Recommended Reading: Goodnight Mister Tom

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

Looking for a book which has won dozens of AWARDS; a book which is loved by children and adults nationwide; and a book which, at different points, will make you beam with happiness, choke with tears or boil with anger? Well this book does all of that and more. It tells the touching tale of a poor, bedraggled, abused evacuee who is sent for safety to the countryside during World War Two, only to find his life transformed as a result. This comes highly recommended, and here is an extract from the first chapter:

‘Yes,’ said Tom bluntly, on opening the front door. ‘What do you want?’
A harassed middle-aged woman in a green coat and felt hat stood on his step. He glanced at the armband on her sleeve. She gave him an awkward smile.
‘I’m the Billeting Officer for this area,’ she began.
‘Oh yes, and what’s that got to do wi’me?’
She flushed slightly. ‘Well, Mr, Mr...’
‘Oakley. Thomas Oakley.’
‘Ah, thank you, Mr Oakley.’ She paused and took a deep breath.
‘Mr Oakley, with the declaration of war imminent...’
Tom waved his hand. ‘I knows all that. Get to the point. What d’you want?’
He noticed a small boy at her side.
‘It’s him I’ve come about,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way to your village hall with the others.’
‘What others?’
She stepped to one side. Behind the large iron gate which stood at the end of the graveyard were a small group of children. Many of them were filthy and very poorly clad. Only a handful had a blazer or coat.
They all looked bewildered and exhausted. One tiny dark-haired girl in the front was hanging firmly on to a new teddybear. The woman touched the boy at her side and pushed him forward.
‘There’s no need to tell me,’ said Tom. ‘It’s obligatory and it’s for the war effort.’
‘You are entitled to choose your child, I know,’ began the woman apologetically.
Tom gave a snort.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘his mother wants him to be with someone who’s religious or near a church. She was quite adamant. Said she would only let him be evacuated if he was.’
‘Was what?’ asked Tom impatiently.
‘Near a church.’
Tom took a second look at the child. The boy was thin and sickly-looking, pale with limp, sandy hair and dull grey eyes.
‘His name’s Willie,’ said the woman.
Willie, who had been staring at the ground, looked up. Round his neck, hanging from a piece of string, was a cardboard label. It read ‘William Beech’.
Tom was well into his sixties, a healthy, robust, stockily-built man with a head of thick white hair. Although he was of average height, in Willie’s eyes he was a towering giant with skin like coarse, wrinkled brown paper and a voice like thunder.
He glared at Willie. ‘You’d best come in,’ he said abruptly.
The woman gave a relieved smile.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and she backed quickly away and hurried down the tiny path towards the other children.
Willie watched her go.
‘Come on in,’ repeated Tom harshly. ‘I ent got all day.’

Poem of the Week: 'The Backslappers' by Jennifer Mitchell

I think it was in the early 1990s that a book of poetry called CITY LINES was published in London. The big difference with this book was that ALL the poems were written by schoolchildren - including this dark and shocking exploration of adolescence by a 15-year-old female poet. It's impressive and powerful stuff - but don't read it if you are easily shocked...

The Backslappers

What greater secrecy of love
than the cracked tiles of the
boys’ room where faucets drip
bored to tears with tales of
girls succumbing? Through the
smoke rings they gather, nodding
and jerking their heads as they
lie about the ease they had in
breaking down the barrier of
mother-tightened pant elastic.
The most graphic, his laugh
caught short, his fag suspended,
recalls her eyes bulging as he
led her to the haven of a darkened
garage, bulbs smashed to the oily floor,
past the gleam of elbow greased cars
reflecting her ill ease as he led
her to the tea-stained mattress
erected to the worship of debasing.
His doubts are chased away as
he fills his lungs, assured that
they both enjoyed it.

Another deals the cards on spittle
and in a reversal of the sight sees
his hand calloused and yellowed
with tobacco running through her hair,
diverting knots, smells the stench
of beer covering her face, regurgitated
later behind someone’s fence like the
words he tells them all.
He feels the slither of his lips
Smearing her sister’s lipstick,
inexperienced and unwilling to learn.
But as he deals a king he ignores
the memory of her after-fumble tears,
the way she grabbed up her clothes
and tripped as she ran.
Those sitting on sinks, in front of
various phone numbers simply smile
and count their belt loads
of broken hymens, doubtless.

