The Complete Guide to Telling Tales

Seven stories, one question

What Telling Tales is and how it is examined

Telling Tales gathers seven short stories by seven writers. They range from a Nottinghamshire mining village before the First World War to a Japanese family home after the Second, from an Irish river to a Jamaican schoolroom, and from an English staffroom to a cottage beside a dark wood. What binds them is their subject matter: families under strain, grief and its strange shapes, young people learning hard truths, and people placed low by class, colour or language who find a way to be seen.

You are not asked to write about all seven. The question names one story and a focus, and you choose a second story to write about with it. That freedom is also a responsibility: the choice of the second story is part of your argument. A thoughtful pairing shows the examiner that you know the collection as a whole.

Because six of the stories are in copyright, this guide quotes none of them. Instead it describes moments precisely, which is exactly what you will do in a closed-book exam with no extract.

The seven at a glance

What just happened

• Seven stories by seven writers.
• The question names one story; you choose the second.
• Families, grief, growing up and identity bind them.
• This guide describes and never quotes.

Why it matters. Knowing the collection as a whole is what makes the second story a strong choice rather than a lucky one.

What to remember

• Learn each story whole.
• Learn the pairings as well as the stories.

Reading a short story for a closed-book exam

What to learn, and how

A short story is small enough to hold in your head entire, which is the advantage. For each story, learn five things: who tells it, the order of events, the turning point, the ending, and four or five moments you could describe exactly.

A described moment needs three parts: what happens, in one precise sentence; where it falls in the story; and one method the writer is using there. For example: near the end of Korea, the son rows in the dark while his father lets out the night line, and McGahern echoes the execution of the opening by having the son watch as if he too must prepare to kill. That is precise, located and analytical, and it quotes nothing.

A moment card

• What happens, in one exact sentence.
• Where: opening, middle, turning point, ending.
• One method: voice, symbol, setting, structure, dialogue.
• One idea it supports.

Short stories also reward structural thinking. Ask what the writer holds back, where the story turns, and why it stops where it does. Lively holds back Mrs Rutter's confession until the last pages; Ishiguro puts the fugu in the first paragraph. Both are choices, and both can be argued about.

What just happened

• Learn each story whole.
• Describe moments precisely and locate them.
• Attach a method to each moment.
• Think about structure: what is held back and where the story stops.

Why it matters. Precision is how a closed-book essay without quotations earns its marks.

What to remember

• Five things per story.
• A moment card for each key moment.

Chemistry

Graham Swift: change, loyalty and what survives a death

The narrator is a grown man remembering the autumn he was ten. His grandmother died when he was four; his father was lost when a small company plane vanished over the Irish Sea when he was seven. His mother sold their house and moved in with her father, and for about a year the three of them lived quietly and almost happily, three generations bound by two absences.

The story opens on a ritual at the park pond. The boy launches a model motor-launch he and his grandfather built; his grandfather waits on the far side to catch it; his mother watches from a bench. Soon after his mother meets Ralph, the launch sinks on its first trip across. Grandfather tells the boy that a loss must be accepted, and the mother looks as if she has seen something appalling.

Ralph comes for weekends and then stays. Grandfather needles him at supper, remarking that the mother no longer cooks the curry she made for her dead husband, and Ralph shouts at him to leave her alone. The boy refuses Ralph's offer of a new boat. In the kitchen the mother asks the boy what she is going to do; then, back at the table, she tells her father to take his meal out to his shed.

The shed is Grandfather's brick workshop, where he does chemistry for curiosity and comfort. He teaches the boy that chemistry changes things rather than making them, and that even gold can change. He holds his dead wife's gold watch chain over a mixture of acids, then draws it back. He tells the boy that people change too, but elements do not. Among his bottles is a clear poison he warns is not for drinking.

