Paper 1: Explorations in creative reading and writing

The lighthouse keeper's daughter had never seen the mainland in winter. Every October, when the last supply boat pulled away from the jetty, Nell watched it shrink to a white thumbprint on the grey and then vanish altogether, and the island closed around her like a fist. From then until March there would be no one but her father, the gulls and the wind, which came off the Atlantic as if it had a grievance and meant to settle it. She did not mind, most years. She had the lamp room, high and round and full of brass that she polished until her own face swam in it. She had the logbook, where she wrote the weather each morning in her careful hand: Wind SW 6, rain later, sea rough. She had the books her mother had left, swollen with damp, their pages crinkled like old skin. But this year was different. This year her father had started to forget things. It began small. A cup left on the stairs. The logbook unsigned. Then, one night in November, Nell woke to silence — a silence so complete that for a moment she thought she had gone deaf. The lamp. The great slow sweep of the lamp, which had pulsed through her sleep every night of her life, had stopped. She took the stairs two at a time, one hundred and twelve of them, her bare feet slapping on cold iron. At the top the lamp room was dark and her father was sitting on the floor beside the mechanism, holding a spanner as if he had never seen one before. 'Dad?' He looked up. In the faint grey from the windows his face was a stranger's face, soft and puzzled. 'I can't remember,' he said, 'which way it turns.' Outside, somewhere in the black, a ship was coming towards the rocks.