English – Literature in English (9-1) – 0992 | Paper 4 Mock 01 | Unseen

Notes for examiners

This is an original unseen prose extract and requires no knowledge of any wider story. The question asks how the writer vividly conveys the narrator's experience, so the discriminator is the candidate's response to the writing rather than to the situation. The extract is a retrospective first-person account by a narrator who states her feelings openly and then keeps revising them downwards, and the best answers will see that the long qualifying sentences, and the very short ones set against them, are themselves the characterisation. Answers that retell the visit, or that simply say the narrator is upset, cannot reach the higher bands.

The three bullets are scaffolding. A candidate who builds an independent argument is not penalised for ignoring them, and a candidate who addresses all three but only paraphrases is not rewarded for coverage.

Areas a strong answer is likely to explore

• A narrator who convicts herself in the first sentence. She had decided "that being told was the same as being ready", and the aside "in the way you can decide things in somebody else's warm kitchen" places the mistake somewhere warm and safe, at a distance from the house. The retrospective voice is established before the flood is.
• The patience of the water. The tidemark is "a brown line round all four walls at one level", fixed "above the plug sockets and under the picture rail", so the disaster is measured against ordinary fittings rather than in feet of water. The conclusion drawn from it is the surprising part: "what the house taught me first was not how violent a flood is but how patient".
• Feeling stated, then made unflattering. The narrator announces her method, "I should say plainly what I felt", and then supplies something no reader expects: "I felt relief." Her reasoning is ungenerous to herself, since it means "my fortnight of dread had not been wasted", and the paragraph closes on a flat refusal to excuse it: "I am not proud of that, but there it is."
• The aunt's rule. The rule is reported rather than quoted, delivered "in the voice she keeps for rules", and the narrator sees through it in one long subordinating sentence: it is "less a way of saving a house than a way of getting through one without stopping in front of any particular object and deciding". That names the extract's real subject, and her self-portrait a line later is rueful rather than bitter: "I am the sort of person who agrees to a rule in a car and abandons it in a doorway."
• The albums, and rescue that destroys. The house resists her, since the drawer "had swelled and jammed". Four albums are "no longer four of anything" and have "set into one slab of grey card with the covers curling back off it", a metaphor of masonry that turns a family record into dead material. The simile "the way you peel a plaster when you have decided to be brave" promises a small controlled pain and delivers a larger one, and it makes her carefulness the cause: "what came away in my hand was half a wedding and one shoe".
• Grief refused. The bare "I did not cry." is followed by an ordinary action, "I bagged them and stood the bag by the door", and then by an honesty most narrators would avoid: "what I felt was not grief, whatever I would prefer to tell you". Naming it instead as "nearer to embarrassment", and defining that as "the awkwardness of being alone in a room and still behaving as though I were being watched", is the most revealing sentence in the extract.
• The tin. Continuity carries the paragraph: it "rattled exactly as it has always rattled", and the isolated fragment "All of them." lands the surprise after a run of long sentences. The find is then turned into an idea rather than an object: "a small round part of the house in which nothing whatever had happened".
• The four seconds. The narrator will not keep the consolation. She concedes at once that the flood had not been beaten, "which it had not been", that the buttons were "the least valuable things in the room", and then holds both truths at once, since "knowing that made no difference to the four seconds". Feeling is not corrected by understanding, and she says so plainly.
• The ending. The lie is weighed, not quoted: "every sentence I had practised that week was a lie of one size or another". She pockets the tin and labels the act herself, "which was a theft of a kind", refusing to let it look noble. The extract then runs on into logistics, "counting what was left in the boot", the aunt calling about upstairs, and stops with the narrator in mid-errand: "I turned round with my arms full and started back up the path." Nothing is resolved and no closing image is offered; the clearing simply continues past the edge of the page.
• Sentence shape. Long accumulating sentences carry the thinking, and the shortest sentences are reserved for the least comfortable statements ("I felt relief.", "I did not cry.", "All of them."). Candidates who notice that pattern, and connect it to a narrator who talks herself towards honesty rather than arriving at it directly, should be well rewarded.

Worked model answer

The extract is told by someone looking back, and the writer makes that distance work from the first sentence. The narrator had decided "that being told was the same as being ready", and the aside dropped into the middle of the sentence, "in the way you can decide things in somebody else's warm kitchen", quietly explains why the decision was worthless. It was made somewhere warm, at a safe distance, by a version of herself she can now see through. The sentence winds through several clauses before it reaches its admission, and that shape becomes the voice of the whole piece: a narrator who thinks her way towards an honesty she cannot state directly.

