The price of ambition

Text 1: The Dead Keys, by Margaret Thewlis

An original novel extract.

The piano in the chapel vestry had three dead keys, all of them in the octave above middle C, and Nancy Hirst had learned to play around them the way a person learns to walk around a broken step. When the music asked for one of them she pressed it anyway, heard the dull wooden knock, and sang the note under her breath so that the tune would not fall into the hole.

She came at half past six every morning before school, letting herself in with the key the minister left under the boot scraper. The vestry smelled of damp hymn books and paraffin. Her fingers were so cold for the first quarter of an hour that she played scales in her gloves, the wool snagging on the chipped ivory.

The audition was in Leeds, on the second Saturday in March. The letter lay folded inside her music case, and she had read it so often that the creases had gone soft as cloth. Her father had not read it at all. He had looked at the envelope, at the crest of the college printed on the back, and set it down beside the bread bin as if it might burn the table.

“The mill’s taking girls on at Easter,” he had said. “Good money. Your mam started there at fifteen.”

Nancy played the Chopin again from the beginning. Her left hand knew it now better than her own handwriting. At the slow passage the dead A came round, and she pressed it, and the knock sounded in the empty room like someone tapping on a door. She did not sing the note this time. She let the silence stand where it should have been, and listened to it, and wondered whether that was what the whole of her life would sound like if she stayed.

Text 2: Night Drawings, by Owen Castellan

An original short story extract.

Derek drew the bridge at the kitchen table between midnight and two, when the house had stopped needing him. He spread the tracing paper over the oilcloth, weighted the corners with the salt, the pepper, a tin of peaches and his son’s football boot, and switched on the lamp he had bought with the money from his last two overtime shifts.

By day he processed motor claims on the fourth floor of Hargreave Mutual: dented wings, cracked windscreens, a van that had rolled into a duck pond. His supervisor said he was good at it, in the tone people use for a dog that has learned to sit. Nobody on the fourth floor knew that he had once been offered a place to study engineering, or that he had turned it down in 1974 when his father’s heart gave out and someone had to earn.

The competition closed on Friday. A footbridge over the river at Calder Lock, open to all entrants, the winning design to be built. Derek’s span was a single shallow curve, so slight that it looked less like steel than like a breath held across the water. He had redrawn it eleven times.

At half past one the kitchen door opened. Liam stood there in his pyjamas, squinting at the light.

“You missed the match,” he said. “We drew. I hit the post.”

Derek looked at the boot holding down the corner of the river. He had meant to go. He had set off, even, and then turned the car round at the lights because he had seen how to solve the problem of the handrail.

“Next week,” he said. Liam nodded, the way his supervisor nodded, and went back up to bed. Derek picked up the pencil. The curve still looked like a breath held. He found that his own was the same.

‘In both texts, ambition costs the characters more than it gives them.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters want to achieve
• explain how far their ambition costs them
• compare how the writers present different kinds of ambition

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