The message in the sandwich tin

Text C: an original fiction extract.

Mina found the folded letter beneath the paper lining of her father's old sandwich tin. She had been asked to clean it for a display about the factory, where three generations of her family had worked. The letter began with a complaint about the noise and ended with an invitation to leave. Between the two, her father had described a training course in another town. He had signed his first name without the familiar confident stroke beneath it.

The date was the summer before he married her mother. Mina had heard that summer described many times: overtime, saving, buying a second-hand table. She had never heard of a course. At seventeen, she was filling in applications herself. Her father checked the closing dates and left prospectuses by her breakfast plate. She had sometimes thought his interest was a way of directing her towards choices he had never needed to make.

She took the letter downstairs. Her father was repairing the loose catch on a kitchen cupboard. He read the first line and smiled in a way she could not interpret. He said he had written it to a friend who had already moved away. Mina asked whether the course had rejected him. He shook his head. He had not applied. His mother was unwell then, and the money he earned mattered. Mina looked back at the invitation to leave and felt she had discovered a door which somebody had closed before the story began.

She said he must regret it. The screwdriver stopped. He said there were things he wondered about. Regret was a larger word than he wanted her to choose for him. Mina began describing how different his life might have been, then heard herself giving him a job, a house and a personality built from one sheet of paper. She stopped halfway through a sentence about the town she had never visited.

Her father fetched two cups. He said he had enjoyed some factory work and disliked other parts. He had met people he still missed. Staying had not been one decision repeated unchanged for thirty years. There had been chances to leave later; some he had considered, others he had not wanted. He asked whether her applications frightened her. She said the choosing did. He said the choice would matter, but she should be suspicious of anybody who described one form as the entire rest of her life.

Mina asked whether the letter could go in the display. He thought for a moment, then said he would rather it did not. A summary about his first year would be enough. She had already imagined visitors pausing before the secret ambition of an ordinary worker. She saw that she had been preparing a second version of him for strangers, barely an hour after objecting to the first.

Upstairs, she put the letter in a plain envelope for him. She cleaned the tin without polishing away the small dents. On her own application, a question asked why she wanted the course. Mina crossed out the sentence about fulfilling a lifelong plan. She began again with what interested her now.

You are Mina. That night, write a journal entry reflecting on the letter and your conversation with your father.

In your response:

• describe why the letter surprised you and changed your view of your father’s past
• explore how your assumptions were challenged during the conversation
• explain how you now feel about the display and your own applications

Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.