Source A: The crack I chose to leave

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

When the community hall asked me to repair its ceramic wall, I thought I understood the instruction. A cupboard had fallen against the lower section, loosening twelve pieces and splitting one large tile from edge to edge. My job was to return everything to how it had been. Repair, I believed, should disappear.

The wall had been made by local families. Each person had pressed a pattern into wet clay: leaves, initials, the teeth of a house key. On the front, these marks formed a loose blue river. On the back, where no visitor could see, the makers had written their names. As I unpacked the broken pieces, I kept turning them over. The hidden handwriting made the fragments feel less like materials and more like interrupted messages.

The hall committee wanted the wall ready for its anniversary celebration. Its chair placed a photograph beside me showing the ceramic surface before the accident. “That is what we are aiming for,” she said. I agreed. I mixed colour after colour, trying to reproduce the particular blue of the damaged tile. In the weak light of my workroom, the final mixture seemed exact.

Under the hall’s bright lamps, it did not. The repaired line was darker than the surrounding glaze. It ran across the tile like a sentence someone had crossed out but not erased. I offered to paint over a wider area, blending the new colour into the old. The chair studied the wall from the doorway and said the join would not show in photographs. Her answer should have reassured me. Instead, I noticed that we were no longer discussing the wall itself.

I began to question what “before the accident” really meant. Even in the committee’s photograph, several tiles were faded. One had been fitted slightly crooked. Another contained the clear print of a thumb where its maker had tried to smooth the surface. If I corrected every irregularity, the wall would become tidier than it had ever been. We would not be restoring the past; we would be improving it until it resembled our idea of the past.

I left the darker line visible. This was not an act of rebellion disguised as art. I secured the tile, filled the dangerous gap and made the surface strong enough to be touched. I simply stopped before pretending that nothing had happened. Beside the wall, the committee placed a small card explaining the repair.

At the celebration, some visitors disliked it. One said the crack looked unfinished. Another asked why we had not employed someone who could match colours properly. But several people searched for the names on the backs of the fragments after I showed them a photograph from the workroom. The damage had made them curious about hands they had previously ignored.

I still believe a repair should serve the object rather than advertise the person who carried it out. A visible join can become a performance of honesty as easily as an invisible one can become a deception. Yet the line remains. It does not make the wall more truthful by itself. It reminds us to ask which parts of its truth we once found convenient not to see.

Source B: The building that refused to look new

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

From across the square, the old cinema appeared to be wearing two different buildings. Half of its frontage had been cleaned to pale stone; the other half remained dark and uneven after a storm had torn away part of the roof. Between them stood three sample panels, each proposing a different future: spotless cream, weathered grey or a careful mixture of both.

I had come expecting a familiar argument between people who wanted progress and people who wanted every stain preserved. The public meeting sounded like that at first. Nearby traders wanted an attractive building that would bring customers back to the square. Members of the history group wanted the damaged surfaces retained. Each side accused the other of caring more about appearances than about the town.

The difficulty was that nobody could agree which appearance counted as authentic. The cinema’s manager displayed photographs from different periods. In one, the entrance carried a wide metal sign. In another, the sign had gone and the stone had been painted white. A later image showed a row of small windows that had since been covered. “If we put it back exactly as it was,” she asked, “which ‘exactly’ do we choose?”

That question changed the discussion. The building had not travelled untouched from a perfect beginning to a damaged present. It had been altered whenever its owners found a new use, a new fashion or enough money for repairs. Recreating one selected version would hide those decisions beneath a confident surface.

However, preserving every mark created problems of its own. A project volunteer pointed to a blackened interior beam that some campaigners wanted to display. “People are calling it a scar,” he said, “but a scar belongs to something that has healed.” At that stage, rain was still entering through temporary coverings. His impatience cut through the romantic language surrounding the damage. Before the building could tell a story, it had to remain a building.

The eventual design was neither the cleanest nor the most visibly wounded of the three proposals. Workers reconstructed the entrance sign using the clearest surviving photographs. They replaced unsafe sections of stone but used a slightly different shade, so close inspection would reveal where the new work began. Inside, they retained the darkened beam, not in the main auditorium as first suggested, but in the foyer beside accounts from staff who had helped empty the building during the storm.

On reopening day, the frontage did not produce a single dramatic impression. The reconstructed sign looked bold above stone that varied quietly in colour. Some visitors walked past the retained beam without noticing it. This seemed to disappoint those who had imagined the building itself delivering a history lesson.

Yet a building cannot control the attention of everyone who enters it. Nor should restoration turn each surface into an instruction about what people must feel. I had arrived suspicious that visible damage might be used as decoration, a way of making endurance attractive. I left thinking the more serious choice was the refusal to offer one simple version of the past. The cinema looks repaired, but not innocent of change. It carries its history without requiring every visitor to stop and admire the weight.