English 11 Course Pack 2024 PDF

Contents Short Story Unit Short Story Unit Terms................................................................................................................... 4 “The Painted Door” by Sinclair Ross............................................................................................. 5 “A...

Contents Short Story Unit Short Story Unit Terms................................................................................................................... 4 “The Painted Door” by Sinclair Ross............................................................................................. 5 “After the Sirens” by Hugh Hood................................................................................................. 21 “Fall of a City” by Alden Nowlan................................................................................................ 30 “The Firing Squad” by Colin McDougall..................................................................................... 35 “Gentlemen, Your Verdict” by Michael Bruce............................................................................. 51 Short Story Unit Notes.................................................................................................................. 55 Lord of the Flies by William Golding Lord of the Flies Unit Terms........................................................................................................ 60 Lord of the Flies Unit Notes......................................................................................................... 61 Macbeth by William Shakespeare Macbeth Unit Terms..................................................................................................................... 66 Macbeth Unit Notes...................................................................................................................... 67 Poetry Unit Poetry Unit Terms......................................................................................................................... 72 “Sonnet VII” by John Milton........................................................................................................ 73 An Excerpt from “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope........................................................... 74 “Sound and Sense” by Alexander Pope........................................................................................ 75 “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge................................................................................. 76 “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William Wordsworth............................................................. 78 “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley...................................................................................... 79 “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron......................................................................................... 80 “Bright Star” by John Keats.......................................................................................................... 81 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats................................................................................. 82 Poetry Unit Notes.......................................................................................................................... 84 Grammar Notes............................................................................................................................. 89 Vocabulary Sets............................................................................................................................ 97 MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack Page|1 Writing Resources 6+1 Trait® Definitions............................................................................................................... 119 Scoring Rubric for 6+1 Writing Traits®.................................................................................... 122 Key Questions for 6+1 Writing Traits®..................................................................................... 125 Writing Terms............................................................................................................................. 126 Writing Exemplars...................................................................................................................... 127 Short Stories Grade-Wide Write................................................................................................. 139 Lord of the Flies Grade-Wide Write........................................................................................... 141 Macbeth Grade-Wide Write........................................................................................................ 143 Poetry Grade-Wide Write........................................................................................................... 145 Grade-Wide Write Feedback...................................................................................................... 147 Index of Literary Terms and Devices......................................................................................... 151 Literary Terms and Devices........................................................................................................ 153 Reading Log | Term A................................................................................................................ 169 Reading Log | Term B................................................................................................................. 171 Notes........................................................................................................................................... 