The flood itself is described with a restraint that makes it worse. The mark is "a brown line round all four walls at one level", and it is placed "above the plug sockets and under the picture rail", so the reader sizes the disaster against the fittings of an ordinary front room rather than against a measurement. What the narrator takes from it is unexpected: "what the house taught me first was not how violent a flood is but how patient". Patience is a virtue word, and lending it to the water makes the damage deliberate and unhurried. A flood that smashed through would at least have been an event; this one waited at a level for nine days and then signed off.

Then the writer does something a more conventional narrator would avoid. Instead of withholding, she announces that she is about to state her feeling, "I should say plainly what I felt", and confesses to an unattractive one: "I felt relief." The reasoning is worked out in front of us, since the house being as bad as promised meant "my fortnight of dread had not been wasted", and the paragraph ends on an unexcused shrug: "I am not proud of that, but there it is." The reader trusts her from this point, because she has volunteered the least flattering thing available.

The aunt's rule is handled with a light comic touch that never becomes cruel. It arrives in reported speech, "in the voice she keeps for rules", so the aunt's certainty is audible without the aunt being present. The narrator then sees its real function in a single long subordinating sentence: it is "less a way of saving a house than a way of getting through one without stopping in front of any particular object and deciding". That is a genuinely acute reading of how people survive the day after a disaster, and it tells the reader what the scene is actually about. She predicts her own failure immediately, and the self-description is wry rather than self-pitying: "I am the sort of person who agrees to a rule in a car and abandons it in a doorway."

The albums are the cruellest passage, and its cruelty lies in making the narrator the agent of the damage. The house resists her first, since the drawer "had swelled and jammed" and gives all at once. What is inside is "no longer four of anything": the albums have "set into one slab of grey card with the covers curling back off it", where the vocabulary of setting and slabs turns a family record into building material, dense and dead, while the curling covers suggest a slow, unpleasant life still going on inside the ruin. The simile that follows is exact. She lifts the page "the way you peel a plaster when you have decided to be brave", which promises a small, controlled, self-administered pain and delivers something much larger, because her own care is what tears it. The result is given without lament: "what came away in my hand was half a wedding and one shoe". The fragment of a list does the work that an outburst would have blunted.

The paragraph after it is the emotional centre, and it earns that place by refusing the emotion the reader is ready to supply. "I did not cry." is bare and stands alone. She performs the practical act, "I bagged them and stood the bag by the door", and then denies herself the dignified reading: "what I felt was not grief, whatever I would prefer to tell you". The concession inside that clause, that she would prefer to tell us otherwise, is what makes the narrator convincing. What she offers instead is stranger and more precise. The feeling was "nearer to embarrassment", and the embarrassment is defined as "the awkwardness of being alone in a room and still behaving as though I were being watched". It is an unusual thing to admit, and it tells us more about her than weeping would.

The tin brings the extract its one piece of luck, and the writing leans on continuity to make it land. The tin "rattled exactly as it has always rattled", so one object in the house has kept its habits when nothing else has. The buttons are dry, and the two-word sentence "All of them." is isolated so the surprise registers after a paragraph of long, winding ones. The writer then enlarges the find into an idea: inside the lid there is "a small round part of the house in which nothing whatever had happened". A biscuit tin becomes a preserved piece of unflooded time, and the adjectives measure the preservation honestly, because what has survived is small and round and holds buttons.

What is most characteristic of this narrator is that she takes the consolation away from herself before anyone else can. The flood had not been beaten, "which it had not been", and the buttons were "the least valuable things in the room". Yet the sentence refuses to let understanding win, since "knowing that made no difference to the four seconds". Feeling happened, it was disproportionate, and it was real anyway. The whole extract is built out of that double movement: state the feeling, then qualify it, then admit that the qualification changes nothing.

The close is deliberately anticlimactic. The lie she must tell her grandmother is never quoted, only weighed, since "every sentence I had practised that week was a lie of one size or another", and the reader is left to imagine the bright kitchen and the conversation. She takes the tin, and rather than let the gesture look tender she names it herself: "which was a theft of a kind". Then the extract simply keeps going. She is "counting what was left in the boot", her aunt is calling from the gate about doing upstairs before the light goes, and the last thing we see is a girl in mid-errand: "I turned round with my arms full and started back up the path." There is no closing image to settle on, and that is the point. The house is not sorted, the conversation has not happened, and the work carries on after the extract stops.

Band descriptors (25 marks)

Marks are awarded for the quality of the candidate's engagement with the extract, using the descriptors below. Examiners award the mark range that best fits the answer as a whole; there is no requirement to cover the bullets.

