Grade 9 Notes: Telling Tales

Chemistry (Graham Swift)

A boy, his widowed mother, his grandfather and the man who comes between them

An adult looks back on the autumn he was ten. His father has died in a plane lost over the Irish Sea, and he and his mother have moved into his grandfather's house, where the three of them live through a year of quiet, grieving contentment. Then his mother meets Ralph. A model boat the boy and his grandfather built sinks in the park pond, Ralph moves in, and the grandfather is pushed out of the family until he eats his meals alone in the brick shed where he does his chemistry. The boy plans to throw acid in Ralph's face; before he can, his grandfather is found dead, and the verdict is suicide by poison. The story ends with the boy at the pond, seeing his grandfather on the far bank, waiting for the boat. Swift's subject is how a family changes after a death, and whether anything that is lost is ever really gone.

The trio and the sinking boat

The story opens on a ritual. Mother sits on a bench, the boy launches the model motor-launch, and Grandfather waits on the far side of the circular pond to catch it, as if the boat travels along a line that ties the three of them together. The adult narrator explains how the household came to be: the grandmother's death when he was four, his father's death when he was seven, and his mother selling up to move in with her father.

Key moment. The model launch, on its first trip after Mother has met Ralph, settling lower in the water and sinking before it reaches Grandfather (Opening). The first loss the boy says he witnessed is a toy, but the timing makes it an omen: the line between the three of them is broken as soon as Ralph exists. Mother's white, still face hints that she understands more than the boy does.

Grandfather's response to the sinking is that a loss must be accepted because it cannot be undone, said as if to himself. The story will spend the rest of its length testing that lesson.

Ralph, the supper table and the shed

Ralph arrives as a weekend guest and becomes a lodger. At supper he shouts at Grandfather to leave Mother alone, after Grandfather has remarked that she no longer cooks the curry she made for her dead husband. The boy refuses Ralph's offer of a new boat just to watch his face fall. Mother, caught between the two men, finally tells Grandfather to take his meal out to his shed.

Key moment. Mother returning from the kitchen with the pudding and, instead of facing Ralph, telling Grandfather to eat in his shed (Middle: the supper). The boy expects solidarity and gets betrayal. The moment shows the cost of Mother's need for Ralph and makes Grandfather an exile in his own house.

Key moment. Grandfather in the shed, holding his late wife's gold watch chain over a mixture of acids that would dissolve it, then drawing it back (Middle: the shed). Chemistry, he says, changes things rather than making them, and gold itself can change. He tests the boy, and himself, with the one object tied to the dead grandmother, and stops. The scene sets up the story's argument: forms change, but the elements are not lost.

The acid, the verdict and the pond

Watching his mother drink with Ralph and look trapped in his arms, the boy steals some nitric acid in a spice jar, meaning to spoil Ralph's face at breakfast. That night his father appears by his bed, soaked and crusted with salt, and says that she made a hole in the bottom of the boat so that it would sink while they watched; the boy, taking him to mean his mother, promises to prove it. In the morning an ambulance takes Grandfather's body away; he has swallowed prussic acid from his shed.

Key moment. Mother, after the funeral, opening the windows of Grandfather's room on a bright November day and calling it lovely, while Ralph wears one of the dead father's sweaters (Ending). Relief replaces grief, and the dead are literally worn by the living. The boy, who was never questioned by the officials, carries the suspicion that suicide can be a kind of murder.

The story closes at the pond. The boy throws the acid in, and at dusk he sees his grandfather standing on the far side, smiling, and knows the launch is still travelling towards him. Whether this is a ghost, grief or a child's need is never settled.

How Chemistry is written

Swift uses an adult narrator remembering himself at ten. The voice is calm and exact, which makes the violence the boy plans more disturbing.

The story is divided into short sections, each a step in the household's change: the pond, the supper, the shed, the acid, the morning, the funeral, the pond again.

Grandfather's lessons in chemistry are the story's central metaphor. Things change form without being destroyed, and the ending applies that idea to the dead.

The circular pond and the line the boat travels give the story a shape: it begins and ends there, and the line is still unbroken in the last image.

Chemistry in context

The story has no named historical setting. Its context is the family: a widow dependent on her father, the arrival of a new partner, and a grandfather who loses his place.

A death recorded by officials as suicide, with a child who is never asked what he knows, shows how adults close a question that a child keeps open.

Relationships

• Korea — Both are told by a son looking back on the moment he understood a parent; both end on a quiet scene by water.
• A Family Supper — Both turn on a death by poison and a parent who may have caused or chosen it, and both refuse to confirm it.
• Odour of Chrysanthemums — Both show how a death rearranges a family and what the living do with their grief.