Watching Ralph and his mother drink and seeing her look trapped in his arms, the boy steals nitric acid in a spice jar, meaning to spoil Ralph's face. That night his drowned father appears beside his bed, soaked and crusted with salt, and says that she made a hole in the boat so that it would sink; the boy promises to prove it. In the morning an ambulance takes Grandfather away. The verdict is suicide by poison.

The mother never explains, and she seems relieved. She opens the windows of Grandfather's room, Ralph wears one of the dead father's sweaters, and they plan to move to a house Ralph is buying. Nobody questions the boy. He throws the acid into the pond, and at dusk he sees his grandfather on the far bank, smiling, waiting for the launch that is still on its way.

Grade 9 insight. Swift's question is whether anything lost is really gone. The chemistry lessons answer it one way, the verdict another, and the final vision lets the boy, and the reader, choose.

What just happened

• A grieving household of three is broken when Ralph arrives.
• The launch sinks; Grandfather is exiled to his shed.
• The boy plans revenge; Grandfather dies by poison.
• At the pond, the boy sees him waiting.

Why it matters. Chemistry pairs well with any story about a family after a death, or a child who knows more than adults allow.

What to remember

• The launch frames the story.
• Change without destruction is its central idea.

Odour of Chrysanthemums

D. H. Lawrence: a wife, a mine, and a stranger in the parlour

Lawrence opens with a world before a person: a small engine clanking past a colliery at dusk, the miners coming up, a cottage squatting beside the railway sidings with a vine clawing at its roof and ragged chrysanthemums by the path. Elizabeth Bates comes out of the hen-house, tall and handsome and set in her disappointment, and calls her son John in from the brook.

She picks a few pale chrysanthemums and tucks them into her apron. Her father, the engine driver, stops for tea, tells her he is going to marry again soon, and reports that her husband Walter has been boasting in a pub about money he means to spend. Indoors, tea waits, the dinner dries in the oven, and her daughter Annie comes home late from school. Elizabeth is sure Walter has walked past his own door to drink.

When she lights the lamp, the light shows that she is pregnant. Annie notices the flowers in her apron and loves their smell; Elizabeth says that chrysanthemums marked her wedding, Annie's birth and the first time Walter was brought home drunk. She tells the children that their father will be carried home and can lie on the floor. She sews while they play, and her anger slowly gives way to fear. She puts them to bed.

In the second section she goes out into the dark. She will not go into the bright pub; she knocks instead at the Rigleys' crowded house, and Jack Rigley admits he left Walter finishing a stint at the coal face and goes to look for him. Back home, every sound of the winding engine startles her. Late in the evening Walter's mother arrives, weeping: there has been an accident.

A collier comes to the door. Walter has been dead for hours. A fall came down behind him at the coal face, did not crush him, but shut him in, and he suffocated. Elizabeth prepares the cold parlour, where vases of chrysanthemums stand, and spreads cloths on the floor. The manager and his men carry the body in; a vase is knocked over, and she mops up the water. Upstairs Annie asks whether her father is drunk, and Elizabeth tells her he is asleep.

The two women undress and wash him. His mother is tender and proud, remembering him as a boy. Elizabeth, looking at the body, realises that she never knew him: they were two separate people who met and fought in the dark. She sees that she denied him what he was. Ashamed, grieving and pitying him, she dresses him and covers him, then tidies the kitchen, submitting to life and afraid of death.

Grade 9 insight. The story's sympathy turns at the end. For most of it the reader shares Elizabeth's anger at an absent drinker; at the end Lawrence asks the reader to see that she, too, failed him.

What just happened

• A miner's wife waits, angry, for a husband she thinks is drinking.
• Anger turns to fear; his mother brings news of an accident.
• He was shut in by a fall and suffocated.
• Washing his body, she sees she never knew him.

Why it matters. The story is the collection's deepest study of grief and of a marriage, and it pairs with any story about misjudging someone.

What to remember

• Trace the chrysanthemums.
• Know the two women's different grief.

