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The Darkness Out There in Telling Tales — character analysis

Telling Tales · Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively · Set text on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Modern texts option; not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. A girl visits a sweet old lady, and learns what she did in the wood

Sandra, a teenager, walks through summer fields to help Mrs Rutter, an elderly widow, for the Good Neighbours Club that most of her set at school has joined. On the way she skirts Packer's End, a dark spinney the village children fear, where a German plane crashed in the war. She meets Kerry Stevens, a boy she looks down on, and the two of them clean, mow and fetch for Mrs Rutter, who flatters Sandra and fusses over them both. When Kerry asks about the plane, Mrs Rutter tells how she and her sister found it in 1942, saw two dead airmen and a third trapped and injured, and went back home. She returned the next day, found the young man still alive, and did nothing; he died the following night. Her husband had been killed in the war. Kerry walks out, and Sandra follows. At the gate she sees that he has grown, and that you can get people wrong. The darkness, she understands, is not in the wood but in people, and now in her.

Build your reading of The Darkness Out There in Telling Tales, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this study carries all three.

How The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively) develops

The walk and the fears

The story opens in sunlight and flowers, seen through Sandra's eyes. Her thoughts drift between the club, the woman who runs it, her own appearance and her plans for the future. The dark spinney is the only shadow: as a small child she feared witches and wolves there, and later the dead airmen and stories of strangers who attack girls.

Key moment. Sandra, walking past Packer's End, picturing helmeted heads among the branches and repeating the rumours about the wood that people at school tell (Opening). Lively shows a fear made of stories, many of them second-hand and prejudiced. The real darkness the story will reveal is nothing she imagines.

Key moment. Kerry Stevens rising from behind the hedge and making Sandra scream, and Sandra deciding at a glance that he is not worth much (Opening). Sandra judges by looks and by family, and the reader is drawn into her judgement. The story will overturn it.

The cottage and the kind old lady

Mrs Rutter seems everything a kind old lady should be: round and smiling, with a cottage full of china ornaments and a tin of chocolates. Yet Lively's description gives her darting, searching eyes. She flatters Sandra, talks about her wedding dress, and shows a photograph of her husband, killed early in the war in Belgium.

Key moment. Sandra and Kerry at the fence, Kerry saying he does not like the way the old woman talks, and Sandra defending her because she lost her husband (Middle). Kerry's instinct is better than Sandra's sympathy. The scene sets up the reversal of who is right about Mrs Rutter, and about Kerry.

The story of the plane

Over tea Kerry asks about the plane. Sandra wants him to stop. Mrs Rutter tells the story calmly, in the same homely voice she uses for chocolates and lobelia: the wet November night, the lantern, the markings that showed the plane was German, the cheering.

Key moment. Mrs Rutter describing how she went back alone the next day, found the young airman still alive and calling out, and decided he had it coming because nobody had helped her husband (Climax). Her calm, cosy language turns the horror up. She calls it tit for tat, and the reader understands that the kind old lady let a wounded young man die over two nights.

Key moment. Kerry getting up and saying he is going, and Sandra, after a moment, following him out (Ending). The boy she dismissed acts first and morally. Sandra's choice to follow him is her first step out of her old way of seeing.

How The Darkness Out There is written

Lively uses a third-person narrator who stays close to Sandra's thoughts, so the reader shares her judgements before seeing them overturned.

The opening is full of light, flowers and summer, and the darkness is kept in the wood. The story moves the darkness indoors.

Mrs Rutter's speech is cosy and homely even when she describes letting a man die. The gap between her tone and her story is the climax's power.

The final paragraph is an epiphany: the darkness is human knowledge, and it cannot be shut out by drawing the curtains.

The Darkness Out There in context

The story is set in an English village long after the Second World War, in a community that still tells stories about it. Mrs Rutter's husband was killed early in the war, and a German plane came down near her cottage in 1942.

Helping the old has become a craze among Sandra's set, advertised with a jokey poster about adopting a granny; the light-hearted framing makes the story's discovery more shocking.

Relationships

  • Odour of Chrysanthemums — Both end with a woman who realises she has misjudged someone, and with darkness as a state of mind.
  • Korea — Both show the lasting damage of war, and a young person learning a hard truth about an adult.
  • Chemistry — Both trace a child's loss of innocence through an adult's hidden act.

What The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively) stands for

  • Packer's End: childish fears of the wood, replaced by a real and human darkness.
  • The flowers and sunlight: the bright surface of Sandra's world, and of the story's opening.
  • The flowered tin and the china ornaments: Mrs Rutter's sweet surface, hiding cruelty.
  • The lace cloth and the fluted cup: the domestic world Sandra stares at as the truth sinks in.

Why Lively made The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively)

  • To show the loss of innocence as the discovery that evil can wear a friendly face.
  • To question easy judgements based on appearance, class and rumour.

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively) can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • A coming-of-age story in which innocence is lost in a single afternoon.
  • A story about war's long shadow, in which grief turns into cruelty.
  • A story about judging by appearances, which Sandra, and the reader, are made to unlearn.

Essay arguments

  • Lively builds her climax by contrast: the cosiest setting holds the worst confession.
  • Sandra's point of view is the story's trap; the reader shares her judgements and then loses them with her.
  • The ending moves the darkness from the wood into the mind, so the story's subject is knowledge rather than danger.

The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively) in theme essays

  • Growing up: Sandra's fears, the confession, the gate.
  • Grief and loss: Mrs Rutter's husband and the young airman.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Lively present the idea that people are not what they seem in ‘The Darkness Out There’, and how is it shown in one other story you have studied?
  • Explore how ‘The Darkness Out There’ and one other story you have studied show a young person changing her view of the world.

Think you understand it?

Reading is the start. On Incandio a topic counts as mastered only once you have taught it and defended it — the two things a revision guide cannot ask of you.

Incandio this topic → Prove it. Teach it. Defend it. What does “Incandio it” mean?

  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of The Darkness Out There in Telling Tales to Ember, an AI pupil who has not made one, and answer the awkward question. Understanding is credited; wording is not required.
  2. Defend it — Hold your reading of The Darkness Out There in Telling Tales against the writer in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — exam-style practice, marked on Incandio.

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