IGCSE English (First Language)0500

Text A: Crossing in the Dark, and Text B: Honey on the Rooftops

TEXT A: Crossing in the Dark
This is an original text written for this practice paper. In it, the writer remembers travelling alone on an overnight river ferry as a child.

I was eleven the first time I took the night ferry alone, and I remember the ticket more clearly than anything else about the day. It was printed on thin pink card, the colour of a sweet left too long in the sun. My mother had pressed it into my hand with a list of instructions so long that by the time she reached the end I had forgotten the beginning. Sit near the stairs. Do not lean on the rail. Speak to the woman who sells tea if you are frightened. I nodded at all of them, already pretending to be someone who did this every week.

The ferry left at nine. In daylight it was an ugly boat, broad and flat, painted a green that had faded to the shade of old peas. At night, though, it changed. Strings of yellow bulbs looped along its sides, the water around it turned from brown to black, and the whole thing seemed to float on its own reflection like a lantern set down on a polished table.

Most of the passengers had made the crossing so often that they no longer noticed it. Farmers slept sitting up, their arms folded over sacks of rice. A group of students played cards on an upturned crate, slapping each one down as though it had personally insulted them. I had imagined the crossing as an adventure. For everyone else, it was simply the long, dull space between one part of their lives and another.

I did not sleep. I had been warned that the delta was wide, but I had not understood what wide meant until the lights of the town behind us shrank to a thin line of sparks and then vanished altogether. After that there was nothing to see in any direction except the occasional fishing boat, each one marked by a single lamp that seemed to hang in the air with nothing holding it up. Once, a much larger vessel passed us, close enough that I could hear its engine, a low hum that I felt in my teeth before I heard it with my ears. Then it was gone, and the dark closed behind it as smoothly as water.

Around midnight the tea seller found me. She was a short, square woman with a voice much larger than she was, and she seemed to know without asking that I was alone. She did not offer sympathy, which I would have hated. Instead she handed me a glass of sweet tea and asked whether I could count money. When I said I could, she sat me on a stool beside her urn and made me her assistant for the rest of the night. I gave change to sleepy farmers and serious students. I have never felt so important, before or since.

Between customers she talked. She had worked on the ferry for twenty-two years, and she knew the river the way other people know their own kitchens. She could tell from the smell of the air when it would rain, and from the colour of the water at dawn whether the fishermen would have a good day. She told me that the river moved its banks a little every year, eating a field here and giving back a sandbank there, so that the charts in the captain's cabin were always slightly wrong. "The river does not care what the chart says," she said. "That is why we still need people who watch it."

At about five the sky in the east turned the grey of wet slate, then pink, then a pale and ordinary blue. Shapes appeared on the shore: a line of palm trees, a temple roof, a cluster of boats pulled up on the mud. The passengers began to stir and stretch and gather their sacks, and the spell of the night broke as quietly as it had formed.

My aunt was waiting on the landing stage, waving with both arms. I ran down the gangplank to meet her, and only when I turned to point out my friend the tea seller did I realise I had never asked her name. I have crossed that river many times since, but I have never seen her again. I still think of her whenever I look at a map, and I remember that someone, somewhere, has to keep watching the water.

TEXT B: Honey on the Rooftops
This is an original article written for this practice paper about keeping bees in cities.

Look up in many large cities today and you may find, among the satellite dishes and water tanks, a row of wooden boxes humming quietly to themselves. Beekeeping, once thought of as a country pastime, has moved into town. Hives now sit on the roofs of offices, hotels, schools and apartment blocks, and city beekeeping clubs often report waiting lists for their beginners' courses. In some places hives have multiplied so quickly that local associations now publish advice on where not to put them.

Part of the appeal is surprising. A city can be a good place to be a bee. Parks, gardens, window boxes, cemeteries, railway banks and tree-lined streets together hold a wide variety of flowering plants, many of them chosen by gardeners precisely because they bloom at different times. That variety means food is often available from early spring until late autumn, a longer season than some areas of intensively farmed countryside can offer, where a single crop may flower for a few weeks and then leave little behind. Many gardens are also treated with fewer chemical sprays than large farms are.

The honey itself is another attraction. Because the bees gather nectar from whatever grows near the hive, honey from one neighbourhood can taste quite different from honey made a few streets away, darker and stronger where certain trees are common, lighter and more floral near gardens. Some rooftop keepers sell jars labelled with the name of the building or district, and customers enjoy the idea of tasting their own part of the city. Because each roof produces only a small amount, the jars often sell out quickly, and the money helps to pay for the hives.

Supporters also point to what bees do for the people around them. Fruit trees, vegetable plots and community gardens all depend on pollinating insects, and growers near hives sometimes notice better harvests. Schools with hives use them to teach biology and to show children where food comes from. Several companies have found that a hive on the roof gives staff something to talk about, and volunteers who help with inspections describe the work as calming, a rare chance to concentrate on something other than a screen.

Yet the trend has critics, and some of them are beekeepers. The most serious concern is crowding. Every hive contains many thousands of bees, and each colony needs a large supply of flowers to feed itself. A city has only so much green space. Where hives multiply quickly, the available nectar and pollen must be shared between more and more colonies, and researchers in several European cities have warned that honeybees may then compete with the wild bees and other insects that also depend on those flowers. Some ecologists argue that people who want to help pollinators would do more good by planting flowers than by adding hives.

Bees also need skilled care. A colony that is not inspected regularly may become diseased, and pests such as the varroa mite can spread from a neglected hive to healthy ones nearby. In late spring a strong colony may swarm, leaving the hive in a dense, noisy cloud that can settle on a car, a lamp post or a balcony. Swarms are rarely aggressive, but they alarm neighbours, stings are a real worry for anyone with an allergy, and a keeper must be ready to collect one quickly. Rooftops bring their own difficulties: they can be windy, very hot in summer and hard to reach while carrying heavy equipment, and building owners may worry about safety and insurance.

