Passage 1: The Forgotten Allotment / Passage 2: The Clock Tower Repair

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Two short original passages written specifically for this worksheet; no existing text has been used or adapted.

When Mr Okafor announced that Year 6 would be adopting the neglected allotment behind the school hall, most pupils groaned at the thought of extra gardening after lessons. The plot had been abandoned for three years, and the rampant weeds now stood taller than the fence posts. Nadia, however, felt a flicker of interest; her grandmother had kept an allotment in Leicester for decades, and she offered to bring in some spare tools from home. Over the following weeks, the class cleared the ground, turned the soil and finally planted rows of carrots, beans and lettuce. Watering the beds became a daily ritual, and pupils took it in turns to check for pests among the young shoots. By half term, the first green shoots had begun to push through the soil, and even the most reluctant gardeners admitted to feeling proud. Mr Okafor explained that the biggest challenge lay ahead: keeping the plants alive through the six-week summer holiday, when nobody would be at school to water them. Determined not to let their hard work go to waste, the pupils drew up a rota so that a different family would visit the allotment each week. When the class returned in September, they could hardly believe how much the vegetables had grown, with marrows the size of rugby balls and beanstalks reaching well above head height. The harvest was so bountiful that the school held a special assembly, with baskets of vegetables given to every family who had helped water the plot. Nadia, once one of the loudest groaners, now spent every lunchtime checking on the beds, and she told her grandmother that she wanted to keep her own allotment one day, just like her.

For as long as anyone in Marsden could remember, the clock tower in the market square had chimed every hour without fail. When it suddenly fell silent one Tuesday morning, the whole town seemed to notice the silence immediately. Mrs Kowalczyk, who ran the bakery beneath the tower, said she felt strangely lost without the familiar chimes to mark her baking schedule. The parish council contacted several specialist firms, but each one warned that repairing such an old mechanism would take several weeks and cost thousands of pounds. Just as the council began to lose hope, a retired watchmaker named Mr Adeyemi-Whitfield stepped forward and offered to examine the mechanism for free. Climbing the narrow spiral staircase with his toolbox, he discovered that a single rusted cog had ground the entire clock to a halt. Over the next fortnight, he worked patiently each evening, cleaning decades of grime from the gears and carefully replacing the broken parts. On the morning of the town's summer fair, a small crowd gathered in the square, unsure whether the repair had worked. At exactly nine o'clock, the bells rang out clearly across the rooftops, and the crowd broke into applause. Mr Adeyemi-Whitfield, embarrassed by the attention, insisted that the clock deserved the credit, not him. From that day on, the council made sure his name was never forgotten, printing a small plaque at the base of the tower in his honour.