What Chemistry (Graham Swift) stands for

• The model launch: the bond between the three generations, sunk when Ralph arrives and, at the end, still travelling.
• The pond: circular, returning, the place of loss and of the final vision.
• Gold and the elements: what changes form without being destroyed, the story's answer to death.
• The shed: Grandfather's exile and the boy's refuge, a sealed world of knowledge and poison.

Why Lively made Chemistry (Graham Swift)

• To show grief and remarriage from the point of view of a child who cannot say what he knows.
• To use the science of change as a way of thinking about loss, loyalty and what survives a death.

Other readings

• A ghost story in which the dead stay loyal when the living do not.
• A study of a child's grief, in which the father's visit and the final vision are what the boy needs to believe.
• A story about a mother judged harshly by a son who never hears her side.

Essay arguments

• Swift makes the sinking launch the story's turning point, so a family's break is shown through an object rather than explained.
• The adult narrator never resolves whether Grandfather's death was chosen or driven, and that refusal is the story's point.
• Chemistry gives the boy a way to think about death: forms change, elements remain, so the ending is consolation as well as loss.

In theme essays

• Parents and children: Mother caught between her father and Ralph; the boy's anger.
• Grief and loss: the father, the boat, the grandfather, and the final vision.
• Growing up: the plan for the acid, and the knowledge the boy keeps to himself.

Questions that get asked

• How does Swift show a child's divided loyalties in ‘Chemistry’, and how does one other story you have studied treat the same idea?
• Change is the subject of the grandfather's lessons. Explore how ‘Chemistry’ and one other story you have studied present a family changing.

Think you understand Chemistry (Graham Swift)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence)

A miner's wife waits for a husband she thinks is drinking, and meets him at last as a stranger

Elizabeth Bates lives in a cottage beside the railway sidings of a Nottinghamshire colliery with her two children, John and Annie, and a third child on the way. Through a long winter evening she waits for her husband Walter, sure he has gone past his own door to the pub, and her anger hardens. As the hours pass, anger turns to fear. She goes to a neighbour, the miner Rigley, and later her mother-in-law arrives with news of an accident. Walter has been trapped by a fall underground and has suffocated. The men carry his body into the cold parlour, and Elizabeth and his mother wash and dress it. Looking at him, Elizabeth realises that she never knew him and that their marriage was two strangers fighting in the dark. The story moves from a domestic grievance to a reckoning with death and with herself.

The waiting

Section I is built from waiting. The story opens with a small engine passing the colliery as the miners come up, then finds Elizabeth in the garden calling her son in from the brook. Her father, an engine driver, stops for tea and tells her he means to marry again soon; he also reports that Walter has been boasting in a pub about money he means to spend. Indoors the tea and the dinner wait, the children wait, and Elizabeth's anger grows.

Key moment. Elizabeth picking a sprig of the pale chrysanthemums and tucking it into her apron band, after scolding John for scattering their petals on the path (Section I: the garden). The flowers enter the story as something she picks almost without choosing. The gesture is tender and unconsidered, and Lawrence lets it sit in the reader's mind until the flowers return in the parlour.

Key moment. Annie noticing the flower in her mother's apron, and Elizabeth explaining that chrysanthemums marked her wedding, Annie's birth and the first time Walter was brought home drunk (Section I: the lamp). The flower now carries the whole history of the marriage. The moment comes just as the lamplight reveals that she is pregnant, so the child to come is placed inside the same pattern.

From anger to fear

Section II follows Elizabeth out into the dark. She will not go into the bright pub to fetch her husband; instead she asks at the Rigleys' cramped, untidy house. Jack Rigley says he left Walter finishing a stint at the coal face and goes to look for him. Back at home, Elizabeth hears the winding engine and starts at every sound.

Key moment. Elizabeth's mother-in-law arriving late in the evening, weeping, to say that Walter has had an accident (Section II: the news). The older woman's grief is loud and self-absorbed; Elizabeth's thoughts turn at once to practical things, the pension and the work of nursing him. Lawrence sets two kinds of feeling side by side and judges neither simply.

Key moment. A miner at the door reporting that Walter has been dead for hours, shut in by a fall behind him and suffocated (Section II: the death). The fall did not crush him; it trapped him. The image of a man sealed in, with no visible wound, prepares the story's final idea that he was always closed off from her.

The body in the parlour

Elizabeth prepares the cold parlour where the chrysanthemums stand in vases. The manager and his men carry Walter in, a vase is knocked over, and she mops up the water before anything else. When Annie calls down asking whether her father is drunk, Elizabeth says that he is asleep. Then the two women strip and wash the body.

Key moment. Elizabeth kneeling beside her husband's washed body and realising that she had never known him, that they had met and fought in the dark, and that she had denied him what he was (Ending). This is the story's turn. The anger of the evening is replaced by shame and pity, and the reader is asked to see the marriage through death's clear light. It is a judgement on her as well as on him.