My Polish Teacher's Tie

Helen Dunmore: class, a lost language, and a song

Carla Carter is part-time catering staff at a school. She wears a blue overall and white cap, knows her hourly rate to the penny, and serves tea and buns to teachers who pay into a kitty and rarely see her. She likes the children. She is half-Polish: her mother came to England after the war and spoke Polish to her until she was six, when her father stopped it because she was starting school. She keeps a tape of herself as a child speaking Polish with her mother, and can no longer follow it.

At the weekly staff meeting the headteacher mentions Polish teachers who want English penfriends. Carla crosses the room, past teachers who step aside without seeing her, and asks him for the address. He struggles with her name and wonders if it is a trick.

Her penfriend Stefan, who signs himself Steve, assumes she is a teacher. She tells him about her daughter Jade and the songs her mother sang, and nothing about her job. He sends poems: one about a bird that flew into a coal mine and sang until it died, heard by everyone and found by no one; another, made from what she told him, about losing the words a mother gave. The letters become the centre of her week.

Then the Head announces that Stefan Jeziorny is coming from Katowice on an exchange and will stay with Mrs Kenward. Stefan's next letter is stiff and asks Carla to introduce him to her colleagues. She imagines the staffroom's whisper and his face when he realises who she is, and she stops writing.

At morning break Valerie Kenward complains about her guest: he talks only of poetry, his accent makes Shakespeare hard to follow, and his ties are ridiculous. Carla looks past her and sees him, stiff in a suit too big for him, wearing a wide red tie with green squiggles, smiling as people do when they do not understand what is going on. When Valerie asks whether the tea is ready, Carla says it is not, lifts the counter-flap and goes to him.

She introduces herself. Surprise, uncertainty, then pleasure cross his face. Holding her hand in the middle of the staffroom, he sings a Polish song her mother used to sing, and Carla finds the words in her mouth and sings with him. The Head says he had not realised she was Polish; she says that neither had she. She tells Stefan she likes his tie.

Grade 9 insight. Dunmore makes the turn come from contempt: Carla can face her own exposure once she hears someone else being laughed at. Courage on another's behalf becomes courage for herself.

What just happened

• Carla, a dinner lady, is half-Polish but has lost the language.
• She writes to a Polish teacher who thinks she is a teacher.
• His visit threatens to expose her.
• She goes to him, and they sing her mother's song.

Why it matters. The story pairs with any story about identity, class or a voice finally heard.

What to remember

• The tie changes meaning.
• Language is the thread from tape to poem to song.

Korea

John McGahern: a father, a son and two wars

The story begins with a question the son asks as his father rows: did he see an execution? The father, unusually, tells it. Captured in an ambush in 1919 and held in Mountjoy prison, he expected to be shot. Instead he watched from his cell as two prisoners were led out: a man in his thirties who refused the blindfold and kept his hands in his pockets, and a weeping boy who came to attention. When they were shot the boy tore at his tunic and its buttons flew into the air.

Years later, on his honeymoon, the father saw furze pods bursting on the hill at Howth and was reminded of the buttons, and the day was ruined. The son asks whether the boy stood to attention because he hoped obedience might save him; the father dismisses the idea as the result of too much schooling.

This is the son's last summer on the river. He and his father fish for eels with a two-mile line of hooks, keep the catch in a wire cage in the bulrushes, and send them alive to London each week. They are the last to fish the river for a living, and the tourist board wants the licence stopped. The son is waiting for exam results. His father asks about his plans and suggests America, the land of opportunity, in big words the son notices are not his father's own.

Emptying worms in the dark of the outside lavatory, the son overhears his father telling the cattle dealer Farrell what the Moran family received from the American army: a monthly sum for each son serving, and a large payment when Luke Moran was killed in Korea. The son remembers Luke's coffin coming home under the American flag. He understands the plan: he would be drafted, his father would be paid while he served, and paid much more if he were killed. He knows, there among the worms, that his youth has ended.