Jennifer Mitchell (15)
SOUTH KILBURN HIGH SCHOOL

THE RECYCLER a short story

She didnt know it, but the owner of the chunky silhouette being projected onto the brick wall was going to be recycled in two minutes, fifteen seconds. She looked down at the decaying piece of chicken nestling in the grease-ridden cardboard box. God that's rank, she thought, as she slung it petulantly into the gutter.
'OI! Eat it.'
The girl turned round.
'What?' she said stroppily.
'Eat the damn chicken.'
'What? Are you mad?' She started swaggering away; kissing her teeth.
'I'd stay here if I was you.' She looked round to see three men in council uniforms ; their arms folded.
'It's people like you that mean that people like us,' he gestured to the men either side of him, 'have to be dirty and smell bad when we go home to our families. It's people like you that earn us the scorn of the whole community. And worst of all you dont even know it'.
The man chuckled as the girl made a second attempt at escape, which didn't last long because two heavy-set men grabbed her and thrust her on to a rusty metal surface. She made attempts to cry for help but was silenced by the whirring of the industrial machinery, her bones cracking like a piece of discarded chicken. As the girl's life was being slowly absorbed by the everafter her final thought read: Jesus, I'm being recycled.......

Recommended Reading: The Day of the Triffids

The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham

A novel about killer, giant plants should NOT be scary - but somehow this book manages to be not only BELIEVABLE but also absolutely TERRIFYING. I first read it in my English lessons when I was in Year 9, and I was totally gripped - so maybe some of you would be too. Here is an extract from the beginning of the book. Read the rest if you dare...

The End Begins

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else—though I did not see how that could be. I went on waiting, tinged with doubt. But presently I had my first bit of objective evidence—a distant clock struck what sounded to me just like eight. I listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a hard, decisive note. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then I knew things were awry.
The way I came to miss the end of the world—well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years—was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that—in which case I’d not be writing now: I’d not be here at all. But chance played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages—and that’s why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages. At the time, however, I was only peevish, wondering what in thunder went on, for I had been in the place long enough to know that, next to the matron, the clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.
Without a clock the place simply couldn’t work. Each second there’s someone consulting it on births, deaths, doses, meals, lights, talking, working, sleeping, resting, visiting, dressing, washing—and hitherto it had decreed that someone should begin to wash and tidy me up at exactly three minutes after 7 a.m. That was one of the best reasons I had for appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. But here, today, clocks of varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions—and still nobody had shown up.
Much as I disliked the sponging process, and useless as it had been to suggest that the help of a guiding hand as far as the bathroom could eliminate it, its failure to occur was highly disconcerting. Besides, it was normally a close forerunner of breakfast, and I was feeling hungry.
Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning, but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was an occasion of particular personal importance. I was doubly anxious to get all the fuss and routine over because this was the day they were going to take off my bandages.
I groped around a bit to find the bell push and let them have a full five seconds’ clatter, just to show what I was thinking of them.
While I was waiting for the pretty short-tempered response that such a peal ought to bring, I went on listening.
The day outside, I realized now, was sounding even more wrong than I had thought. The noises it made, or failed to make, were more like Sunday than Sunday itself—and I’d come round again to being absolutely assured that it was Wednesday, whatever else had happened to it.
Why the founders of St. Merryn’s Hospital chose to erect their institution at a main-road crossing upon a valuable office site, and thus expose their patients’ nerves to constant laceration, is a foible that I never properly understood. But for those fortunate enough to be suffering from complaints unaffected by the wear and tear of continuous traffic, it did have the advantage that one could lie abed and still not be out of touch, so to speak, with the flow of life. Customarily the west-bound busses thundered along trying to beat the lights at the corner; as often as not a pig-squeal of brakes and a salvo of shots from the silencer would tell that they hadn’t. Then the released cross traffic would rev and roar as it started up the incline. And every now and then there would be an interlude: a good grinding bump, followed by a general stoppage—exceedingly tantalizing to one in my condition, where the extent of the contretemps had to be judged entirely by the degree of profanity resulting. Certainly, neither by day nor during most of the night, was there any chance of a St. Merryn patient being under the impression that the common round had stopped just because he, personally, was on the shelf for the moment.
But this morning was different. Disturbingly, because mysteriously, different. No wheels rumbled, no busses roared, no sound of a car of any kind, in fact, was to be heard; no brakes, no horns, not even the clopping of the few rare horses that still occasionally passed; nor, as there should be at such an hour, the composite tramp of work-bound feet.
The more I listened, the queerer it seemed—and the less I cared for it. In what I reckoned to be ten minutes of careful listening I heard five sets of shuffling, hesitating footsteps, three voices bawling unintelligibly in the distance, and the hysterical sobs of a woman. There was not the cooing of a pigeon, not the chirp of a sparrow. Nothing but the humming of wires in the wind. . . .

Poem of the Week: 'The Jaguar' by Ted Hughes

Very few poets have been as obsessed with the power of NATURE as Ted Hughes - one of the most famous and influential British poets of the 20th century. He believed passionately in nature's ascendancy over mankind, and this is just one of the poems in which he explores this immense power. It was written after watching a jaguar's cage in a zoo, and shows both awe and fear of this magnificent creature.

