Source A: Tuesday evenings

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

At nine, I believed reading was a staircase. The cleverest people lived at the top, where books were thick and words arrived quickly. At school, our teacher timed us with a silver watch and drew gold stars beside the names of the fastest readers. I had six stars. I kept count.

On Tuesday evenings, my aunt helped at a reading class in the public library. She could not leave me at home, so I sat at the back with a puzzle book while twelve adults bent over worksheets beneath the white ceiling lights.

I watched them drag their fingers under sentences. They stopped at ordinary words and waited, as if the next syllable had been hidden from them. One man reached the end of each line and returned to the beginning by mistake. A woman whispered the same word four times before writing it down. Their reading seemed to me like a row of buses stalled in traffic: noisy, slow and going nowhere.

I was careful not to laugh. Instead, I performed kindness. I smiled too widely when someone finished a paragraph. Once, when the man beside me read a notice without pausing, I said, ‘Brilliant!’ in the bright voice my teacher used for children who had finally remembered something simple. He nodded politely and closed his book.

During the break, the room changed.

The man who lost his place in a sentence repaired the broken catch on a window using a coin and the spring from an old pen. The woman who repeated words organised three complicated bus journeys for a new student, drawing the connections from memory. At another table, two learners compared pages of writing that flowed from right to left. Their conversation became quick and confident, filled with jokes I could not follow.

My aunt placed one of their notebooks in front of me. The page was covered in neat lines of another script. To my eyes, the marks were locked doors.

‘Read it,’ she said.

‘I can’t.’

She waited. She did not explain the lesson I was supposed to learn, and perhaps that is why I remember it. For the first time, I noticed that the staircase in my head had only one entrance.

I wish I could say that this discovery transformed me at once. It did not. The following Tuesday, I still counted the adults’ pauses. I still felt a small burst of pride when I finished my own book before the class ended. But I stopped giving out smiles like prizes. I began to wonder what each person could read that I could not.

Years later, I returned to the library to help with the same class. A learner completed a form and passed it to me. ‘Brilliant,’ I said automatically, hearing again that polished, generous voice from my childhood. The word hung between us. He looked at me, not offended, but not grateful either.

I corrected myself and asked about the work he had been doing before he came to this country. We spoke for twenty minutes. Even so, as I walked home, I realised the staircase had not vanished. I had merely learned to notice when I was standing on it.