173 P a g e |2 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  Short Stories Movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack Page|3 Short Story Unit Terms Antagonist Foreshadowing Rising action Character Hero/heroine Round character Characterization Image Setting Climax Indirect presentation Slang Conflict Interior monologue Static character Dénouement Internal conflict Stereotype Dilemma Juxtaposition Stock (or stereotyped) Direct presentation Limited omniscient point character Dynamic character of view Style Epilogue Objective point of view Surprise ending Epiphany Omniscient point of view Symbol External conflict Plot Symbolism Externalization Plot twist Theme Falling action Point of view Third person point of view First person point of view Protagonist Flat character Resolution A list of key terms is at the beginning of each unit, and is linked to the material in the unit. For Short Stories and Poetry, individual works have a list of key terms on their last page. At the end of the coursepack is a glossary with definitions of each term within the coursepack, and an index with page references for where each term is linked to a work. Terms which are introduced in Grade 11 are set in boldface type when they appear throughout the coursepack. Key Terms for Strangers on a Train: antagonist, objective point of view, protagonist P a g e |4 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School The Painted Door (1939) Sinclair Ross (1908-1996) Straight across the hills it was five miles from John’s farm to his father’s. But in winter, with the roads impassible, a team had to make a wide detour and skirt the hills, so that from five the distance was more than trebled to seventeen. “I think I’ll walk,” John said at breakfast to his wife. “The drifts in the hills wouldn’t hold a horse, but they’ll carry me all right. If I leave early I can spend a few hours helping him with his chores, and still be back by suppertime.” She went to the window, and thawing a clear place in the frost with her breath, stood looking across the snowswept farmyard to the huddle of stables and sheds. “There was a double wheel around the moon last night,” she countered presently. “You said yourself we could expect a storm. It isn’t right to leave me here alone. Surely I’m as important as your father.” He glanced up uneasily, then drinking off his coffee tried to reassure her. “But there’s nothing to be afraid of—even if it does start to storm. You won’t need to go near the stable. Everything’s fed and watered now to last till night. I’ll be back at the latest by seven or eight.” 5 She went on blowing against the frosted pane, carefully elongating the clear place until it was oval-shaped and symmetrical. He watched her a moment or two longer, then more insistently repeated, “I say you won’t need to go near the stable. Everything’s fed and watered, and I’ll see that there’s plenty of wood in. That will be all right, won’t it?” “Yes—of course—I heard you—” It was a curiously cold voice now, as if the words were chilled by their contact with the frosted pane. “Plenty to eat—plenty of wood to keep me warm—what more could a woman ask for?” “But he’s an old man—living there all alone. What is it, Ann? You’re not like yourself this morning.” She shook her head without turning. “Pay no attention to me. Seven years a farmer’s wife—it’s time I was used to staying alone.” Slowly the clear place on the glass enlarged: oval, then round, then oval again. The sun was risen above the frost mists now, so keen and hard a glitter on the snow that instead of warmth its rays seemed shedding cold. One of the two-year-old colts that had cantered away when John turned the horses out for water stood covered with rime at the stable door again, head down and body hunched, each breath a little plume of steam against the frosty air. She shivered, but did not turn. In the clear, bitter light the long white miles of prairie landscape seemed a region alien to life. Even the distant farmsteads she could see served only to intensify a sense of isolation. Scattered across the face of so MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack Page|5  vast and bleak a wilderness it was difficult to conceive them as a testimony of human The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross hardihood and endurance. Rather they seemed futile, lost, to cower before the implacability of snow-swept earth and clear pale sun-chilled sky. And when at last she turned from the window there was a brooding stillness in her face as if she had recognized this mastery of snow and cold. It troubled John. “If you’re really afraid,” he yielded, “I won’t go today. Lately it’s been so cold, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure he’s all right in case we do have a storm.” 10 “I know—I’m not really afraid.” She was putting in a fire now, and he could no longer see her face. “Pay no attention. It’s ten miles there and back, so you’d better get started.” “You ought to know by now I wouldn’t stay away,” he tried to brighten her. “No matter how it stormed. Before we were married—remember? Twice a week I never missed and we had some bad blizzards that winter too.” He was a slow, unambitious man, content with his farm and cattle, naïvely proud of Ann. He had been bewildered by it once, her caring for a dull-witted fellow like him; then assured at last of her affection he had relaxed against it gratefully, unsuspecting it might ever be less constant than his own. Even now, listening to the restless brooding in her voice, he felt only a quick, unformulated kind of pride that after seven years his absence for a day should still concern her. While she, his trust and earnestness controlling her again: “I know. It’s just that sometimes when you’re away I get lonely... There’s a long cold tramp in front of you. You’ll let me fix a scarf around your face.” He nodded. “And on my way I’ll drop in at Steven’s place. Maybe he’ll come over tonight for a game of cards. You haven’t seen anybody but me for the last two weeks.” 