That evening, setting the night line, his father asks if he has decided. He says he is not going. His father warns that if he comes to nothing it will be his own funeral, and the son repeats the words. Then he asks whether the war and the prison come back to his father; they do, the father says, and he wishes he had fought his own wars and let the country look after itself. The son rows in silence, closer to his father than ever, watching every movement as if he too had to prepare himself to murder.

Grade 9 insight. Neither man mentions the overheard conversation. McGahern lets the final closeness be both understanding and a hardening, and the story's last thought links the son to the firing squad of the opening.

What just happened

• The father tells of an execution he witnessed in 1919.
• On the river, he urges his son towards America.
• In the lavatory, the son learns the money behind the offer.
• He refuses, and rows on in a closeness that chills.

Why it matters. Korea pairs with any story about a parent and child, about war's long shadow, or about growing up in a moment.

What to remember

• Learn the buttons and the furze.
• Learn the lavatory and the night line.

A Family Supper

Kazuo Ishiguro: honour, poison and silence

The story opens with a short lesson on fugu, a fish whose poison sits in two fragile sacs that must be removed with care; a mistake means a painful death by morning. The narrator's mother died from eating it, at the invitation of an old school friend, while he was in California and on bad terms with his parents. He learns the details two years later, driving from the airport to his father's house.

His father is formidable, with a stony jaw and fierce eyebrows, proud of his samurai blood. He once hit his son for chattering. Their talk is stiff and full of silences. The father's firm has collapsed, and his partner Watanabe has killed himself rather than live with the disgrace; the father calls him a man of principle. He says he is ready to forget the past and that his son was swayed by influences.

The narrator's sister Kikuko arrives from university in Osaka. Alone with her brother in the garden she smokes, giggles, and talks about a boyfriend who wants to go to America. They walk to an old well the narrator once said was haunted, and Kikuko tells him what their father did not: Watanabe gassed his wife and two little daughters in their sleep before cutting his own stomach. The narrator then describes the ghost he saw as a child, an old woman in a white kimono with her hair coming loose.

Their father is cooking. He sends Kikuko to help and walks his son through rooms that are almost empty, then into a crowded room where a half-built plastic battleship sits on newspaper. He says he served on a ship in the war but wanted the air force, because a plane always had a final weapon. He says he should perhaps have been a more attentive father, and that he believes the mother's death was no accident.

Supper is eaten under one dim lantern. The narrator notices a photograph of an old woman in a white kimono and asks who it is. It is his mother. His father lifts the lid of a pot of fish and will call it only fish. They all eat; the son offers his father the last piece. Afterwards, the father calls Watanabe's killings a mistake, invites his son to stay, and says things will improve when Kikuko comes home. They wait in silence for the tea.

Grade 9 insight. Ishiguro never confirms that the fish is fugu or that anyone will die. The menace is built entirely from the opening explanation, Watanabe's story, the father's hints, and the family's polite silence.

What just happened

• A son returns two years after his mother died from fugu.
• Kikuko reveals that Watanabe killed his family too.
• The father shows a battleship and blames the mother's despair.
• They eat a fish he will only call fish, and wait.

Why it matters. The story pairs with any story about fathers, honour, tension or what goes unsaid.

What to remember

• The opening sets the threat.
• The ending refuses to resolve it.

Invisible Mass of the Back Row

Claudette Williams: the back row finds its voice

Hortense sits in the back row of a sweltering schoolroom in Jamaica, where the school inspector's ruler is pointing at her. He wants the story of Columbus recited. The words will not come, and then a different set of words bursts out: what was Columbus doing here, and who invited him? Miss Henderson raps her knuckles with the ruler. In their locked gaze Hortense sees that the teacher is as afraid of the inspector as she is.

Hortense lives with her aunt while her parents are in England. When the lunch bell frees them, she and her friends turn on Lorna Phillips, a lighter-skinned, richer girl who always sits at the front; Lorna taunts back that Hortense is kept at the back because she is black and, Lorna claims, stupid. The chase is stopped by Teacher Edwards, a kind man the children respect. Hortense's uncle says such people work together to humiliate the poor and black.

