her wrists, like gloves.

Mam opened the door before she knocked. She was in her work tabard still, from the bakery, and she looked tired, and smaller than Shannon remembered, and she said, “Look at the colour of you,” and hugged her too hard.

Shannon’s bedroom was exactly as she had left it. That was the trouble. The same damp patch in the corner of the ceiling. The same view of the car park and the bins. She sat on the bed and looked at her phone, at the photos of the pool, and felt something heavy settle in her chest, and did not want to be ungrateful, and was.

At seven Mam knocked and put her head round the door. “I saved it,” she said.

Shannon did not know what she meant. Then she did. The last three episodes of the series they watched together every Sunday, the one about the vets in Yorkshire, which Mam had recorded and not watched, all summer.

“You didn’t have to wait,” Shannon said.

“I know,” said Mam. She had made cheese on toast, the way Shannon liked it, with Worcester sauce, and two mugs of tea. They sat on the settee under the same blanket with the rain on the window, and Spain went a little further away, and Shannon let it go.

Text 2: The Swing Seat, by Leela Pillai-Hart

An original contemporary memoir.

I had imagined the house so often that I walked straight past it. I was looking for a low building with a red tiled roof, and a verandah with a swing seat, and a coconut grove behind it where my grandmother used to send me to collect fallen husks for the fire. What stood at the end of the lane was a two-storey villa of pink concrete with tinted windows and a satellite dish, and a gate with gold paint on its spikes.

The coconut grove was a car park for the new hospital. My grandmother had been dead for nine years. I had known both of these things before I got on the plane at Heathrow, and I had come anyway, after twenty-five years away, because I needed to stand somewhere that would remember me.

Nothing remembered me. The lane was tarmac now. The well had been capped. Children watched me from a doorway, the foreign woman in the wrong clothes, sweating in the heat, holding a map on her phone. My Malayalam, which I had practised for weeks, dried up in my mouth.

I was turning to go back to the taxi when an old woman came out of the house opposite, very bent, with a walking stick and a white sari. She stopped in the middle of the lane and looked at me, hard, for a long time, the way you look at a word you nearly know.

Then she said my name. Not my English name, the one on my passport, but the name my grandmother had called me, the pet name nobody had used since I was eight.

“You walk like her,” she said, in Malayalam, and I understood every word. “You always did. Come. Sit. You will have tea.”

I sat on her verandah for three hours. She had a swing seat. It creaked exactly as I remembered.

‘Both texts present homecoming as a disappointment.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters expect when they return
• explain how far they are disappointed
• compare how the writers present homecoming

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