15 She glanced up sharply, then busied herself clearing the table. “It will mean another two miles if you do. You’re going to be cold and tired enough as it is. When you’re gone I think I’ll paint the kitchen woodwork. White this time—-you remember we got the paint last fall. It’s going to make the room a lot lighter. I’ll be too busy to find the day long.” “I will though,” he insisted, “and if a storm gets up you’ll feel safer, knowing that he’s coming. That’s what you need, maybe—someone to talk to besides me.” She stood at the stove motionless a moment, then turned to him uneasily. “Will you shave then, John—now—before you go?” He glanced at her questioningly, and avoiding his eyes she tried to explain, “I mean—he may be here before you’re back—and you won’t have a chance then.” “But it’s only Steven—we’re not going anywhere.” P a g e |6 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School 20 “He’ll be shaved, though—that’s what I mean—and I’d like you too to spend a little time on yourself.” He stood up, stroking the heavy stubble on his chin. “Maybe I should—only it softens up the skin too much. Especially when I’ve got to face the wind.” She nodded and began to help him dress, bringing heavy socks and a big woollen sweater from the bedroom, wrapping a scarf around his face and forehead. “I’ll tell Steven to come early,” he said, as he went out. “In time for supper. Likely there’ll be chores for me to do, so if I’m not back by six don’t wait.” From the bedroom window she watched him nearly a mile along the road. The fire had gone down when at last she turned away, and already through the house there was an encroaching chill. A blaze sprang up again when the draughts were opened, but as she went on clearing the table her movements were furtive and constrained. It was the silence weighing upon her—the frozen silence of the bitter fields and sun-chilled sky— lurking outside as if alive, relentlessly in wait, mile-deep between her now and John. She listened to it, suddenly tense, motionless. The fire crackled and the clock ticked. Always it was there. “I’m a fool,” she whispered, rattling the dishes in defiance, going back to the stove to put in another fire. “Warm and safe—I’m a fool. It’s a good chance when he’s away to paint. The day will go quickly. I won’t have time to brood.” Since November now the paint had been waiting warmer weather. The frost in the walls on a day like this would crack and peel it as it dried, but she needed something to keep her hands occupied, something to stave off the gathering cold and loneliness. “First of all,” she said aloud, opening the paint and mixing it with a little turpentine, “I must get the house warmer. Fill up the stove and open the oven door so that all the heat comes out. Wad something along the window-sills to keep out the draughts. Then I’ll feel brighter. It’s the cold that depresses.” 25 She moved briskly, performing each little task with careful and exaggerated absorption, binding her thoughts to it, making it a screen between herself and the surrounding snow and silence. But when the stove was filled and the windows sealed it was more difficult again. Above the quiet, steady swishing of her brush against the bedroom door the clock began to tick. Suddenly her movements became precise, The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross deliberate, her posture self-conscious, as if someone had entered the room and were watching her. It was the silence again, aggressive, hovering. The fire spat and crackled at it. Still it was there. “I’m a fool,” she repeated. “All farmers’ wives have to stay alone. I mustn’t give in this way. I mustn’t brood. A few hours now and they’ll be here.” The sound of her voice reassured her. She went on: “I’ll get them a good supper— and for coffee after cards bake some of the little cakes with raisins that he likes… Just three of us, so I’ll watch, and let John play. It’s better with four, but at least we can talk. MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack Page|7  That’s all I need—someone to talk to. John never talks. He’s stronger—doesn’t need to. The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross But he likes Steven—no matter what the neighbours say. Maybe he’ll have him come again, and some other young people too. It’s what we need, both of us, to help keep young ourselves… And then before we know it we’ll be into March. It’s cold still in March sometimes, but you never mind the same. At least you’re beginning to think about spring.” She began to think about it now. Thoughts that outstripped her words, that left her alone again with herself and the ever-lurking silence. Eager and hopeful first, then clenched, rebellious, lonely. Windows open, sun and thawing earth again, the urge of growing, living things. Then the days that began in the morning at half-past four and lasted till ten at night; the meals at which John gulped his food and scarcely spoke a word; the brute-tired stupid eyes he turned on her if ever she mentioned town or visiting. For spring was drudgery again. John never hired a man to help him. He wanted a mortgage-free farm; then a new house and pretty clothes for her. Sometimes, because with the best of crops it was going to take so long to pay off anyway, she wondered whether they mightn’t better let the mortgage wait a little. Before they were worn out, before their best years were gone. It was something of life she wanted, not just a house and furniture; something of John, not pretty clothes when she would be too old to wear them. But John of course couldn’t understand. To him it seemed only right that she should have the clothes—only right that he, fit for nothing else, should slave away fifteen hours a day to give them to her. There was in his devotion a baffling, insurmountable humility that made him feel the need of sacrifice. And when his muscles ached, when his feet dragged stolidly with weariness, then it seemed that in some measure at least he was making amends for his big hulking body and simple mind. Year after year their lives went on in the same little groove. He drove his horses in the field; she milked the cows and hoed potatoes. By dint of his drudgery he saved a few months’ wages, added a few dollars more each fall to his payments on the mortgage; but the only real difference that it all made was to deprive her of his companionship, to make him a little duller, older, uglier than he might otherwise have been. He never saw their lives objectively. To him it was not what he actually accomplished by means of the sacrifice that mattered, but the sacrifice itself, the gesture—something done for her sake. And she, understanding, kept her silence. In such a gesture, however futile, there was a graciousness not to be shattered lightly. “John,” she would begin sometimes, “you’re doing too much. Get a man to help you—just for a month—” but smiling down at her he would answer simply, “I don’t mind. Look at the hands on me. They’re made for work.” While in his voice there would be a stalwart ring to tell her that by her P a g e |8 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  thoughtfulness she had made him only the more resolved to serve her, to prove his devotion and fidelity. 