• 23-25 (Band 1): Sustained, perceptive and individual personal response. Confident critical understanding of the extract, including what is implied rather than stated. Sensitive, well selected and fully integrated reference to the text. Sustained analysis of the effects of the writer's language, structure and narrative method.
• 20-22 (Band 2): Sustained personal response with moments of perception. Clear critical understanding of the extract and of its implications. Well chosen and integrated reference. Analysis of a range of the effects of the writer's language, structure and narrative method.
• 17-19 (Band 3): Clear and developed personal response. Clear understanding of the extract and of some of its deeper implications. Careful, relevant and mostly well integrated reference. Clear analysis of a number of the writer's effects.
• 14-16 (Band 4): A developing personal response. Understanding of the extract with some awareness of what lies beneath its surface. Relevant reference, at times used to support a point rather than to build an argument. Some analysis of the writer's language, where effects are explored unevenly.
• 11-13 (Band 5): The beginnings of a personal response. Understanding of the surface meaning of the extract. Appropriate reference and quotation, though often used to retell the scene. Some comment on the writer's language, where effects are more often asserted than analysed.
• 8-10 (Band 6): A little personal response. A little understanding, expressed mainly through narrative or paraphrase of what the narrator does. Occasional and sometimes undirected reference to the text. A little awareness that the extract has been written by someone making choices.
• 5-7 (Band 7): Some knowledge of the content of the extract, conveyed mainly through retelling. Thin or repeated reference. Very little awareness of the writer's use of language.
• 1-4 (Band 8): Limited response. Very limited understanding, seldom moving beyond repetition of the content of the extract. Very limited or no supporting reference. No awareness of the writer's use of language.
• 0: No answerable content.

Notes for examiners

This is an original unseen poem; candidates come to it without preparation and are rewarded for what they make of it, not for reaching any fixed reading. The question asks how the poet strikingly conveys the speaker's experience of the night shift, so the discriminator is the quality of engagement with the writing itself: the selection of detail, the weighing of individual words, and the tracing of the poem's movement from the emptied town of the opening to the arriving light of the close. Answers that narrate what the baker does, however accurately, cannot reach the higher bands.

The three bullets are scaffolding. A candidate who ignores them and argues a coherent case of their own is not penalised, and a candidate who works steadily through all three without ever commenting on effect is not thereby rewarded.

Areas a strong answer is likely to explore

• The emptied town. The personification of "the town lets go of itself" and of the bus that "sighs its doors shut" hands agency to the sleeping world and leaves the speaker among the few things still working. The unexplained "there is only us" gives the night a small, undefined company.
• The bakery as its own climate. "the ovens breathing their long orange breath" animates the machinery and makes the heat continuous; "the flour that hangs in the air like weather" is the poem's boldest early image, enlarging a small indoor room into a whole atmosphere the speaker simply lives inside.
• The dough as a living thing. "warm as an animal, / slack, unwilling" gives the material a will, so the kneading becomes a contest; "until it agrees to hold its shape" completes the animation. The simile "the way you fold a letter you cannot send" is the poem's strangest move, attaching private, unspoken feeling to a repetitive physical task, and the shift into "you" briefly implicates the reader.
• Invisible labour. The flat monosyllabic "Nobody is awake to want this." and the quiet paradox of "people still dreaming of bread". Naming "the woman at number nine" makes the unknowing consumer concrete, and "somebody stood in the dark and made it" erases the speaker into the third person at exactly the point where recognition is withheld.
• Sentence length and the stalling of time. The fourth stanza abandons the long unwinding lines for three short sentences: "The mixer knocks. My back keeps its own time." The clipped rhythm enacts the slowest hour. The radio "talks to nobody, low, / a voice from a country three hours ahead" widens the poem, placing the speaker out of step with a world where it is already morning, and "The clock forgets to move" closes the stanza on gently hyperbolic stalled time.
• The turn and the close. "Then, at four" is signalled plainly, and the lines lengthen again. "the smell of something finished" carries relief without naming it; "the street begins to grey at its edges" arrives slowly and without drama. The last image keeps the labour visible in the moment of rest ("my arms floured to the elbow"), and the final line lends the dawn the vocabulary of the trade, since it is dough that is "certain of its rising" as much as the light.
• Form. Free verse with stanzas that contract from five lines to four and then open out to six; no rhyme scheme is imposed, so the poem's shape is carried by sentence and image rather than by pattern. Candidates who notice the contraction and the reopening, and connect it to the shape of the night, should be well rewarded.

Worked model answer

The poem's first move is to empty the town of everyone but the speaker. "At one o'clock the town lets go of itself" makes the town the subject of a verb of release, as though sleep were something it chooses rather than something that happens to it, and the personification quietly transfers all the agency in the scene away from the speaker. Even the bus is given a human weariness: it "sighs its doors shut at the depot" before "there is only us". That "us" is never explained. The poet gains from the omission, because the reader learns only that the speaker belongs to a small awake minority, never how small.

