Paper One
Explorations in Creative Reading and Writing
Introduction
This resource has been broken into two parts to make it easier for you to cut, paste and edit. Please click on the link below to find the other half of this resource.
- AQA English Language Fiction Reading Anthology | Childhood Part 1
‘The aim of this paper is to engage students in a creative text, reading a literature fiction text in order to consider how established writers use narrative and descriptive techniques to capture the interest of readers’.
Part 2
7
This extract is from the opening section of Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
In this extract the author, recalls some of his childhood memories.
At the age of four and a half I caught scarlet fever; my younger brother had just been born, and l could not be nursed at home, so my parents sent me off to a public fever hospital. The ward contained twenty little proletarians, and only one bourgeois child besides myself.
I did not notice particularly that the nurses and my fellow-patients had a different attitude towards me; I accepted the kindness and spoiling easily, being accustomed to it. But the respect and even reverence given to this other little boy, a clergyman‘s child, astonished me. ‘Oh,’ the nurses would cry after he had gone, ‘oh, he did look a little gentleman in his pretty white pelisse when they took him away!’ ‘That young Matthew was a fair toff,’ ech-oed the little proletarians.
On my return from two months in hospital, my accent was deplored, and l learned that the boys in the ward had been very vulgar. I did not know what ‘vulgar’ meant; it had to be ex-plained to me. About a year later I met Arthur, a boy of nine, who had been in the ward and taught me how to play cricket when we were convalescent together. He turned out to be a ragged errand-boy. In hospital, we had all worn the same institutional night-gowns, and I did not know that we came off such different...