30 They were useless, such thoughts. She knew. It was his very devotion that made them useless, that forbade her to rebel. Yet over and over, sometimes hunched still before their bleakness, sometimes her brush making swift sharp strokes to pace the chafe and rancour that they brought, she persisted in them. This now, the winter, was their slack season. She could sleep sometimes till eight, and John till seven. They could linger over their meals a little, read, play cards, go visiting the neighbours. It was the time to relax, to indulge and enjoy themselves; but instead, fretful and impatient, they kept on waiting for the spring. They were compelled now, not by labour, but by the spirit of labour. A spirit that pervaded their lives and brought with idleness a sense of guilt. Sometimes they did sleep late, sometimes they did play cards, but always uneasily, always reproached by the thought of more important things that might be done. When John got up at five to attend to the fire he wanted to stay up and go out to the stable. When he sat down to a meal he hurried his food and pushed his chair away again, from habit, from sheer work-instinct, even though it was only to put more wood in the stove, or go down to the cellar to cut up beets and turnips for the cows. And anyway, sometimes she asked herself, why sit trying to talk with a man who never talked? Why talk when there was nothing to talk about but crops and cattle, the weather and the neighbours? The neighbours, too—why go visiting them when still it was the same—crops and cattle, the weather and the other neighbours? Why go to the dances in the schoolhouse to sit among the older women, one of them now, married seven years, or to waltz with the work-bent, tired old farmers to a squeaky fiddle tune? Once she had danced with Steven six or seven times in the evening, and they had talked about it for as many months. It was easier to stay at home. John never danced or enjoyed himself. He was always uncomfortable in his good suit and shoes. He didn’t like shaving in the cold weather oftener than once or twice a week. It was easier to stay at home, to stand at the window staring out across the bitter fields, to count the days and look forward to another spring. But now, alone with herself in the winter silence, she saw the spring for what it The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross really was. This spring—next spring—all the springs and summers still to come. While they grew old, while their bodies warped, while their minds kept shrivelling dry and empty like their lives. “I mustn’t,” she said aloud again. “I married him—and he’s a good man. I mustn’t keep on this way. It will be noon before long, and then time to think about supper… Maybe he’ll come early—and as soon as John is finished at the stable we can all play cards.” MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack Page|9  It was getting cold again, and she left her painting to put in more wood. But this The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross time the warmth spread slowly. She pushed a mat up to the outside door, and went back to the window to pat down the woollen shirt that was wadded along the sill. Then she paced a few times round the room, then poked the fire and rattled the stove lids, then paced again. The fire crackled, the clock ticked. The silence now seemed more intense than ever, seemed to have reached a pitch where it faintly moaned. She began to pace on tiptoe, listening, her shoulders drawn together, not realizing for a while that it was the wind she heard, thin-strained and whimpering through the eaves. 35 Then she wheeled to the window, and with quick short breaths thawed the frost to see again. The glitter was gone. Across the drifts sped swift and snakelike little tongues of snow. She could not follow them, where they sprang from, or where they disappeared. It was as if all across the yard the snow were shivering awake—roused by the warnings of the wind to hold itself in readiness for the impending storm. The sky had become a sombre, whitish grey. It, too, as if in readiness, had shifted and lay close to earth. Before her as she watched a mane of powdery snow reared up breast-high against the darker background of the stable, tossed for a moment angrily, and then subsided again as if whipped down to obedience and restraint. But another followed, more reckless and impatient than the first. Another reeled and dashed itself against the window where she watched. Then ominously for a while there were only the angry little snakes of snow. The wind rose, creaking the troughs that were wired beneath the eaves. In the distance, sky and prairie now were merged into one another linelessly. All round her it was gathering; already in its press and whimpering there strummed a boding of eventual fury. Again she saw a mane of snow spring up, so dense and high this time that all the sheds and stables were obscured. Then others followed, whirling fiercely out of hand; and, when at last they cleared, the stables seemed in dimmer outline than before. It was the snow beginning, long lancet shafts of it, straight from the north, borne almost level by the straining wind. “He’ll be here soon,” she whispered, “and coming home it will be in his back. He’ll leave again right away. He saw the double wheel—he knows the kind of storm there’ll be.” She went back to her painting. For a while it was easier, all her thoughts half- anxious ones of John in the blizzard, struggling his way across the hills; but petulantly again she soon began, “I knew we were going to have a storm—I told him so—but it doesn’t matter what I say. Big stubborn fool—he goes his own way anyway. It doesn’t matter what becomes of me. In a storm like this he’ll never get home. He won’t even try. And while he sits keeping his father company I can look after his stable for him, go ploughing through snowdrifts up to my knees—nearly frozen—” P a g e | 10 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  Not that she meant or believed her words. It was just an effort to convince herself that she