The story ends with Elizabeth tidying the kitchen, submitting to life as the master she must serve, and shrinking from death as the master she fears.

How Odour of Chrysanthemums is written

Lawrence opens with a long, slow description of the colliery, the engine and the miners coming up, so the industrial world is established before any person speaks.

Dialogue is in the local dialect for the miners and their families, set against Elizabeth's more correct speech, which marks her pride and her distance.

The narration moves into Elizabeth's thoughts, so the reader shares her anger and then her horror. At the end it reports her realisation almost as an argument with herself.

Light and dark structure the story: the fire, the lamp, the black sidings, the single candle in the cold parlour.

Odour of Chrysanthemums in context

The story is set beside Brinsley Colliery in Nottinghamshire, near where Lawrence grew up as a miner's son. Pit accidents, long shifts and the pub were part of ordinary life.

Elizabeth's first practical thought, of the pension and what she could earn, reflects how completely a miner's family depended on one wage.

First published in a magazine in 1911, the story was revised for Lawrence's collection The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914); the ending in this set text is the revised one.

Relationships

• Chemistry — Both show a family rearranged by a death, and a woman whose grief is not what others expect.
• A Family Supper — Both are set around a meal that waits and a parent who controls the table; both turn on what is unsaid.
• The Darkness Out There — Both end with a woman made to see that she had judged a person wrongly.

What Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence) stands for

• Chrysanthemums: the marriage's milestones, beauty and sorrow together, and finally the cold smell of death.
• The pit and the fall: the industrial world that feeds the family and kills its men; Walter shut in, as he was shut off from her.
• Fire and dark: the warm kitchen hearth against the black sidings and the cold parlour.
• The unborn child: life continuing, and a weight apart from her at the moment of loss.

Why Lively made Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence)

• To show the daily life of a mining family, with its poverty, drink and danger, from inside.
• To show grief as a moment of truth that overturns a person's understanding of her own life.

Other readings

• A tragedy of a marriage, in which both partners failed each other and only death shows it.
• A judgement on Elizabeth, whose pride and coldness the ending exposes.
• A story about mining communities, where danger is ordinary and women carry the cost.

Essay arguments

• Lawrence builds the story on a long delay, so the reader shares Elizabeth's anger before sharing her horror.
• The chrysanthemums move from apron to vase to the smell of the parlour, tracing a marriage from beginning to end.
• The ending reverses the story's sympathy: the absent drunkard becomes a man Elizabeth never let herself see.

In theme essays

• Grief and loss: the body in the parlour; the two women's grief.
• Parents and children: Elizabeth shielding John and Annie; Walter's mother remembering her boy.

Questions that get asked

• How is a marriage judged in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, and how does one other story you have studied present a relationship that has failed?
• Explore how Lawrence shows a character changing her understanding of someone in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and in one other story you have studied.

Think you understand Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

My Polish Teacher's Tie (Helen Dunmore)

A school dinner lady, a Polish penfriend, and the identity she was made to forget

Carla Carter works part time in a school kitchen, serving tea and buns to teachers who barely see her. She is half-Polish: her mother came to England after the war and spoke Polish to her until her father stopped it when she started school. When the headteacher mentions Polish teachers who want English penfriends, Carla asks for an address and begins writing to Stefan, who calls himself Steve. He assumes she is a teacher, and she never corrects him. He sends her poems, one of them about her lost language. When he comes to the school on an exchange, she dreads being exposed. Instead, after hearing the staff mock him, she crosses the staffroom and introduces herself, and he sings a Polish song her mother used to sing, and she sings it with him. The story is about class, a lost inheritance, and the courage to be seen.

Invisible in the staffroom

Carla tells her own story in a dry, plain voice. She knows her hourly rate exactly, she knows the teachers pay into a kitty for their tea, and she notes with irony how keen the school is on fairness. She listens to the headteacher's weekly announcements only by accident, and he cannot quite remember her name.

Key moment. Carla lifting the counter-flap and walking through the teachers to ask the headteacher for the Polish address (Opening). Crossing the counter is crossing a class line. The teachers move aside without seeing her, and the Head assumes she must have come about a problem. Her request surprises everyone, perhaps including herself.

The letters and the poems

Through the letters Carla finds a voice she has not used before. She tells Steve about her daughter Jade and the Polish songs she has forgotten, but nothing about her job. She tells herself she is not lying, only letting him think what he likes. He writes poems and translates them for her.

Key moment. Steve's poem about a bird that flew down a mine shaft and sang until it died, heard by everyone and found by no one (Middle: the letters). The poem reads like an image of Carla herself: a voice trapped underground, heard but never found. She asks to see the Polish original, and its sounds remind her of her mother's rhymes.

Key moment. Steve sending a second poem, written from what Carla told him, about a child who has lost the words her mother gave her (Middle: the letters). Her private loss becomes art in someone else's language, and he asks her permission to publish it. The poem names her identity before she does.

