Teach Primary Issue 19.6

pages 40-41 www.teachwire.net | 87 40-41 Nat knew he was awake but felt as if he must be dreaming again. He’d been feeling that way ever since a knock at the door had interrupted what should have been the Shah family’s first normal breakfast in over a season. Nat had hopped down from his chair, the last corner of his toast in hand, to see who was there, and found a long, thin string of a man stooping in the porch, ashen-faced and clutching an envelope. The caller wasn’t someone who smiled much, but usually the chance that he might smile crackled like a warm hearth in his gaze. At that moment, though, his eyes were winter-bleak with worry. ‘It’s Ista,’ Giddon had said, and Nat had understood that nothing about today was going to be normal. That was before he’d even read the letter. After all they had been through, his mum and Ravi deserved every scrap of normal they could get. So when Priya called from the kitchen to ask who their visitor was, Nat held a hand up to Giddon and called in reply that it was someone looking for a house on the next street. Approximately two minutes later, Nat popped his head back into the kitchen and said that he fancied a quick walk, actually, if that was OK. Thirty seconds after that, he and Giddon were hurrying along the pavement. Nat had read the letter twice by then, and he read it again as they went. The third reading, for some reason, made the situation both more and less real. Ista couldn’t have left with so little explanation. She couldn’t have. But she had. There was no secret message hidden between the lines. Extract from T E ACH RE AD I NG & WR I T I NG At the end of book 1, Nat was finally reunited with his little brother, who had been missing for months. I put a reminder of that here, to emphasise what is at stake for Nat if he rushes off on a new adventure. During this two minutes, Nat would be reading the letter for the first time, but the reader has already seen it so there was no need to show it again. Instead, I’ve used a little time jump so that we can skip forward to the new information. This is a callback to an identical phrase in book 1. Observant readers will guess, or perhaps even know, who the visitor is without me having to tell them. (I then confirm, a few lines down, that the visitor is Giddon.) Nat’s incredulity, as emphasised by the repetition of ‘couldn’t’, shows how much he cares for Ista and how betrayed he feels by her unexplained and sudden departure. My hope is that this signposts to the reader that Ista’s departure IS strange. Her whole arc in book 1 involved her learning that she didn’t need to do everything alone and that she had lots of people she could depend on. So why has she run off now? Perhaps the strange key her father left behind is even more mysterious than it first appeared... The contrast between the simplicity of what Giddon says and the strength of Nat’s reaction to it is meant to show that a) Nat and Giddon have a history and can communicate in more than just words, and b) the strength of Nat’s feelings for Ista. The phrase ‘the last corner’ shows just how close Nat has come to having one normal meal with his newly reunited family. This second time jump, which is shorter than the first, along with the fact that Nat and Giddon are now ‘hurrying’, is intended to increase the sense of urgency. The book is written in a third-person narrative that mostly sticks to Ista’s perspective, but a few sections are from the point of view of other characters. I’ve tried to anchor us clearly in Nat’s head in this opening sentence. Note the tense shift, too. We join him at a point when he has received bad news, then go back further into the past to see his morning being disrupted. I’ve chosen to quickly recap this exchange rather than writing it in direct speech or with lots of detail, to highlight the fact that Nat’s focus is no longer on his immediate surroundings or what he’s saying to his mum. I’ve isolated these words on a line of their own to remind readers that the letters (which Ista has left for her friends) are the only clue Nat and Giddon have as to where she’s gone and why.