did have a grievance, to justify her rebellious thoughts, to prove John responsible for her unhappiness. She was young still, eager for excitement and distractions; and John’s steadfastness rebuked her vanity, made her complaints seem weak and trivial. She went on, fretfully, “If he’d listen to me sometimes and not be so stubborn we wouldn’t still be living in a house like this. Seven years in two rooms—seven years and never a new stick of furniture… There—as if another coat of paint could make it different anyway.” She cleaned her brush, filled up the stove again, and went back to the window. There was a void white moment that she thought must be frost formed on the window- pane; then, like a fitful shadow through the whirling snow, she recognized the stable roof. It was incredible. The sudden, maniac raging of the storm struck from her face all its pettishness. Her eyes glazed with fear a little; her lips blanched. “If he starts for home now,” she whispered silently—”But he won’t—he knows I’m safe—he knows Steven’s coming. Across the hills he would never dare.” She turned to the stove, holding out her hands to the warmth. Around her now there seemed a constant sway and tremor, as if the air were vibrating with the shudderings of the walls. She stood quite still, listening. Sometimes the wind struck with sharp, savage blows. Sometimes it bore down in a sustained, minute-long blast, silent with effort and intensity; then with a foiled shriek of threat wheeled away to gather and assault again. Always the eave-troughs creaked and sawed. She started towards the window again, then detecting the morbid trend of her thoughts, prepared fresh coffee and forced herself to drink a few mouthfuls. “He would never dare,” she whispered again. “He wouldn’t leave the old man anyway in such a storm. Safe in here—there’s nothing for me to keep worrying about. It’s after one already. I’ll do my baking now, and then it will be time to get supper ready for Steven.” 40 Soon, however, she began to doubt whether Steven would come. In such a storm even a mile was enough to make a man hesitate. Especially Steven, who was hardly the one to face a blizzard for the sake of someone else’s chores. He had a stable of his own to look after anyway. It would be only natural for him to think that when the storm blew up The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross John had turned again for home. Another man would have—would have put his wife first. But she felt little dread or uneasiness at the prospect of spending the night alone. It was the first time she had been left like this on her own resources, and her reaction, now that she could face and appraise her situation calmly, was gradually to feel it a kind of adventure and responsibility. It stimulated her. Before nightfall she must go to the stable and feed everything. Wrap up in some of John’s clothes—take a ball of string in MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 11  her hand, one end tied to the door, so that no matter how blinding the storm she could at The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross least find her way back to the house. She had heard of people having to do that. It appealed to her now because suddenly it made life dramatic. She had not felt the storm yet, only watched it for a minute through the window. It took nearly an hour to find enough string, to choose the right socks and sweaters. Long before it was time to start out she tried on John’s clothes, changing and rechanging, striding around the room to make sure there would be play enough for pitching hay and struggling over snowdrifts; then she took them off again, and for a while busied herself baking the little cakes with raisins that he liked. Night came early. Just for a moment on the doorstep she shrank back, uncertain. The slow dimming of the light clutched her with an illogical sense of abandonment. It was like the covert withdrawal of an ally, leaving the alien miles unleashed and unrestrained. Watching the hurricane of writhing snow rage past the little house she forced herself, “They’ll never stand the night unless I get them fed. It’s nearly dark already, and I’ve work to last an hour.” Timidly, unwinding a little of the string, she crept out from the shelter of the doorway. A gust of wind spun her forward a few yards, then plunged her headlong against a drift that in the dense white whirl lay invisible across her path. For nearly a minute she huddled still, breathless and dazed. The snow was in her mouth and nostrils, inside her scarf and up her sleeves. As she tried to straighten a smothering scud flung itself against her face, cutting off her breath a second time. The wind struck from all sides, blustering and furious. It was as if the storm had discovered her, as if all its forces were concentrated upon her extinction. Seized with panic suddenly she threshed out a moment with her arms, then stumbled back and sprawled her length across the drift. 45 But this time she regained her feet quickly, roused by the whip and batter of the storm to retaliative anger. For a moment her impulse was to face the wind and strike back blow for blow; then, as suddenly as it had come, her frantic strength gave way to limpness and exhaustion. Suddenly, a comprehension so clear and terrifying that it struck all thoughts of the stable from her mind, she realized in such a storm her puniness. And the realization gave her new strength, stilled this time to a desperate persistence. Just for a moment the wind held her, numb and swaying in its vise; then slowly, buckled far forward, she groped her way again towards the house. Inside, leaning against the door, she stood tense and still a while. It was almost dark now. The top of the stove glowed a deep, dull red. Heedless of the storm, self- absorbed and self-satisfied, the clock ticked on like a glib little idiot. “He shouldn’t have gone,” she whispered silently. “He saw the double wheel—he knew. He shouldn’t have left me here alone.” P a g e | 12 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  For so fierce now, so insane and dominant did the blizzard seem, that she could not credit the safety of the house. The warmth and lull around her was not real yet, not to be relied upon. She was still at the mercy of the storm. Only her