The visit and the song

When the Head announces that Stefan Jeziorny is coming from Katowice to stay with Mrs Kenward, Carla's pleasure turns to dread. His next letter is stiff and asks to be introduced to her colleagues. She imagines the whisper running round the staffroom and him thinking she had made a fool of him. She stops writing.

Key moment. Carla hearing Valerie Kenward mock Stefan's accent, his talk of poetry and his ties, then refusing to make Valerie's tea and going to him (Ending). Contempt for him gives Carla the courage she lacked for herself. Refusing the tea is a small rebellion that costs her nothing and means everything.

Key moment. Stefan holding Carla's hand in the middle of the staffroom and singing a Polish song her mother sang, and Carla finding the words and singing with him (Ending). The language she was made to forget comes back through her body before her mind understands it. The Head's surprise that she is Polish, and her reply that she had not realised either, close the circle.

How My Polish Teacher's Tie is written

Carla narrates in the first person in plain, conversational sentences, with a dry humour that exposes the staffroom's snobbery.

The story is built on letters: Carla finds a voice in writing that she does not use in the staffroom, and the letters let her be someone others do not see.

Two poems sit inside the story, and both are images of Carla's lost identity. The song at the end completes the pattern without words she understands.

The tie is introduced through Valerie's mockery and ends as Carla's last word, a structural turn that mirrors her change.

My Polish Teacher's Tie in context

Carla's mother came to Britain from Poland after the Second World War, as many Poles did. Her father's choice to stop the Polish reflects a pressure on migrant families to fit in.

The school is a modern English school with an inspection system, a staff kitty and a teacher exchange with Katowice; the class line between teaching and catering staff is the story's social context.

Relationships

• Invisible Mass of the Back Row — Both are about identity, language and being placed low in an institution; both end with a voice finally heard.
• Korea — Both turn on a parent's decision about a child's future, made without asking her.
• The Darkness Out There — Both set a person's real worth against how others judge them on sight.

What My Polish Teacher's Tie (Helen Dunmore) stands for

• The tie: bright, too wide and hopeful, at first a joke for the staff, finally a flag from a better country than either of theirs.
• The uniform: blue overall and white cap, the marks of Carla's class and of how she is overlooked.
• The bird in the mine: a voice that sings unheard, a picture of a lost identity.
• The tape and the songs: her mother's language, kept but not understood until it returns.

Why Lively made My Polish Teacher's Tie (Helen Dunmore)

• To show how class makes some people invisible in the institutions they serve.
• To show identity as something that can be lost through other people's decisions and recovered through connection.

Other readings

• A story about class, in which a dinner lady proves herself the equal of the teachers.
• A story about recovering an identity that a father's decision took away.
• A love story told with restraint, ending on a beginning.

Essay arguments

• Dunmore uses Carla's flat, ironic voice to expose the snobbery of the staffroom without a single speech against it.
• The tie moves from a sign of Stefan's foolishness to a symbol of hope, and Carla's view of it measures her change.
• Language is the story's thread: lost at six, glimpsed in a poem, recovered in a song.

In theme essays

• Identity and belonging: the lost language, the uniform, the song.
• Parents and children: the father who stopped the Polish; Carla and Jade.

Questions that get asked

• How does Dunmore present a character who feels she does not belong in ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’? Write about this story and one other you have studied.
• Explore how pretending to be something you are not is shown in ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ and in one other story you have studied.

Think you understand My Polish Teacher's Tie (Helen Dunmore)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

Korea (John McGahern)

A son on his father's eel boat discovers what the father has planned for him

A young man spends his last summer fishing for eels with his father on an Irish river, waiting for his exam results. Rowing, the father talks for once about his past: as a prisoner during the Irish War of Independence he watched two men executed, and the memory spoiled even his honeymoon. He then urges his son to go to America. Hiding in the outside lavatory with the worms, the son overhears his father telling a cattle dealer how much money the Morans received from the American army: a monthly sum for sons who serve, and a large payment when their son Luke was killed in Korea. The son understands that his father would send him to be conscripted and profit if he died. That evening he refuses to go. Rowing in the dark, he feels closer to his father than ever, and watches him as if preparing himself to kill. The story is about a father and son, the wars that shape them, and the end of youth.

The father's war

The story opens mid-conversation, with the son asking about an execution his father saw. The father tells it as he rows: captured in an ambush in 1919, held in Mountjoy prison, he watched from his cell as a man and a weeping boy were shot in the yard.

Key moment. The father describing the boy at the execution tearing at his tunic as he was shot, the buttons flying into the air, while the older man fell back with his hands still in his pockets (Opening). The two deaths show two ways of facing an order: the boy obeys and still dies, the man refuses and dies anyway. The detail of the buttons is the image the father cannot shake off.