Finally there is time and cost. The equipment, protective clothing and training all have to be paid for before the first jar of honey appears, and a hive needs attention every week or two during the warmer months. Some new keepers give up after a single season, leaving hives that others must take over.

None of this means that city bees are a bad idea. Experienced keepers tend to agree on a simple rule: begin with training, keep only as many hives as the local flowers can support, and plant as generously as you harvest. Handled with care, a rooftop hive can be good for the bees, for the neighbourhood and for the people who look after it.

Text C: The Salt Wind

TEXT C: The Salt Wind
This is an original story written for this practice paper. Mira lives with her grandfather, Teo, on a small island.

The wind had changed in the night. Mira knew it before she opened her eyes, because the shutters had stopped their usual gossip against the frame and begun instead a slow, heavy knocking, like someone who had been kept waiting too long at the door.

By the time she reached the harbour the sky had turned the colour of a bruise, yellow at its edges and purple in the middle, and the sea beneath it lay flat as poured metal. Nothing moved on it. The gulls had gone, every one of them, and their absence was louder than their crying had ever been. Out beyond the headland a single line of white marked where the swell was gathering, patient and enormous, waiting for permission.

Her grandfather was already at the boat. Teo had built the Marisol with his own father fifty years before, plank by plank, and he talked to her the way other men talked to dogs. Now he was kneeling at her stern, untying the mooring rope with fingers that had once mended nets faster than anyone on the island.

"You should have woken me," Mira said.

"You needed sleep. I needed the boat out of the water. Different needs." He did not look up.

They fixed the rope to the old winch at the top of the slipway and began to haul. Teo worked as he always did, deliberate and economical, wasting nothing, but Mira saw something grudging in the way he straightened his back between turns, as though his body were a crew member he no longer entirely trusted. His breath came short and harsh. His knee, the one he never mentioned, buckled once on the wet stones, and he caught himself against the hull and pretended he had meant to rest there. Mira took the winch handle without asking. He let her, and that frightened her more than the sky.

The Marisol came up the slipway inch by complaining inch, her keel grinding on the stones like teeth. Then the rain arrived, not falling but thrown, fistfuls of it flung sideways across the harbour. The water that had been so still began to heave and slap against the harbour wall, sending up white plumes that hung for a moment in the air before collapsing. Somewhere a loose sheet of tin roofing began to scream.

When the boat was finally above the tide line they lashed her to the iron rings set in the rock, and Teo ran his hand along her side, checking each knot twice. Then he sat down heavily on an upturned crate and looked at the sea.

"When I was your age," he said, "there were thirty boats on this slipway in a storm. Thirty families hauling. Now look." Mira looked. There were four: theirs, and three others whose owners had left for the mainland years ago, their hulls green with weed. "And you will go too, one day. Everyone does."

"Who will pull her up when I can't?" he asked, and for once it was not a joke.

Mira did not answer. She took his arm and helped him to his feet, and together they walked up the hill toward the house with the storm at their backs, both of them leaning into the wind, each of them pretending to the other that it was the wind they were leaning against.

Text C: The Salt Wind

TEXT C: The Salt Wind
This is an original story written for this practice paper. Mira lives with her grandfather, Teo, on a small island.

The wind had changed in the night. Mira knew it before she opened her eyes, because the shutters had stopped their usual gossip against the frame and begun instead a slow, heavy knocking, like someone who had been kept waiting too long at the door.

By the time she reached the harbour the sky had turned the colour of a bruise, yellow at its edges and purple in the middle, and the sea beneath it lay flat as poured metal. Nothing moved on it. The gulls had gone, every one of them, and their absence was louder than their crying had ever been. Out beyond the headland a single line of white marked where the swell was gathering, patient and enormous, waiting for permission.

Her grandfather was already at the boat. Teo had built the Marisol with his own father fifty years before, plank by plank, and he talked to her the way other men talked to dogs. Now he was kneeling at her stern, untying the mooring rope with fingers that had once mended nets faster than anyone on the island.

"You should have woken me," Mira said.

"You needed sleep. I needed the boat out of the water. Different needs." He did not look up.

They fixed the rope to the old winch at the top of the slipway and began to haul. Teo worked as he always did, deliberate and economical, wasting nothing, but Mira saw something grudging in the way he straightened his back between turns, as though his body were a crew member he no longer entirely trusted. His breath came short and harsh. His knee, the one he never mentioned, buckled once on the wet stones, and he caught himself against the hull and pretended he had meant to rest there. Mira took the winch handle without asking. He let her, and that frightened her more than the sky.

The Marisol came up the slipway inch by complaining inch, her keel grinding on the stones like teeth. Then the rain arrived, not falling but thrown, fistfuls of it flung sideways across the harbour. The water that had been so still began to heave and slap against the harbour wall, sending up white plumes that hung for a moment in the air before collapsing. Somewhere a loose sheet of tin roofing began to scream.

When the boat was finally above the tide line they lashed her to the iron rings set in the rock, and Teo ran his hand along her side, checking each knot twice. Then he sat down heavily on an upturned crate and looked at the sea.

"When I was your age," he said, "there were thirty boats on this slipway in a storm. Thirty families hauling. Now look." Mira looked. There were four: theirs, and three others whose owners had left for the mainland years ago, their hulls green with weed. "And you will go too, one day. Everyone does."

"Who will pull her up when I can't?" he asked, and for once it was not a joke.

Mira did not answer. She took his arm and helped him to his feet, and together they walked up the hill toward the house with the storm at their backs, both of them leaning into the wind, each of them pretending to the other that it was the wind they were leaning against.