Source A: The lane beneath the gallery

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

I enrolled in adult swimming lessons after years of arranging holidays around shallow water. The pool had a glass-walled gallery along one side. Parents waited there during children's lessons, cleaners passed with trolleys and early swimmers sat tying their laces. I had imagined the water as a private enemy. Instead, it came with witnesses.

At the first lesson, I chose the lane furthest from the gallery. Priya, the instructor, asked why I kept looking towards the glass. I said I was checking the clock, although the clock was behind me. When she told me to put my face in the water, I lowered it for half a second and stood up coughing. The sounds of the pool rushed back: splashes, whistles and a chair scraping above us. None of them had anything to do with me, but I felt as if I had caused every one.

From the water, the people in the gallery were mostly reduced to shoes. There were polished office shoes, small trainers swinging beneath chairs and the rubber soles of the cleaner's boots. Without faces, they became more severe. I treated every turned foot as a verdict. Priya would explain a movement, and I would understand it until I imagined someone watching me attempt it.

During the third lesson, a child pressed both palms against the glass and copied the circles I was making with my arms. His mother pulled him back and gave me an apologetic smile. I wanted the pool tiles to open beneath me. Yet the child had copied the effort, not the failure. He had not laughed or pointed. For the first time, I wondered whether the audience I feared was partly one I had invented.

Several weeks later, Priya asked me to swim across the deep end without holding a float. I suggested waiting until the gallery was empty. She looked up at the row of chairs and said, "It never empties." This was not comforting, but it was true. Even at quiet times, someone was collecting a towel, waiting for a lesson or looking for a lost pair of goggles.

I pushed away from the wall. For four strokes, there was only the sequence Priya had taught me: pull, breathe, kick. Then I touched the opposite side. I expected the room to change. It did not. A man above me continued reading. The cleaner moved to the next window. One of the early swimmers asked Priya when the lane would be free.

Their indifference was almost as useful as praise. I had crossed the water without becoming the centre of it. The child's imitation still mattered because it reminded me that effort can be visible without being ridiculous. But the silent man and the cleaner mattered too. They showed me that another person's glance is not necessarily a judgement.

I still prefer the pool when the gallery is quiet. Confidence has not made me enjoy an audience. It has simply stopped me requiring an empty room before I begin.

Source B: The letter above the door

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

My apprenticeship in sign painting began with a public commission. The town reading room needed new lettering above its entrance, and the work was scheduled for the week of the street market. A board beside our ladder explained that the sign would be painted by hand. Under my mentor's name appeared mine, followed by the word "apprentice" in letters larger and straighter than any I could yet produce.

I had expected to practise in the workshop until my mistakes became too small for strangers to notice. Instead, Nia handed me a brush and asked me to paint the first curved letter while shoppers moved around the barriers below. The brush seemed to collect the weight of every lifted face. My line narrowed, widened and then stopped altogether.

Nia wiped away the wet paint. Someone in the crowd asked why we did not use a stencil. Another person wanted to know how long the whole sign would take. A child began counting my attempts aloud. By the fourth, I was no longer looking at the shape I had drawn. I was painting for the brief gap between questions.

Nia did not pretend the attention was helpful. She asked the child to give me room to concentrate and moved the information board further from the ladder. But she did not hide the correction. She cleaned the surface carefully, mixed the paint again and explained to those still watching that a hand-painted letter was built through adjustment. My mistake, which I had wanted erased from public memory, became part of her account of the work.

Near midday, an older woman waited until the crowd thinned. She told us that her father had taken her to the reading room each week when she was young. The old sign, faded almost to the colour of the stone, had been one of the first words she recognised. Until then, I had thought of the spectators as people consuming a performance. Her story reminded me that the finished letters would belong to their memories as well as to my training.

This did not make every kind of observation useful. During lunch, I turned my practice board towards the wall. Nia left it there. Some movements needed repetition without commentary, and privacy allowed me to take risks that I avoided on the ladder. Being open about a process did not mean surrendering every uncertain moment to an audience.

In the afternoon, I repainted the curved letter. Several people stopped, but I watched the edge of the brush rather than their reflections in the window. The curve was not perfect. Nia adjusted its lower edge, and this time I studied the correction instead of wishing it invisible. Most of the spectators had moved on before we finished it.

When the sign was complete, people photographed the clean row of letters. Their pictures contained none of the wiping, waiting or repeated strokes. I was pleased by their approval, but it was not proof that I had mastered the craft. What mattered more was that the public had seen skilled work include revision, while I had learned that visibility needs boundaries if learning is to remain honest.