Key moment. The father recalling his honeymoon on the tram at Howth, when the furze pods bursting reminded him of the buttons and spoiled the whole day (Opening). War follows him into the happiest day of his life. The son learns that his father is haunted, which makes the later betrayal both more shocking and more understandable.

The river and the offer

The middle of the story is full of the work of eel fishing: the long line with its hooks, the wire cage in the bulrushes, the eels sent live to London each week. They are the last to fish this river for a living, and the tourist board wants the licence stopped. The father asks what his son will do, then suggests America, using big words about opportunity that the son notices are not his own.

Key moment. The son, emptying worms in the dark lavatory, overhearing his father tell the cattle dealer Farrell about the money the Morans received after Luke was killed in Korea (Middle: the lavatory). The offer of a chance becomes a calculation. The squalid setting matches the son's shock, and the adult narrator says that he knew there that his youth had ended.

The refusal and the night line

That evening, setting the night line, the father asks whether the son has decided. The son says he is not going. The father warns that it will be his own funeral if he comes to nothing, and the son repeats the phrase back to him. Then the son asks whether the war comes back to him as he grows older.

Key moment. The father admitting that his memories of war and prison come back, that talking of the execution disturbed him, and that he wishes he had fought his own wars and let the country fend for itself (Ending). The fighter for his country now regrets it, which helps explain why he would sell his son to someone else's war. Neither of them mentions the overheard conversation.

Key moment. The son rowing in the dark while his father lets out the line, feeling closer to him than ever, and watching every movement as if he too had to prepare himself to murder (Ending). The closeness is that of two men who now understand each other completely, and the last image connects the son to the executioners of the opening. It is one of the bleakest endings in the collection.

How Korea is written

McGahern frames a story within a story: the father's account of the execution opens the son's own account of his last summer.

The prose is spare and precise, especially about the work of fishing, so that feeling is carried by detail and silence.

The son notices that his father's words about America are not his own. Borrowed language is the first sign of the plan.

The ending links the son to the executioners of the opening, a structural echo that makes the final closeness ambiguous.

Korea in context

The father was captured during the Irish War of Independence and held in Mountjoy prison. He fought for the new state and now feels it has failed him: the authorities may take away his fishing licence.

In the early 1950s young Irish emigrants to America could be drafted into the army, and the Korean War killed some of them. The money paid to the Moran family is the story's hinge.

Relationships

• A Family Supper — Both set a son against a father shaped by war, at a meal or a task, with the real subject unspoken.
• Chemistry — Both are about the moment a son understands a parent, told by the son years later.
• My Polish Teacher's Tie — Both turn on a parent deciding a child's future without asking.

What Korea (John McGahern) stands for

• The buttons: the boy's death and the father's trauma, returning in the furze pods.
• The eels and the line: a dying way of life, and the trap the father lays for his son.
• America and Korea: opportunity and death, the same offer seen from two sides.
• The lavatory: the squalid place of revelation and shame.

Why Lively made Korea (John McGahern)

• To show how violence and poverty can distort a parent's love.
• To show the end of youth as a moment of understanding rather than an event.

Other readings

• A story of betrayal, in which a father values his son at the price of an insurance payment.
• A story of damage, in which the father's war and poverty explain, without excusing, what he plans.
• A coming-of-age story in which the son grows up by learning to see his father as he is.

Essay arguments

• McGahern opens with an execution so that the son's discovery later reads as another kind of sentence passed on the young.
• The father's borrowed words about America reveal the plan before the lavatory scene confirms it.
• The final image is deliberately ambiguous: the son's closeness to his father is also a hardening, a readiness to kill something in himself.

In theme essays

• Parents and children: the offer of America; the lavatory; the night line.
• Growing up: the end of youth in the dark.
• Grief and loss: the executed boy; Luke Moran's funeral.

Questions that get asked

• How does McGahern show a son coming to see his father clearly in ‘Korea’, and how is this shown in one other story you have studied?
• Explore how the effects of war on ordinary people are shown in ‘Korea’ and in one other story you have studied.

Think you understand Korea (John McGahern)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro)

A son comes home to Japan, a father cooks fish, and nobody says what everyone fears

The narrator, a young man who has been living in California, flies home to Tokyo and his father's house in the Kamakura district two years after his mother's death. She died from eating fugu, a fish that is poisonous if badly prepared, when an old school friend invited her to eat it. His father's business has collapsed and his partner Watanabe has killed himself. His sister Kikuko arrives from university in Osaka, and in the garden she tells him that Watanabe killed his wife and daughters too. The father shows his son the empty rooms and a model battleship, and says he believes the mother's death was no accident. At supper, in dim lantern light, the father serves a pot of fish and will only call it fish. They eat it. The story ends with father and son waiting in silence for Kikuko to bring the tea. Ishiguro never says whether the father has poisoned them.