Under the great cotton tree the lunch women sell saltfish fritters, dumplings, puddings, fruit and shaved ice, each woman with her own character. It is the warmest scene in the story. Then a letter and a parcel arrive from England: her mother has sent for Hortense and her two brothers.

On the November morning she leaves, neighbours bring gifts, and in the van she remembers waking beside Cousy and finding that she had died in the night, tears on her face. Who, she wonders, will tend Cousy's grave and roses? The flight takes her to parents she has not seen for years. The adult narrator calls it the start of an exile from Heartease, though she would return many times.

England is cold, smells of paraffin heaters, and has houses stuck together with nowhere to play. A short passage of free verse breaks the prose. Her mother asks her to choose what to call her parents, and Hortense finds she has no language for these people who are not strangers but feel like them. She even wishes Lorna were there, since at least she knows her name.

At her new school she reads aloud words she does not know and is placed in a class one step above the bottom stream. There the back row makes its own culture of hair, make-up and talk, and Joycelin brings library books about Columbus enslaving the people who helped him, and about the rebels and heroes of resistance. When a cold teacher asks Hortense why Columbus sailed, she answers slowly and fully with the conquest, the enslavement and the trade in African people, and Fay Green adds the rest. The teacher reddens, the bell goes, the class leaves with dignity, and the back row claims its victory.

Grade 9 insight. The story is framed by two questions about Columbus. The first she can only challenge; the second she can answer. Between them is the whole journey.

What just happened

• Hortense challenges the Columbus lesson in Jamaica and is punished.
• Lunch under the cotton tree, then a letter from England.
• She leaves Cousy's grave and arrives somewhere cold and strange.
• In the back row of an English school she answers in full.

Why it matters. The story pairs with any story about identity, education, language or a young person finding a voice.

What to remember

• The two Columbus questions frame it.
• Creole and English carry the identity theme.

The Darkness Out There

Penelope Lively: the cosy cottage and the confession

Sandra walks through a field of summer flowers to help an old woman for the Good Neighbours Club that most of her set at school has joined. Her thoughts drift: the club's organiser and her squint, her own pretty feet, the friends she hopes to work with, a future of travel and love and a new sewing machine. The only shadow is Packer's End, the spinney by the path, where a German plane came down in the war and where, people say, you can hear voices.

As a small child she feared witches and wolves there; later it was the dead airmen, and rumours about strangers who threatened a girl on the path. Then Kerry Stevens rises from behind the hedge and makes her scream. He is the other helper. Sandra and her friends think little of him, with his licked-down hair and his spots.

Mrs Rutter seems the ideal old lady: round, smiling, with a cottage full of china ornaments and a tin of chocolates. But her eyes dart and investigate. She sets Kerry to mow and fetch sticks from the wood, and Sandra to clean and rinse her washing, flattering Sandra's looks and figure and talking about the wedding dress she sewed. A photograph shows her husband, killed early in the war in Belgium. At the fence, Kerry says he does not like the way she talks; Sandra defends her as tragic.

Over tea, Kerry asks about the plane, and Sandra tells him to stop. Mrs Rutter answers in the same comfortable voice she uses for everything. On a wet November night in 1942 she and her sister Dot heard the plane come down and went to look. Seeing its markings, they knew it was German, and cheered. Two airmen were dead; a third, trapped and badly hurt, was moaning. Dot said he would not last, and they went home to the warm.

The next day, with a punctured bike and Dot unwell, Mrs Rutter went back alone. The airman was still alive, young, about twenty, and called out. She thought he had it coming, because nobody had helped her husband, and did nothing. He was still alive that evening and dead the next morning; only then did she report the crash. She calls it tit for tat.

Kerry pushes back his chair and says he is going. Sandra, after a moment, goes too, while Mrs Rutter chats about next week. At the gateway into the cornfield Kerry stops, shaking with anger, and Sandra sees that he has grown: his anger outweighs everything she disliked about him. You can get people wrong, she realises, and there is a darkness that is not in the wood but in the mind, which once known stays for ever.