body pressing hard like this against the door was staving it off. She didn’t dare move. She didn’t dare ease the ache and strain. “He shouldn’t have gone,” she repeated, thinking of the stable again, reproached by her helplessness. “They’ll freeze in their stalls—and I can’t reach them. He’ll say it’s all my fault. He won’t believe I tried.” Then Steven came. Quickly, startled to quietness and control, she let him in and lit the lamp. He stared at her a moment, then flinging off his cap crossed to where she stood by the table and seized her arms. “You’re so white—what’s wrong? Look at me—” It was like him in such little situations to be masterful. “You should have known better— for a while I thought I wasn’t going to make it here myself—” “I was afraid you wouldn’t come—John left early; and there was the stable—” 50 But the storm had unnerved her, and suddenly at the assurance of his touch and voice the fear that had been gripping her gave way to an hysteria of relief. Scarcely aware of herself she seized his arm and sobbed against it. He remained still a moment unyielding, then slipped his other arm around her shoulder. It was comforting and she relaxed against it, hushed by a sudden sense of lull and safety. Her shoulders trembled with the easing of the strain, then fell limp and still. “You’re shivering,”—he drew her gently towards the stove. “It’s all right—nothing to be afraid of. I’m going to see to the stable.” It was a quiet, sympathetic voice, yet with an undertone of insolence, a kind of mockery even, that made her draw away quickly and busy herself putting in a fire. With his lips drawn in a little smile he watched her till she looked at him again. The smile too was insolent, but at the same time companionable; Steven’s smile, and therefore difficult to reprove. It lit up his lean, still-boyish face with a peculiar kind of arrogance: features and smile that were different from John’s, from other men’s—wilful and derisive, yet naïvely so—as if it were less the difference itself he was conscious of, than the long- accustomed privilege that thereby fell his due. He was erect, tall, square-shouldered. His hair was dark and trim, his lips curved soft and full. While John, she made the The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross comparison swiftly, was thickset, heavy-jowled, and stooped. He always stood before her helpless, a kind of humility and wonderment in his attitude. And Steven now smiled on her appraisingly with the worldly-wise assurance of one for whom a woman holds neither mystery nor illusion. “It was good of you to come, Steven,” she responded, the words running into a sudden, empty laugh. “Such a storm to face—I suppose I should feel flattered.” MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 13  For his presumption, his misunderstanding of what had been only a momentary The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross weakness, instead of angering quickened her, roused from latency and long disuse all the instincts and resources of her femininity. She felt eager, challenged. Something was at hand that hitherto had always eluded her, even in the early days with John, something vital, beckoning, meaningful. She didn’t understand, but she knew. The texture of the moment was satisfyingly dreamlike: an incredibility perceived as such, yet acquiesced in. She was John’s wife—she knew—but also she knew that Steven standing here was different from John. There was no thought or motive, no understanding of herself as the knowledge persisted. Wary and poised round a sudden little core of blind excitement she evaded him, “But it’s nearly dark—hadn’t you better hurry if you’re going to do the chores? Don’t trouble—I can get them off myself—” An hour later when he returned from the stable she was in another dress, hair rearranged, a little flush of colour in her face. Pouring warm water for him from the kettle into the basin she said evenly, “By the time you’re washed supper will be ready. John said we weren’t to wait for him.” 55 He looked at her a moment, “You don’t mean you’re expecting John tonight? The way it’s blowing—” “Of course.” As she spoke she could feel the colour deepening in her face. “We’re going to play cards. He was the one that suggested it.” He went on washing, and then as they took their places at the table, resumed, “So John’s coming. When are you expecting him?” “He said it might be seven o’clock—or a little later.” Conversation with Steven at other times had always been brisk and natural, but now all at once she found it strained. “He may have work to do for his father. That’s what he said when he left. Why do you ask, Steven?” “I was just wondering—it’s a rough night.” “You don’t know John. It would take more than a storm to stop him.” 60 She glanced up again and he was smiling at her. The same insolence, the same little twist of mockery and appraisal. It made her flinch, and ask herself why she was pretending to expect John—why there should be this instinct of defence to force her. This time, instead of poise and excitement, it brought a reminder that she had changed her dress and rearranged her hair. It crushed in a sudden silence, through which she heard the whistling wind again, and the creaking saw of the eaves. Neither spoke now. There was something strange, almost terrifying, about this Steven and his quiet, unrelenting smile; but strangest of all was the familiarity: the Steven she had never seen or encountered, and yet had always known, always expected, always waited for. It was less Steven himself that she felt than his inevitability. Just as she had felt the snow, the silence and the storm. P a g e | 14 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  She kept her eyes lowered, on the window past his shoulder, on the stove, but his smile now seemed to exist apart from him, to merge and hover with the silence. She clinked a cup— listened to the whistle of the storm—always it was there. He began to speak, but her mind missed the meaning of his words. Swiftly she was making comparisons again; his face so different to John’s, so handsome and young and clean-shaven. Swiftly, helplessly, feeling the imperceptible and relentless ascendancy that thereby he was gaining over her, sensing sudden menace in this new, more vital life, even