The return and the father

The story begins with an explanation of fugu and of the mother's death, given in a calm, almost clinical voice. The father is a formidable man, proud of his samurai ancestry, who once struck his son for chattering. Their talk is full of pauses. He says he is prepared to forget the past and that his son was swayed by influences.

Key moment. The father praising his dead business partner Watanabe as a man of principle who could not live with the disgrace of the firm's collapse (Opening). Honour is the father's highest value, and the story will test what it costs. The praise sounds different once Kikuko reveals what Watanabe did.

The garden and the well

With their father out of the room, Kikuko relaxes. In the darkening garden she smokes in secret, talks about a boyfriend who wants to go to America, and walks to the old well the narrator once said was haunted.

Key moment. Kikuko telling her brother that Watanabe gassed his wife and two little daughters in their sleep before killing himself (Middle: the garden). The revelation turns the father's word principle into something chilling, and sets the pattern of a father who takes his family with him.

Key moment. The narrator describing the ghost he saw as a child: an old woman in a white kimono, her hair coming loose (Middle: the garden). A ghost story told for fun becomes uncanny at supper, when the photograph of the mother shows the same figure.

The battleship and the supper

The father takes his son through rooms that are startlingly empty, then into a room crowded with books and a half-built plastic battleship. He says he served on a ship in the war but always wanted the air force, because an aeroplane always had a final weapon. He says the mother's death was no accident, and that parents lose their children to things they do not understand.

Key moment. The father lifting the lid of the pot, steam rising towards the lantern, and answering his son's question about what the fish is with the single word fish, more than once (Ending: the supper). After the story's opening on fugu, the reader cannot not suspect poison. Ishiguro holds the tension through repetition and politeness, and lets the son offer his father the last piece.

After supper the father calls Watanabe's killings a mistake, invites his son to live with him, and says things will improve when Kikuko comes home. The final sentence leaves them waiting for the tea, in silence.

How A Family Supper is written

Ishiguro's narrator is reserved and formal; the dialogue is polite and full of pauses, so tension sits in what is not said.

The opening paragraphs explain fugu in a calm, almost textbook voice. Every later detail is read in the light of that explanation.

Repetition builds menace: the father asks more than once whether his son is hungry and calls the dish only fish.

Light and shadow structure the evening: the garden darkening, the dim lantern, the father's face half in shadow.

A Family Supper in context

The story is set in Japan after the Second World War. The father's samurai pride, his idea of honour, and his dislike of doing business the foreign way show a generation unsettled by defeat and by the West.

Fugu became popular after the war and was sometimes prepared at home before stricter rules came in. Watanabe's suicide after the firm's disgrace echoes an older code of honour.

Relationships

• Korea — Both pair a son with a father shaped by war and honour, and both end in quiet with the danger unspoken.
• Chemistry — Both turn on a death by poison and leave the reader to decide what really happened.
• Odour of Chrysanthemums — Both centre on a meal and on what the family cannot say to each other.

What A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro) stands for

• Fugu: a delicacy that can kill, the proof in the eating; the mother's death and the supper's threat.
• The well and the ghost: the past that haunts the house, and the mother the son failed to recognise.
• The battleship: the father's war, his wish for a final weapon, and a child's model in an old man's hands.
• Light and dark: the dim lantern, the face half in shadow, the garden going dark.

Why Lively made A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro)

• To show the gap between generations in a Japan changed by war and by the West.
• To build menace out of politeness and silence, leaving the reader to supply the worst.

Other readings

• A story of a planned murder and suicide that the reader is left to complete.
• A story of a lonely father whose menace is only the son's fear projected onto him.
• A study of honour and shame in post-war Japan, and of children lost to another culture.

Essay arguments

• Ishiguro places the explanation of fugu first, so that every later detail is read as a threat.
• Watanabe's story is a mirror: what he did to his family is what the reader fears the father may be doing.
• The calm, formal dialogue is the story's method; danger lives in what the characters will not say.

In theme essays

• Parents and children: the father's judgement, the son's distance, Kikuko's obedience.
• Grief and loss: the mother's death, Watanabe's family, the empty house.

Questions that get asked

• How does Ishiguro create tension in ‘A Family Supper’? Write about this and about how tension is built in one other story you have studied.
• Explore how ‘A Family Supper’ and one other story you have studied present the gap between what characters say and what they mean.

Think you understand A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

Invisible Mass of the Back Row (Claudette Williams)

A girl in the back row, in Jamaica and then in England, learns to answer back

Hortense, the narrator, sits in the back row of a hot schoolroom in Jamaica. When a school inspector demands that she recite facts about Columbus, she blurts out a challenge: what was Columbus doing here, and who invited him? Her teacher raps her knuckles with a ruler. Afterwards she chases Lorna Phillips, the rich, lighter-skinned favourite who always sits at the front. Then comes lunch under the cotton tree, served by women she knows and loves. Her parents, who have been in England for years, send for her and her brothers. She leaves her home, and the grave of Cousy, the old woman who died in her sleep beside her. In England she finds cold houses, parents who feel like strangers, and a new school that places her near the bottom stream. There, with a back row of girls who read library books about slavery and resistance, she finally answers a question about Columbus in full, and the back row claims a victory.

