Voting for the first time

Text 1: The Pencil on a String, by Ffion Delacourt

An original short story extract.

The polling station was the church hall where Megan had gone to Brownies, and it had not changed. The same parquet floor, the same piano with a cloth over it, the same faint smell of floor polish and orange squash. Only now there were tables with paper signs taped to them, and plywood booths along one wall like a row of tiny changing rooms, and a policeman by the door looking bored.

“Don’t rush it,” said Nana, who had insisted on coming. She was wearing her good coat and her brooch, the silver one shaped like a bird, as though they were going to a wedding. “I’ve voted in every election since 1966, and I’ve never once rushed it.”

Megan gave her name to a woman with reading glasses on a chain. The woman found it in a long printed list and drew a neat line through it, and that was strange, seeing herself crossed off like that, as if she had been ticked off a register at school. The woman handed her a ballot paper, long and thin and folded once, and pointed to a booth.

Inside it was very small. There was a ledge, and a stubby pencil tied to the ledge with a piece of string, and that was all. Megan unfolded the paper. Five names. Five little empty boxes. She had read all the leaflets. She had argued about them at the dinner table and on the bus and in the comments under videos at two in the morning. She knew exactly what she thought.

And yet she stood there with the pencil in her hand and did not move.

It was the string, she thought afterwards. Something about that bit of grubby string, which meant that someone, somewhere, had decided this pencil mattered enough to tie it down. On the other side of the thin plywood wall she could hear the slow scratch of an old woman’s pencil, careful and unhurried, the way she wrote birthday cards.

Megan drew her cross. It was small and neat and a little shaky. She folded the paper and walked to the black tin box and pushed it through the slot, and heard it land softly among all the others.

Outside, the sky had cleared. Nana took her arm on the steps.

“Well?” she said. “How does it feel?”

Megan thought about it. “Small,” she said. “And enormous.”

Nana nodded, as if that was the right answer, and squeezed her arm.

Explore how Ffion Delacourt uses language and structure to present Megan’s feelings about voting for the first time.

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