If you are interested, click here for a short essay on Hughes' animal poems in general - and see if there are any others you would like to read. (The essay also gives some excellent examples of how to EMBED quotations in your own essays, for those of you who want help with this.)

All that aside, however, enjoy the poem...

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Recommended Reading: Lord of the Flies

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

This is a tremendously dark vision of what happens to a group of schoolboys when they are stranded on a desert island without any adults to keep them in order. This new 'community' goes swiftly from order to chaos, as the boys show just how close all of us are to the more violent, vicious and animalistic urges deep within.

This book is often studied at GCSE, and never fails to mesmerise the reader. It's not for the faint-hearted, but if you can cope with being launched almost physically into a nightmare world whose evil is all too human, then I strongly suggest you give it a go. And if you're a fan of the C4 series, Lost, this book is an absolute MUST, because that programme could never have been made if this book hadn't been written first...

Instead of PRINTING an extract this week, I thought it would make a change for you to LISTEN to one instead. Click on this LINK, and then click on listen to an extract. Just make sure you have REALplayer on your system first. (You can download that for free HERE.)

Poems of the Week: 'Education for Leisure' by Carol Ann Duffy and 'The Hitcher' by Simon Armitage

These two poems were in the old AQA GCSE anthology which we don't study any more; but they are certainly worth having a look at anyway: two different reflections on the theme of VIOLENCE - and its cause and effect. Click HERE for a powerpoint presentation on the two poems, if you're interested.

Education for Leisure

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

The Hitcher

I'd been tired, under
the weather, but the ansaphone kept screaming:
One more sick note, mister, and you're finished. Fired.
I thumbed a lift to where the car was parked.
A Vauxhall Astra. It was hired.

I picked him up in Leeds.
He was following the sun to west from east
with just a toothbrush and the good earth for a bed. The truth,
he said, was blowin' in the wind,
or round the next bend.

I let him have it
on the top road out of Harrogate-once
with the head, then six times with the krooklok
in the face-and didn't even swerve.
I dropped it into third

and leant across
to let him out, and saw him in the mirror
bouncing off the kerb, then disappearing down the verge.
We were the same age, give or take a week.
He said he like the breeze

to run it's fingers
through his hair. It was twelve noon.
The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.
Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.

Analyse/Review/Comment Writing - Exemplar 1

You'll be working on this in your lessons this week (if you're in Years 9-11), but I thought it would help if I posted it on the BLOG too. This is an exemplar response to an ARC question.

Exam Question: It has been suggested that having 169 TV channels and building motorways through the countryside is ‘progress’. Analyse this view of progress, commenting on why things are developing in this way and what reasons people might have to disagree.

PLAN
Intro: Evolution
• Dr. Robert Oppenheimer
• Medicine
• Computers
• Entertainment
• Industrialisation
Conclusion: Back to basics

Ever since Neanderthal man first rubbed dry sticks to make fire or figured out that wheels work better when round, mankind has sought progress. It’s just another form of evolution: Darwin should be proud. However, the greater our advances, the more controversial they can become; to the extent that many might question whether they are ‘progress’ at all. When progress ameliorates life, that is one thing; but when it simply improves lifestyle, that is something else entirely.

Interestingly, Dr Robert Oppenheimer must have understood this debate all too well. In the 1930s, he was the chief scientist in charge of the development of the USA’s nuclear technology. Only a few years later, the American government harnessed this very same technology to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear proliferation so much that the American government started to restrict his personal freedom. What would he have said if asked if any ‘progress’ had really been achieved?

Nonetheless, it is important for us to acknowledge the complexity of the issue, and few could argue that some progress is unequivocally good. In medicine, for example, advances in technology have led to the eradication of diseases which, as little as fifty years ago, claimed victims every day. Even AIDS, until recently thought invincible, may now have a cure or vaccination in sight.

Similarly, computer technology has totally transformed the way in which we live our lives today, and many of us rely on our trusty PC to organise everything from our finances to our daily routines. I defy anyone to argue that my iPod is not a good thing – six hours driving to the Lake District over the summer would have been toddler hell without the entire Horrid Henry back catalogue playing over the car stereo. And where would we be in schools, without computers to improve both teaching and learning?

However, it is not difficult to flip the coin of progress to the other, less shiny side. For example, how many channels do we really need on our TV sets? I have free access to dozens of channels now, and there is still, invariably, very little worth watching. Instead, television’s hold over our lives is becoming more and more intense, and, to the benefit of whom? In the words of Bruce Springsteen, there are “57 channels and nothing on”.

It is also hard to dispute that the increasing industrialisation of society is placing our planet in grave danger. A new motorway might cut the journey time from A to B in two; but it cuts the countryside in two too. Cheap plane travel might send thousands more people into the sky; but that sky is choking as a result. When progress is at the expense of the planet we inhabit, some would say that it is not progress at all. After all, what is the point of improving life on earth, if there will be no earth to host it?

