Reading and Comprehension (Prose) Set 3 - Worksheets, Questions and Revision

The Attic Violin

An original short story written for Revision Library.

[1] Freya had expected the attic at Foxglove Cottage to hold nothing more interesting than moth-eaten blankets and a few chipped teacups, but the low room under the eaves turned out to be a museum of somebody else's whole life. A rocking horse with a cracked ear stood guard beside stacks of yellowing postcards, and a rail of faded floral dresses hung along one wall like a row of ghosts waiting patiently for a party that had ended decades ago. Dust hung in the single shaft of light from the skylight, drifting as slowly as ash settling after a fire, and the whole space smelled of beeswax polish, mothballs and something older still, something Freya could not quite name. Great-Aunt Hettie had asked for the attic to be cleared before the move to Larkspur Court, and it was, she had said firmly from the doorway below, 'high time somebody dealt with sixty years of clutter.'

[2] It was while shifting a tea chest away from the cold water tank that Freya's fingers brushed something hard and rectangular, wedged into the narrow gap behind the pipework. She had to kneel flat on the rough floorboards and reach with her whole arm before she could work the object free: a black case, its corners furred with damp, its leather handle stiffened almost to the point of snapping. The catches had rusted shut, and it took several minutes of careful wiggling with a flathead screwdriver borrowed from the kitchen drawer before the lid finally sighed open on hinges that had not moved in half a lifetime.

[3] Inside, nestled in a bed of moth-eaten velvet the colour of a bruise, lay a violin. One string curled loose and broken across the fingerboard like a fallen strand of hair, and a fine grey bloom of old resin dust coated the wood beneath the bridge. Wedged into the compartment meant for spare strings, Freya found a bundle of envelopes tied with a ribbon gone the brittle brown of dead leaves. She carried the whole find downstairs balanced carefully in both arms, as though she were carrying something that might wake.

[4] Great-Aunt Hettie went very still when she saw what lay in Freya's hands. For a long moment she said nothing at all, and the only sound in the small sitting room was the tick of the mantel clock, suddenly much louder than before. 'I wondered if that old thing had rotted through by now,' she said eventually, though her voice had lost its usual brisk certainty. 'Put the kettle on, Freya, and I will tell you why a violin has spent sixty years hiding behind a water tank instead of being played.'

[5] The story came out slowly, in pieces, punctuated by sips of tea gone cold. At seventeen, Hettie had won a place to study violin at a college in London, offered after a single audition by a teacher named Miss Nwosu, who had written to say she had 'not heard talent of that clarity in a decade.' That same spring, Hettie's mother fell seriously ill, and with her father needed at the family bakery from four o'clock every morning, someone had to run the house and mind her three younger brothers. Hettie never sat the entrance audition a second time. Miss Nwosu's last letter, which Freya read aloud at the table, still held a place open 'for whenever circumstances allow,' in handwriting that grew fainter and more hesitant with each line, as though even the ink itself sensed it was writing to no one.

[6] 'I told myself I would go back to it once the boys were older,' Hettie said, turning the violin gently in her lap as if it might still be startled awake. 'Then there was always a next thing, and then another, until it was simply easier to leave the case behind the tank than to look at it.' Freya said nothing, but that evening she drove into Skipton and returned with a fresh set of strings, and by the time Hettie's bungalow was finally ready the following month, the restrung violin travelled with her in the passenger footwell, not packed away in a box of things to be dealt with later. It was not perfect, Hettie admitted, propping it on the new mantelpiece where anyone entering the room would see it first; her fingers, after sixty stiff years, would probably never again find quite what they once had. But for the first time since she was seventeen, the violin was somewhere she could see it every single day, rather than somewhere she had chosen, quietly and for six decades, not to look.