Source A: Salt before snow

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

By Ruth Calder

I had imagined the depot as a warehouse for weather: a place where winter was stacked in advance and sent out on lorries when required. From the gate, it seemed to confirm the idea. Under the security lights, heaps of salt rose behind concrete walls, grey-white and solid, like snow that had tried and failed to be beautiful. The sheds were low, the yard was loud, and every surface appeared to have been rubbed with the same colourless dust.

Workers crossed the yard in reflective coats. At first, I noticed only their repeated movements: climb, tip, reverse; shovel, sweep, repeat. A loader lifted salt into the back of a lorry and returned for another scoop. Watching from the office doorway, I wrote in my notebook: a job with one verb — spread.

Inside, the control room was warmer but hardly more impressive. Four screens displayed maps covered in coloured patches. A radio muttered on a shelf. Beside it, a row of mugs suggested that the most demanding part of the night might be staying awake.

Mara, the supervisor, read what I had written and smiled without appearing offended.

‘If spreading were all it was,’ she said, ‘we could go home and leave the machines to it.’

She pointed to the largest screen. The forecast predicted frost before midnight, but several drivers had reported that the western roads were still holding warmth from the afternoon. Near the river, however, the temperature had fallen sharply. The screens could describe the air above the town; the drivers had to judge the road beneath them.

‘A forecast is a warning,’ Mara said, ‘not an instruction.’

The room seemed to alter around that sentence. The coloured patches were no longer decorative stains. They advanced and thinned across the maps while telephone messages interrupted them with details no screen contained: water running from a field, mist settling near a bridge, a shaded bend already shining. Each fragment was added to the plan. Routes were shortened, delayed or exchanged. What I had mistaken for waiting was attention.

I joined a driver called Imran. Before leaving, he walked around the lorry, checking lights, tyres and the mechanism that scattered the salt. He adjusted the setting twice before we reached the gate. When I asked what the machine was doing, he answered, ‘What I tell it. If I tell it properly.’

Beyond the depot, the town had folded itself into darkness. Imran named places before they appeared: the bridge that froze first, the hill where water crossed the road, the corner where parked cars narrowed the route. He seemed to carry an invisible version of the town inside his head, one made not of shops and houses but of slopes, shadows and cold air.

On the wider roads, the work looked almost effortless. An orange light revolved above us and grains of salt hissed against the surface behind. Then we entered an estate where cars crowded both sides of the road. Imran slowed. He stopped the spreader when a cyclist passed, restarted it beyond a row of drains and altered its width beside a school entrance. The smooth repetition I had seen in the yard broke into dozens of small decisions.

Snow began sooner than predicted. At first, it was a scatter of pale marks in the headlights. Within minutes, it thickened, swallowing the edges of the road. The radio sharpened into a sequence of voices: a fallen branch, a blocked lane, another driver turning back. Mara redirected us towards the bridge.

Imran did not look surprised, but he no longer looked relaxed. We climbed in silence while snow gathered against the windscreen. For several seconds at the top, the tyres slipped before finding the road again. I gripped the seat and watched our orange trail disappear beneath fresh white.

When we returned, the depot was busier than before. The salt heaps had been cut into steep new faces, and the control-room maps had changed again. I looked at the sentence in my notebook and crossed out the final word.

Outside, another lorry moved towards the gate. Salt streamed from it in a bright, brief fan. It no longer looked like material waiting to be moved. It looked like an argument with the weather, and the weather had not agreed.