Source A: A black square in the heather

At first light, the heath was still wearing the night's mist. Drops hung from the spider webs between the heather stems, and every bush seemed to hold its breath. Into this softness, the reserve workers hammered a line of wooden stakes. The stakes enclosed a rectangle so straight and deliberate that it looked less like part of the landscape than a decision imposed upon it.

I knew why we had come. Even so, the sight of the metal fuel can made my shoulders tighten.

When I was nine, a grass fire had crossed the lane behind our house. I remembered adults running with buckets, smoke pressing against the windows and birds lifting from the hedge in a single dark cloud. For years afterwards, the word ‘fire’ had meant only one thing: something alive moving faster than the people trying to stop it.

Here, however, nobody ran. The reserve manager tested the wind with a damp finger and spoke in the patient voice of someone explaining a task that had already been argued over. The old heather had grown tall and woody. In a dry summer, he said, one accidental spark could travel through it without meeting a gap. Burning small sections in cool, damp weather would create breaks and allow younger plants to grow among the older ones.

His explanation was calm, measured and difficult to dispute. My response to it was equally clear and entirely unhelpful: I did not want him to strike the match.

The first flame was hardly a flame at all. It crouched beneath the heather, blue at its base, as if ashamed of being seen. Then it found a dry stem. It straightened, brightened and hurried sideways. Workers moved along the boundary with beaters and water, guiding it with such practised movements that the fire appeared obedient. It stopped at the cut strip exactly as they had promised.

Efficient, I thought. Almost polite.

But no flame is polite to what it consumes. Stems twisted into hooks. Seed heads snapped. A beetle stumbled across the ash towards a pale stone, and I watched its progress with an attention that made the wider purpose of the burn briefly disappear. It reached the stone, although whether it had escaped or merely lost its shelter, I could not tell.

Beyond the marked rectangle, the heath remained silver-green and wet. Inside it, colour collapsed into black. The contrast made the damage look both contained and severe: a missing page cut neatly from a book. The workers leaned on their tools and studied the ground with satisfaction. I understood their satisfaction. I also resented it.

The manager knelt and pressed two fingers into the ash. Beneath it, the soil was cool. Around the burnt patch, uncut islands of heather remained, and a strip beside the stream had been left untouched. He pointed out each precaution, offering evidence against the disaster I had imagined. This was not the fire from my childhood. It had boundaries, watchers and an ending.

Six weeks later, I returned after rain. Fine green shoots were rising through the black surface. From a distance, the rectangle no longer resembled a wound; it looked like dark cloth stitched with green thread. I wanted that new growth to make the earlier morning simple, to prove that my alarm had been merely ignorance and the workers' confidence entirely right.

It did not. The green showed that the plan had worked, but when I touched one of the old stems, soot still marked my hand.

How does the writer use language and structure to present her divided response to the controlled burn, and how far does the ending resolve this division?

In your response, use detailed references to the text and include brief quotations.