Reading and Comprehension (Prose) Set 6 - Worksheets, Questions and Revision

The Tin Behind the Skirting Board

An original short story written for Revision Library.

[1] Leila Hassan had pictured her first evening at Marlow House a hundred different ways on the long flight back from Muscat, but none of the versions in her head had included quite so much rain. The taxi from the station dropped her at the end of a gravel drive because, the driver explained apologetically, he did not fancy his chances on the flooded lane beyond it, and so she arrived at the school's front steps soaked through, dragging a suitcase that had clearly been packed for a warmer country. A tall woman in a green waterproof was waiting under the porch light, a clipboard held against her chest like a shield. 'You must be the new girl,' she said, in a voice that made the words sound like an inconvenience rather than a welcome. 'I am Mrs Okafor, head of Year Nine boarding. We do not usually admit students in January, so I trust you will not need telling anything twice.'

[2] Leila followed Mrs Okafor's brisk footsteps along a corridor that smelled of floor polish and, faintly, of school dinners, past noticeboards crowded with photographs of hockey teams and a handwritten sign about a Founders' Concert that meant nothing to her yet. Everything about Marlow House felt as though it had been running perfectly well for a hundred years without her, and would continue running perfectly well whether or not she managed to keep up. In Muscat, the school gates had opened straight onto a courtyard full of bougainvillea, with the call to prayer drifting faintly over the wall from the mosque nearby most afternoons; here, the windows rattled faintly in their frames each time the wind gathered itself for another attempt at the building, as though the whole house itself were bracing against the storm.

[3] The dormitory, when they reached it, held six narrow beds separated by thin curtains, four of them clearly already occupied, judging by the string lights and photographs Blu-tacked above the pillows. Mrs Okafor pointed to the bed nearest the window, the only bare one, and recited the rules of the house in the flat, practised tone of someone who had said them a thousand times before: lights out at half past nine, uniform checks on Mondays, and absolutely no food kept in the dormitory on account of what had happened, apparently, the previous winter. Then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the corridor, and Leila was left alone with a suitcase full of clothes for the wrong climate and a narrow bed that did not yet feel like it belonged to anyone.

[4] It was while she was pushing her case under the bed that she noticed the loose skirting board beneath the windowsill, a thin strip of wood that wobbled when her knuckle knocked against it. Curious more than hopeful, she worked her fingers into the gap and found, to her surprise, a small tin box wedged behind it, its paint long since faded to the colour of weak tea. Inside, folded around a flower pressed flat and papery thin, was a note written in handwriting that had clearly practised its loops many times: To whoever finds this next. I do not know your name, or where you have come from, or how far you have travelled to be reading this, but I know that this bed by the window has felt like the loneliest place in the world at least once, because it certainly did to me. It gets better than the first night. It always does. Leila read it twice, then a third time, and found, without quite understanding why, that her eyes had filled with tears she had been holding back since the airport.

[5] She might have kept the tin a secret entirely, if Mrs Okafor had not walked back in unannounced the following evening to check the lights-out rule was being properly observed, and caught Leila sitting cross-legged on her bed with the note open in her lap. For a long moment Mrs Okafor said nothing at all, and Leila braced herself for a telling-off about the loose skirting board. Instead, something shifted in the older woman's face, a softening so brief that Leila almost missed it. 'I wrote that,' Mrs Okafor said finally, 'in my first term here, twenty-two years ago, when I was rather more frightened than I ever admitted to anyone.' She did not explain any further, and did not stay long, but for the rest of that visit her clipboard-shield voice had noticeably thawed, and just before she left she added, almost as an afterthought, that new girls were allowed one extra biscuit at supper on their first Friday, provided nobody official ever heard it from her.

[6] Leila kept the tin on her windowsill after that, the pressed flower propped carefully beside it, and slowly the narrow bed by the window began to feel less like a punishment and more like the start of something. On the last evening of her first week, she wrote her own note on a torn half-sheet of paper, folded it small, and tucked it into the tin alongside the original, ready for whichever girl arrived next, frightened and soaked through and certain that nobody in the whole building would ever understand. Her father had once told her, on the drive to Muscat airport, that the hardest beginnings were usually the ones that made the strongest endings, and she had not really believed him at the time. Sliding the skirting board carefully back into place, she thought that, for once, he might actually have been right.