as she felt drawn towards it. The lamp between them flickered as an onslaught of the storm sent shudderings through the room. She rose to build up the fire again and he followed her. For a long time they stood close to the stove, their arms almost touching. Once as the blizzard creaked the house she spun around sharply, fancying it was John at the door; but quietly he intercepted her. “Not tonight—you might as well make up your mind to it. Across the hills in a storm like this—it would be suicide to try.” Her lips trembled suddenly in an effort to answer, to parry the certainty in his voice, then set thin and bloodless. She was afraid now. Afraid of his face so different from John’s—of his smile, of her own helplessness to rebuke it. Afraid of the storm, isolating her here alone with him. They tried to play cards, but she kept starting up at every creak and shiver of the walls. “It’s too rough a night,” he repeated. “Even for John. Just relax a few minutes—stop worrying and pay a little attention to me.” But in his tone there was a contradiction to his words. For it implied that she was not worrying—that her only concern was lest it really might be John at the door. And the implication persisted. He filled up the stove for her, shuffled the cards— won—shuffled— still it was there. She tried to respond to his conversation, to think of the game, but helplessly into her cards instead she began to ask, Was he right? Was that why he smiled? Why he seemed to wait, expectant and assured? 65 The clock ticked, the fire crackled. Always it was there. Furtively for a moment she watched him as he deliberated over his hand. John, even in the days before they were married, had never looked like that. Only this morning she had asked him to shave. Because Steven was coming—because she had been afraid to see them side by side— The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross because deep within herself she had known even then. The same knowledge, furtive and forbidden, that was flaunted now in Steven’s smile. “You look cold,” he said at last, dropping his cards and rising from the table. “We’re not playing, anyway. Come over to the stove for few minutes and get warm.” “But first I think we’ll hang blankets over the door. When there’s a blizzard like this we always do.” It seemed that in sane, commonplace activity there might be release, MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 15  a moment or two in which to recover herself. “John has nails in to put them on. They The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross keep out a little of the draught.” He stood on a chair for her, and hung the blankets that she carried from the bedroom. Then for a moment they stood silent, watching the blankets sway and tremble before the blade of wind that spurted around the jamb. “I forgot,” she said at last, “that I painted the bedroom door. At the top there, see—I’ve smeared the blankets.” He glanced at her curiously, and went back to the stove. She followed him, trying to imagine the hills in such a storm, wondering whether John would come. “A man couldn’t live in it,” suddenly he answered her thoughts, lowering the oven door and drawing up their chairs one on each side of it. “He knows you’re safe. It isn’t likely that he’d leave his father, anyway.” “The wind will be in his back,” she persisted. “The winter before we were married—all the blizzards that we had that year—and he never missed—” 70 “Blizzards like this one? Up in the hills he wouldn’t be able to keep his direction for a hundred yards. Listen to it a minute and ask yourself.” His voice seemed softer, kindlier now. She met his smile a moment, its assured little twist of appraisal, then for a long time sat silent, tense, careful again to avoid his eyes. Everything now seemed to depend on this. It was the same as a few hours ago when she braced the door against the storm. He was watching her, smiling. She dared not move, unclench her hands, or raise her eyes. The flames crackled, the clock ticked. The storm wrenched the walls as if to make them buckle in. So rigid and desperate were all her muscles set, withstanding, that the room around her seemed to swim and reel. So rigid and strained that for relief at last, despite herself, she raised her head and met his eyes again. Intending that it should be for only an instant, just to breathe again, to ease the tension that had grown unbearable—but in his smile now, instead of the insolent appraisal that she feared, there seemed a kind of warmth and sympathy. An understanding that quickened and encouraged her—that made her wonder why but a moment ago she had been afraid. It was as if the storm had lulled, as if she had suddenly found calm and shelter. Or perhaps, the thought seized her, perhaps instead of his smile it was she that had changed. She who, in the long, wind-creaked silence, had emerged from the increment of codes and loyalties to her real, unfettered self. She who now felt his air of appraisal as nothing more than an understanding of the unfulfilled woman that until this moment had lain within her brooding and unadmitted, reproved out of consciousness by the insistence of an outgrown, routine fidelity. P a g e | 16 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School 75 For there had always been Steven. She understood now. Seven years—almost as long as John—ever since the night they first danced together. The lamp was burning dry, and through the dimming light, isolated in the fastness of silence and storm, they watched each other. Her face was white and struggling still. His was handsome, clean-shaven, young. Her eyes were fanatic, believing desperately, fixed upon him as if to exclude all else, as if to find justification. His were cool, bland, drooped a little with expectancy. The light kept dimming, gathering the shadows round them, hushed, conspiratorial. He was smiling still. Her hands again were clenched up white and hard. “But he always came,” she persisted. “The wildest, coldest nights—even such a night as this. There was never a storm—” “Never a storm like this one.” There was a quietness in his smile now, a kind of simplicity almost, as if to reassure her. “You were out in it yourself for a few minutes. He’d have it for five miles, across the hills… I’d think twice myself, on such a night, before risking even one.” Long after he was asleep she lay listening to the storm. As a check on the draught up the chimney they had left one of the stove lids partly off, and through the open bedroom door she could see the flickerings of flame and shadow on the kitchen wall. They leaped and sank fantastically. The longer she watched the more alive they seemed to be. There was one great shadow that struggled towards her threateningly, massive and black and engulfing all the room. Again and again it advanced, about to spring, but each time a little whip of light subdued it to its place among the others on the wall. Yet though it never reached her still she cowered, feeling that gathered there was all the frozen wilderness, its heart of terror and invincibility. 