The inspector and the ruler

The story opens in the present tense, inside Hortense's fear. The inspector's ruler points at her; the heat under the metal roof is a steam bath; the words she knows will not come. Then the rebel inside her speaks.

Key moment. Hortense, told to recite the story of Columbus, instead asking what he was doing in Jamaica and who invited him, and having her knuckles struck with a ruler (Opening). Her question goes to the heart of a colonial curriculum that celebrates the man who began the conquest. Punished for it, she sees for an instant that her teacher is as frightened of the inspector as she is.

Key moment. Hortense and her friends chasing Lorna Phillips, the teacher's favourite, until kind Teacher Edwards appears and the chase becomes a polite walk (Opening). The anger the children cannot turn on the inspector is turned on another child. Williams shows how humiliation passes downward, and how colour and money decide who sits where.

The cotton tree and the leaving

Lunch under the great cotton tree is the warmest passage in the story: the lunch women, each with her own manner, and a list of foods that fills the senses. Then a letter and a parcel arrive from England. Hortense is delighted at first, and the departure, when it comes, is numb and painful.

Key moment. Hortense, on the morning she leaves, remembering waking beside Cousy and finding that she had died in the night, tears still on her face (Middle: the departure). Grief interrupts the journey. The question of who will look after Cousy's grave and roses shows what she is leaving behind, and the adult narrator calls the departure the start of an exile.

England and the back row

England arrives as cold, paraffin heaters, houses stuck together and no yard to play in. A short passage of free verse breaks the prose, as if ordinary sentences cannot hold the feeling. Her mother asks her to choose what to call her parents, and Hortense finds she has no language for these familiar strangers.

Key moment. Hortense reading aloud at her new school's interview, not knowing many of the words, and being placed in a class one step above the bottom stream (Middle: England). The comedy of everyone being impressed hides a sorting that repeats Jamaica: once again she is assigned to the back.

Key moment. Hortense, asked by a cold teacher why Columbus sailed, answering slowly and fully with the conquest, the enslavement and the trade in African people, backed by Fay Green, while the teacher reddens (Ending). The question that silenced her in Jamaica is the one she now answers, with knowledge the back row taught itself from library books. The class leaves with dignity, and the back row claims its victory.

How Invisible Mass of the Back Row is written

Williams writes much of the story in the present tense, so the reader is inside Hortense's fear in the schoolroom.

The narrative moves between Standard English and Jamaican Creole, especially in dialogue and in Hortense's thoughts, showing her identity under pressure and in defiance.

A short passage of free verse breaks the prose when she arrives in England, as if ordinary sentences cannot hold the cold and the strangeness.

The story is framed by two questions about Columbus, one she cannot answer and one she can, so its structure measures her growth.

Invisible Mass of the Back Row in context

In colonial and post-colonial Caribbean schools, children were often taught the history of the European powers, including Columbus as a discoverer.

After the Second World War many Caribbean people settled in Britain. Parents often went first and sent for their children later, and many Caribbean children in English schools were placed in low streams.

Relationships

• My Polish Teacher's Tie — Both are about language, identity and being placed low in an institution, and both end with a voice that finally speaks.
• The Darkness Out There — Both turn on how history, and the war or the conquest behind it, is told and judged.
• Chemistry — Both show a child's grief and anger in a household that has changed around her.

What Invisible Mass of the Back Row (Claudette Williams) stands for

• The back row: a place of humiliation that becomes a community and a source of pride.
• Columbus: the history taught to the colonised, questioned in Jamaica and answered in England.
• The cotton tree: home, community and nourishment.
• Language: Jamaican Creole, the new English of England, and the language of knowledge the girls teach themselves.

Why Lively made Invisible Mass of the Back Row (Claudette Williams)

• To show how education can humiliate children and how they can claim it back.
• To show migration from the inside: the loss, the cold, and the new language a child must learn.

Other readings

• A story of resistance, in which knowledge becomes power.
• A story of migration and loss, in which the victory at the end does not cancel the exile.
• A story about language, in which finding a voice is the real subject.

Essay arguments

• Williams frames the story with two questions about Columbus, so Hortense's growth is measured by the answer she can finally give.
• The shift between Standard English and Jamaican Creole shows identity under pressure and in defiance.
• The back row moves from invisibility to community, and the title's mass becomes a force.