When you think about it, it is easy to sympathise with those who favour a more ‘no-nonsense’, ‘back to basics’ approach to life. If you were to remove all technology from your life, would you really be worse off? I would miss my iPod, but I managed before I first bought it; and there are few ailments I fight off through a trip to Boots that a decent shaman couldn’t cure with a few crushed leaves and a nice hot poultice. And as for roads and interminable television, they may well spruce up my lifestyle – but my life could probably do perfectly well without them.

Poem of the Week: 'Who knows if the moon's a balloon?' by e. e. cummings

who knows if the moon's
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited, where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

Recommended Reading: Waterland

The very best novels I have read have changed me: they have changed the way I think; they have changed the way I write; and they have changed the way I live. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it is not. One of the novels to have this profound effect on me was Waterland by Graham Swift. Written in 1983, I first read it in 1996, whilst I was travelling in South East Asia. I spent several weeks staying in a tiny guest house on stilts above the waters of the estuary of the Terrenganau river on the north-east of the Malay peninsula, and every waking (and sleeping) moment of mine was spent with the sounds and the smells and the sight of this vast waterway overwhelming my senses. It couldn't have been a more apt place, therefore, to read this novel, about a History teacher who grew up in the Norfolk fens, beside the river Ouse, and whose life was permeated by the 'spirit' of that river, ever since he discovered in it the dead body of one of his friends. It's part thriller - and part 'coming of age' novel, but the most extraordinary thing for me was the way in which the story was TOLD, with a narrative which lulled me and hypnotised me with its freshness, originality and almost musical command of the written word and, above all, the art of storytelling. There's always a danger recommending something THIS highly, for fear you might be disappointed. But I am recommending it nonetheless. These are the opening paragraphs:

"And don't forget," my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, "whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk..."

Fairy-tale words; fairy-tale advice. But we lived in a fairy-tale place. In a lock-keeper's cottage, by a river, in the middle of the Fens. Far away from the wide world. And my father, who was a superstitious man, liked to do things in such a way as to make them seem magical and occult. So he would always set his eel traps at night. Not because eel traps cannot be set by day, but because the mystery of the darkness appealed to him. And one night, in midsummer, in 1937, we went with him, Dick and I, to set traps near Stott's Bridge. It was hot and windless. When the traps had been set we lay back on the riverbank. Dick was fourteen and I was ten. The pumps were tump-tumping, as they do, incessantly, so that you scarcely notice them, all over the Fens, and frogs were croaking in the ditches. Up above, the sky swarmed with stars which seemed to multiply as we looked at them. And as we lay, Dad said: "Do you know what the stars are? They are the silver dust of God's blessing. They are little broken-off bits of heaven. God cast them down to fall on us. But when he saw how wicked we were, he changed his mind and ordered the stars to stop. Which is why they hang in the sky but seem as though at any time they might drop...

Alices Adventures in Wonderland

If any of you arent reading a book at the moment then i strongly recommend you read Alices adventures in Wonderland. Its one of the best books i've ever read and even though it was written quite some time ago the language isnt at all difficult, if i could read it when i was in year 4 them i'm sure you can read it now. You'll enjoy it alot , its one of those books that you can't put down(in my opinion anyway).

Recommended Reading: The Catcher in the Rye

This is the opening of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger. Written in 1951, it has turned out to be one of the most controversial American novels of the 20th Century. Even in the 1990s, it was the 13th most challenged book in American schools and libraries. Basically, it tells the story, from a first person narrative, of a teenage boys adventures in New York City, after running away from his Private School. It offers a captivating view of male adolescence and 'coming of age'.

Chapter 1

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all - I'm not saying that - but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those lithe English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

Poem of the Week: Well Bread Dog by John Hegley

One evening John came home from work
went into the kitchen to make himself a nice cup of tea
and on the kitchen table, in a plastic bag,
he discovered a large sliced loaf
with one of the crusts missing.
Actually it was a very large sliced loaf,
about the size of a rabbit hutch,
and John, who lived very much alone,
knew that he hadn't put it there and wondered who had.
Just then there was a rap-a-tap-tap at the front door.
It was John's new next-door-neighbour.
"Excuse me barging in", she said ,
"but you haven't seen my dog have you?".
"What does it look like?", inquired John concernedly.
"Like a large sliced loaf", replied the neighbour.
"With one of the crusts missing?", asked John.
"Yes", replied the neighbour, "she had a fight".
John smiled, went out into the kitchen,
and returned with the mysterious loaf.
"Is this her by any chance?" he asked.
And the neighbour said,
"No".

Click HERE to hear the poet read the poem ALOUD.

Copyright: John Hegley.