What fills the emptied town is atmosphere rather than event. The ovens are "breathing their long orange breath", where "long" does as much work as the colour, stretching the line and making the heat something exhaled continuously through the night rather than switched on. Bolder still is the flour that "hangs in the air like weather". Weather is vast and outdoors; a bakery at one in the morning is small and enclosed. The simile makes the room its own climate, and suggests that the flour is not a detail of the speaker's work but the condition they live inside, so total that it is no longer noticed.

The second stanza turns from the room to the hands, and the writing becomes physical. "I sink my hands to the wrist in it" is a verb of submersion rather than of skill, and what the speaker sinks into is described as though it were alive: "warm as an animal, / slack, unwilling". The dough resists, so the kneading becomes a small contest of wills, and the line "until it agrees to hold its shape" finishes the idea by granting the dough consent. Between these two moments comes the poem's most surprising image. The speaker folds the dough "the way you fold a letter you cannot send". A repetitive, unremarkable action is suddenly attached to something private and unresolved, and the slide from "I" into "you" pulls the reader into the comparison. Nothing in the poem explains the letter, and that reticence is the effect: the work is a way of doing something with feeling that has nowhere else to go, over and over, until it holds.

The third stanza turns bleak, and turns plain to do it. "Nobody is awake to want this." is a flat, almost entirely monosyllabic sentence after two stanzas of unwinding lines, and the full stop lands hard. What follows is a quiet paradox: the bread is "for people still dreaming of bread", so the sleepers both want it and cannot know they want it. Naming "the woman at number nine" gives that unknowing an address, which is far sharper than a general complaint about ingratitude would be. Most telling is the pronoun in "somebody stood in the dark and made it": at precisely the moment the speaker describes not being recognised, the poem stops saying "I" and calls the baker "somebody", performing the erasure it is describing.

In the fourth stanza the poet changes the pattern of the sentences to change the pace of the hour. Three short statements replace the long ones: "The mixer knocks. My back keeps its own time." The knock is the only event, and the back is given its own separate clock, so even the body has stopped agreeing with the night. The radio "talks to nobody, low, / a voice from a country three hours ahead" opens the poem outwards for a moment and reveals how far out of step the speaker is, since somewhere else the morning has already happened. Then "The clock forgets to move", a small hyperbole that turns the slowest hour of the shift into an actual failure of time.

The turn comes with a plain adverbial: "Then, at four, the trays go in". The lines lengthen again as the work reaches its result, and the shop fills "with the smell of something finished", an abstraction that carries relief without ever naming it. The dawn itself is undramatic: "the street begins to grey at its edges" is slow and partial, colour arriving at the margins rather than in a burst. The last picture keeps the labour visible inside the rest, since the speaker leans in the doorway "with my arms floured to the elbow" and is still wearing the night's work. Everything turns on the final word. The light comes up "slow, and certain of its rising", and "rising" belongs to bread before it belongs to the sun, so the poet lends the dawn the vocabulary of the trade and lets the speaker claim it as something they have made. The poem does not pretend this is happiness; the speaker is exhausted and leaning on a door frame. What it grants is a result, and that is enough to end on.

Band descriptors (25 marks)

Marks are awarded for the quality of the candidate's engagement with the poem, using the descriptors below. Examiners award the mark range that best fits the answer as a whole; there is no requirement to cover the bullets.

• 21-25: Sustained, perceptive and individual personal response. Confident critical understanding of the poem, including its implications. Sensitive, well selected and integrated reference to the text. Sustained analysis of the effects of the poet's language, structure and form, with an ear for the weight of particular words.
• 16-20: Clear and developed personal response. Clear understanding of the poem and of some of its deeper implications. Careful, relevant and mostly well integrated reference. Clear analysis of a number of the effects of the poet's language, structure and form.
• 11-15: Begins to develop a personal response. Understanding of the surface meaning of the poem, with some awareness of what lies beneath it. Appropriate reference and quotation, though at times used to retell rather than to argue. Some comment on the poet's language, where effects may be identified or asserted more often than analysed.
• 6-10: A little personal response. A little understanding, expressed mainly through narrative or paraphrase of what the speaker does. Occasional and sometimes undirected reference to the text. A little awareness that the poem has been written by someone making choices.
• 1-5: Limited response. Very limited understanding, seldom moving beyond repetition of the poem's content. Very limited or no supporting reference. No awareness of the poet's use of language.
• 0: No answerable content.