The lodger with the birdcage

Text 1: Castle Street, by Dorothy Penhallow

An original novel extract.

The new lodger came on a Tuesday, in the rain, carrying one suitcase and a birdcage with a cloth over it. Peggy watched him from the landing window, her chin on the sill, as he stood at the gate for a long moment looking up at the house as if he were reading it.

Mother had said he was a teacher. Mother had said he was quiet, and clean, and paid a month in advance, which in Mother’s mouth was the highest praise there was. She had not said he would be so thin, or that his coat would be too big for him, or that he would hold the birdcage against his chest the way other people held babies.

Peggy went down to the hall to look at him properly. Close to, he smelt of wet wool and pipe tobacco and something else, something like the inside of a church. His hair was grey at the sides though his face was young. When Mother held out her hand he took it carefully, as if it might break, and bowed a little over it, which nobody in Castle Street had ever done.

“And this is Margaret,” Mother said. “She’s nine. She asks a great many questions.”

“Good,” said the lodger. He looked at Peggy, and his eyes were a very pale blue, almost no colour at all, like a winter sky over the allotments. “Questions are how we find things out.”

Peggy did not ask a single question. Her mouth had gone dry. She was staring at the birdcage.

He must have noticed, because he set the suitcase down on the mat and lifted a corner of the cloth, just a corner, slowly, the way you might open a letter you were not sure you wanted to read. Inside, on a perch, sat a small bird the colour of butter. It looked at Peggy with one black bead of an eye. It did not sing.

“She hasn’t sung since we left,” the lodger said quietly. “Nearly a year now. I keep hoping.”

He let the cloth fall. Mother began talking briskly about the bathroom rota and the gas meter and breakfast at half past seven sharp, and he nodded at everything, politely, as if he were a long way off. But Peggy saw his hand stay on the cage, and stay there, and she understood, without knowing how she understood, that wherever he had come from, he could not go back.

Explore how Dorothy Penhallow uses language and structure to present the lodger and Peggy’s impressions of him.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.