Grade 9 insight. Lively's method is contrast: the sunniest opening, the cosiest room and the most homely voice carry the worst act in the collection.

What just happened

• Sandra fears the wood and judges Kerry by his looks.
• Mrs Rutter seems the ideal old lady.
• She tells how she let a wounded German airman die.
• Sandra follows Kerry out and sees the darkness in people.

Why it matters. The story pairs with any story about lost innocence, misjudgement or war's long shadow.

What to remember

• Kerry is right first.
• The title's darkness moves indoors.

Fathers, mothers and their children

Reading the stories together on family

Family is the subject the collection returns to most. In five stories a child, young or grown, sees something a parent cannot say. The pairings are richest when the parents are set side by side.

Fathers. McGahern's father in Korea and Ishiguro's in A Family Supper are both shaped by war and by a code: one fought for Irish independence and now regrets it, the other prizes samurai honour and wishes he had flown with a final weapon. Both make plans for their families that the reader has to piece together, and both stories end in a quiet that holds danger. The sons respond differently: one refuses, one eats.

Mothers. In Chemistry the mother chooses Ralph over her father and is relieved when her father dies; in Odour of Chrysanthemums Elizabeth protects her children from the truth of the night. In My Polish Teacher's Tie the absent mother lives on in a song. In Invisible Mass of the Back Row a mother who has been away for years becomes a stranger her daughter must learn to address.

Questions to ask of any family pairing

• What does the child know that the parent does not say?
• What outside force shapes the parent: war, poverty, grief, migration?
• Does the child act against the parent, or absorb the parent's choice?
• How does the ending leave the relationship?

What just happened

• Five stories centre a parent and child.
• Fathers in Korea and A Family Supper are shaped by war.
• Mothers range from Elizabeth's protection to Chemistry's betrayal.
• Endings leave relationships unresolved.

Why it matters. Family questions are common, and these pairings give you the strongest second story.

What to remember

• Korea with A Family Supper.
• Chemistry with Odour of Chrysanthemums.

Grief, guilt and the dead

How the stories handle death

Every story has a death or a loss in it, and the stories are less interested in death itself than in what it does to the living. In Odour of Chrysanthemums grief brings Elizabeth to a terrible honesty about her marriage. In Chemistry grief shapes a whole household, and the boy keeps his grandfather alive in a vision.

Grief can harden into cruelty or calculation. Mrs Rutter's grief for her husband becomes her reason for leaving a young man to die. McGahern's father, haunted by an execution, prices his son's life at an insurance payment. Ishiguro's father, widowed and disgraced, may be planning to take his family with him as Watanabe did.

The dead return. Grandfather appears across the pond; the drowned father appears by the bed; the mother in A Family Supper is both a photograph and a ghost in the garden. Writers use the dead to show what the living cannot let go.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Both stories are sad because people die.

Write: Lawrence and Swift both use a death to expose a family's hidden truth: Elizabeth's failure to know her husband, and a mother's choice that may have driven her father to poison himself.

What just happened

• Every story contains a death or loss.
• Grief can open the eyes or harden the heart.
• The dead return in visions, photographs and ghosts.
• The living are the real subject.

Why it matters. A grief essay is strongest when it argues what grief reveals, not that it is sad.

What to remember

• Odour with Chemistry.
• The Darkness Out There with Odour of Chrysanthemums.

Voices, class and belonging

Identity across the collection

Two stories are about voice in the literal sense. Carla has lost her mother's Polish and finds it again in a song; Hortense moves between Jamaican Creole and the English of an English school, and finds her voice in the knowledge the back row teaches itself. Both are placed low by an institution, a staffroom counter and a back row, and both stories end with a public moment in which the overlooked person speaks or sings and is heard.

