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OCR English Language Unseen Fiction Reading Anthology | Childhood Part 1
7
This extract is from Fun with a Stranger by Richard Yates
In this extract an old fashioned school is described.
All that summer the children who were due to start junior school in Miss Snell’s class had been warned about her. “Boy, you’re gonna get it,? the older children would say. “You’re really gon-na get it. Mrs. Cleary’s all right,? (Mrs. Cleary taught the other, luckier class of new pupils) “she’s fine, but boy, that Snell - you better watch out.? So it happened that the anxiety level of Miss Snell’s class was high even before school began in September, and she did little in the first few weeks to improve it.
She was probably sixty, a woman with a man’s face and clothes that seemed to smell of pencil shavings and chalk dust. She was strict and humourless, determined to stop the things she thought intolerable: “mumbling, daydreaming, frequent trips to the toilets?, and the worst of, “coming to school without proper supplies.?
Her small eyes were sharp, and when somebody sent out a stealthy alarm of whispers and nudges to try to borrow a pencil from somebody else, it almost never worked. What’s…