In theme essays

• Identity and belonging: Creole, England, the back row.
• Growing up: the departure, the new parents, the final answer.
• Grief and loss: Cousy and Heartease.

Questions that get asked

• How does Williams present education and power in ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’? Write about this story and one other you have studied.
• Explore how ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’ and one other story you have studied show a young person finding her voice.

Think you understand Invisible Mass of the Back Row (Claudette Williams)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively)

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.

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.

Other readings

• 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.

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 The Darkness Out There (Penelope Lively)? Teach it, then defend it against Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively →

Parents and children

Five of the seven stories are built around a parent and a child, and in most of them the child sees something about the parent that the parent cannot or will not say.

In ‘Chemistry’ and ‘Korea’ a son looks back on the moment he understood a parent: a mother who chose a new man over her father, and a father who would trade his son's life for money. Both are told years later, so the adult narrator knows what the boy only sensed. In ‘A Family Supper’ the son comes home to a father whose silences may hide a plan to kill them all, and the story never confirms it.

Parents here are shaped by forces bigger than them. McGahern's father has been through war and prison; Ishiguro's has lost his business and his wife; Swift's mother has lost her husband. In ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ Elizabeth shields her children from their father's death even as she faces it, and her mother-in-law grieves for the boy she raised. In ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ a father's decision that his daughter should forget Polish costs her a part of herself.

The strongest pairings set a story where the child acts against a parent beside one where the child accepts or absorbs. The son in ‘Korea’ refuses America; the son in ‘A Family Supper’ eats the fish.

Pairings that work

• ‘Korea’ with ‘A Family Supper’: two sons, two fathers shaped by war, two endings in silence.
• ‘Chemistry’ with ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: a family rearranged by a death, and the grief of those left.
• ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ with ‘Korea’: a parent's decision about a child's future made without asking.

Think you understand parents and children in Telling Tales? Teach it, then defend it →

Grief and loss

Every story contains a death or a loss, and most are about what the living do with grief: hide it, turn it into anger, or let it change how they see.

‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is the collection's fullest study of grief. Elizabeth's anger at an absent husband becomes fear, then shock, then a terrible recognition that she never knew him. Lawrence sets her silent grief beside her mother-in-law's open weeping, and neither is simply right. In ‘Chemistry’ grief is a household's whole atmosphere, and the boy's final vision at the pond is his way of refusing to accept that his grandfather is gone.

Grief can turn to cruelty. In ‘The Darkness Out There’ Mrs Rutter's loss of her husband becomes her reason for leaving a young enemy airman to die. In ‘A Family Supper’ the mother's death and Watanabe's killings hang over the meal. In ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’ Hortense's grief for Cousy and for home sits inside a story about leaving.

Pairings that work

• ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ with ‘Chemistry’: two households changed by a death, two women's grief judged by others.
• ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ with ‘The Darkness Out There’: two women whose response to loss the story asks us to judge.
• ‘A Family Supper’ with ‘Chemistry’: two deaths by poison that the stories refuse to explain.

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Growing up and lost innocence

Several stories capture the moment a young person learns something that cannot be unlearned, usually about an adult.

In ‘The Darkness Out There’ Sandra walks into the cottage believing in sweet old ladies and walks out knowing that ordinary people can be monstrous. In ‘Korea’ the son knows, in the dark lavatory, that his youth has ended. In ‘Chemistry’ the boy plans an act of violence, is overtaken by a death, and keeps to himself what he suspects.

Growing up is not always loss. In ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’ Hortense grows from a frightened girl who blurts a question into a young woman who can answer it in full, with friends beside her. The strongest essays notice that each story places the change at a different point: a single afternoon, a single overheard conversation, or years of migration.

Pairings that work

• ‘The Darkness Out There’ with ‘Korea’: an adult's hidden act revealed, and a young person changed by knowing it.
• ‘Chemistry’ with ‘The Darkness Out There’: innocence lost through an adult's secret.
• ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’ with ‘The Darkness Out There’: growing up as gaining a voice, set against growing up as losing a belief.

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Identity, class and belonging (minor)

Two stories are directly about identity, and several more about where a person is placed by class, colour, money or culture.

Carla in ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ and Hortense in ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’ are both placed low by an institution: one serves tea behind a counter, one sits in the back row. Both have lost or are losing a language, and both stories end with a voice that is finally heard. In ‘A Family Supper’ the son has become a stranger to his own family after years in America; he does not even recognise his mother's photograph.

Class runs through the collection. Sandra in ‘The Darkness Out There’ judges Kerry by his hair and his family; the teachers in ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ do not see the woman who serves them; the mining family in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ lives beside the sidings in a cottage overrun by rats. Writing about identity, connect the person to the place they are put, and to what they do about it.

Pairings that work

• ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’ with ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’: two voices recovered in institutions that silenced them.
• ‘A Family Supper’ with ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’: identity lost between two countries.

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