Section A: Reading
Spend 35 minutes on this section.
Read the following extract from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and answer
Questions 1–10.
Text for Section A:
It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot
of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the
trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped
through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.
The house shook.
Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.
She wasn’t usually afraid of weather. —It’s not just the weather, she thought. – It’s the
weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything
wrong. School. School was all wrong.
She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of her
teachers had said crossly, ‘Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with parents as
brilliant as yours are supposed to be, can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to
do a little better you’ll have to stay back next year.’
And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one
of the boys had said something about her ‘dumb baby brother.’ At this she’d thrown the
books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and
arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye.
Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour
earlier than she did, were disgusted. ‘Let us do the fighting when it’s necessary,’ they
told her.
– A delinquent, that’s what I am, she thought grimly. – That’s what they’ll be saying
next. Not Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father –
But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her
mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, ‘When your father gets back –’
Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were
saying, must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg.
But if it did she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her expression.
– Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything? The
window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt close about her. Curled up on
one of her pillows, a grey fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head
under again, and went back to sleep.
Everybody was asleep. Everybody except Meg. Even Charles Wallace, the ‘dumb baby
brother,’ who had an uncanny way of knowing when she was awake and unhappy, and
who would come, so many nights, tiptoeing up the attic stairs to her – even Charles
Wallace was asleep.
How could they sleep? All day on the radio there had been hurricane warnings. How
could they leave her up in the attic in the rickety brass bed, knowing that the roof might
be blown right off the house, and she tossed out into the wild night sky to land who
knows where?
Section B: Writing
Spend 35 minutes on this section.
[Link] extract ends on a suspenseful note. Continue the story from Meg’s perspective,
imagining what happens next.
You could think about:
What Meg does next
Whether she speaks to anyone
What she discovers about the storm or her father
Space for your plan:
Write your continuation on the next page.
[25 marks]