Class and appearance shape judgement throughout. Sandra decides Kerry is not worth much from his hair and his street. Lorna Phillips sits at the front because she is lighter-skinned and rich. The teachers in My Polish Teacher's Tie step round the catering staff without seeing them. The mining family in Odour of Chrysanthemums lives beside the sidings, and Elizabeth's pride sets her apart from her neighbours.

Belonging is often between places. Hortense is in exile from Heartease; Carla is half-Polish and does not know it in her body until she sings; the son in A Family Supper has been in California so long he cannot recognise his mother's face.

What just happened

• Carla and Hortense both find a voice.
• Class, colour and money decide who is seen.
• Belonging is often divided between two places.
• Judgements by appearance are overturned.

Why it matters. Identity questions reward pairing the two voice stories, or setting one beside The Darkness Out There.

What to remember

• My Polish Teacher's Tie with Invisible Mass of the Back Row.
• Watch for class in every story.

Writing the two-story essay

Planning, balance and comparison

Read the question twice. Underline the focus and the named story. Then choose the second story for the focus. Spend the first five minutes planning: a thesis that names both stories, and three moments from each.

There are two good structures. You can write about the named story first and then the second, linking back as you go; or you can move between them paragraph by paragraph. Either is fine, because comparison is welcome but not itself credited. What matters is that both stories get real attention and that every paragraph serves the argument.

A five-paragraph shape

• Thesis: what both stories show about the focus, and how they differ.
• The named story's opening or set-up, with a method.
• The named story's turning point or ending, with context.
• The second story: two moments, a method and context.
• A judgement: what the pairing shows that neither story shows alone.

Avoid. Writing a long essay on the named story and a single paragraph on the second. Plan the balance before you start.

Remember AO4: write in clear, varied sentences, spell the writers' names and the titles correctly, and leave two minutes to proofread.

What just happened

• Underline the focus and the named story.
• Choose the second story for the focus.
• Plan a balanced five-paragraph essay.
• Proofread names and titles.

Why it matters. Planning is where this question is won: the pairing and the balance are decided before you write.

What to remember

• Both stories need real attention.
• Comparison helps the argument but is not marked for itself.

Context without padding

Making AO3 change a reading

Context on this question is credited when it changes what a moment means. Each story has its own context, so learn one or two precise points for each, and attach them to moments.

One contextual point per story

Avoid. Writing about a writer's life when the story does not need it. One fact can help, such as Lawrence's own mining background, but the essay is about the stories.

What just happened

• Context must change a reading.
• Each story has its own world.
• Attach context to a moment.
• Avoid biography the story does not need.

Why it matters. Two or three precise contextual clauses, spread across both stories, are worth more than a paragraph of history.

What to remember

• Use the table to prepare one point per story.
• Weld context to a moment.

Key moments to learn

Four moments per story

Chemistry

• The launch on the pond, and its sinking.
• Mother sending Grandfather to the shed.
• The gold chain over the acid.
• The vision at the pond.

Odour of Chrysanthemums

• The flowers in the apron and their history.
• The visit to the Rigleys.
• The news: shut in and suffocated.
• Washing the body; the realisation.

My Polish Teacher's Tie

• The uniform and the lost Polish.
• The bird in the mine.
• The dreaded visit.
• The song in the staffroom.

Korea

• The execution and the buttons.
• America in borrowed words.
• The lavatory and the Morans.
• The night line.

A Family Supper

• Fugu and the mother's death.
• Watanabe's family.
• The battleship.
• The pot of fish.

Invisible Mass of the Back Row

• The first Columbus question.
• The cotton tree.
• Cousy and the leaving.
• The answer in England.

The Darkness Out There

• Packer's End and the rumours.
• Kerry judged at a glance.
• The confession.
• The gate.

What just happened

• Four moments per story make twenty-eight in all.
• Each moment can serve several essays.
• Beginnings, turning points and endings matter most.

Why it matters. With four moments per story, any pairing can be planned in five minutes.

What to remember

• Learn them as precise descriptions.
• Add one method and one context point to each.