80 Then she dozed a while, and the shadow was John. Interminably he advanced. The whips of light still flicked and coiled, but now suddenly they were the swift little snakes that this afternoon she had watched twist and shiver across the snow. And they too were advancing. They writhed and vanished and came again. She lay still, paralysed. He was over her now, so close that she could have touched him. Already it seemed that a The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross deadly tightening hand was on her throat. She tried to scream but her lips were locked. Steven beside her slept on heedlessly. Until suddenly as she lay staring up at him a gleam of light revealed his face. And in it was not a trace of threat or anger—only calm, and stonelike hopelessness. That was like John. He began to withdraw, and frantically she tried to call him back. “It isn’t true—not really true—listen, John—” but the words clung frozen to her MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 17  lips. Already there was only the shriek of wind again, the sawing eaves, the leap and twist The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross of shadow on the wall. She sat up, startled now and awake. And so real had he seemed there, standing close to her, so vivid the sudden age and sorrow in his face, that at first she could not make herself understand she had only been dreaming. Against the conviction of his presence in the room it was necessary to insist over and over that he must still be with his father on the other side of the hills. Watching the shadows she had fallen asleep. It was only her mind, her imagination, distorted to a nightmare by the illogical and unadmitted dread of his return. But he wouldn’t come. Steven was right. In such a storm he would never try. They were safe, alone. No one would ever know. It was only fear, morbid and irrational; only the sense of guilt that even her new-found and challenged womanhood could not entirely quell. She knew now. She had not let herself understand or acknowledge it as guilt before, but gradually through the wind-torn silence of the night his face compelled her. The face that had watched her from the darkness with its stonelike sorrow—the face that was really John—John more than his features of mere flesh and bone could ever be. 85 She wept silently. The fitful gleam of light began to sink. On the ceiling and wall at last there was only a faint dull flickering glow. The little house shuddered and quailed, and a chill crept in again. Without wakening Steven she slipped out to build up the fire. It was burned to a few spent embers now, and the wood she put on seemed a long time catching light. The wind swirled through the blankets they had hung around the door, and then, hollow and moaning, roared up the chimney again, as if against its will drawn back to serve still longer with the onrush of the storm. For a long time she crouched over the stove, listening. Earlier in the evening, with the lamp lit and the fire crackling, the house had seemed a stand against the wilderness, a refuge of feeble walls wherein persisted the elements of human meaning and survival. Now, in the cold, creaking darkness, it was strangely extinct, looted by the storm and abandoned again. She lifted the stove lid and fanned the embers till at last a swift little tongue of flame began to lick around the wood. Then she replaced the lid, extended her hands, and as if frozen in that attitude stood waiting. It was not long now. After a few minutes she closed the draughts, and as the flames whirled back upon each other, beating against the top of the stove and sending out flickers of light again, a warmth surged up to relax her stiffened limbs. But shivering and numb it had been easier. The bodily well-being that the warmth induced gave play again to an ever more insistent mental suffering. She remembered the shadow that was John. She saw him bent towards her, then retreating, his features pale and overcast with unaccusing grief. She re-lived their seven years together and, in retrospect, found them to P a g e | 18 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  be years of worth and dignity. Until crushed by it all at last, seized by a sudden need to suffer and atone, she crossed to where the draught was bitter, and for a long time stood unflinching on the icy floor. The storm was close here. Even through the blankets she could feel a sift of snow against her face. The eaves sawed, the walls creaked, and the wind was like a wolf in howling flight. And yet, suddenly she asked herself, hadn’t there been other storms, other blizzards? And through the worst of them hadn’t he always reached her? 90 Clutched by the thought she stood rooted a minute. It was hard now to understand how she could have so deceived herself—how a moment of passion could have quieted within her not only conscience, but reason and discretion too. John always came. There could never be a storm to stop him. He was strong, inured to the cold. He had crossed the hills since his boyhood, knew every creek-bed and gully. It was madness to go on like this—to wait. While there was still time she must waken Steven, and hurry him away. But in the bedroom again, standing at Steven’s side, she hesitated. In his detachment from it all, in his quiet, even breathing, there was such sanity, such realism. For him nothing had happened; nothing would. If she wakened him he would only laugh and tell her to listen to the storm. Already it was long past midnight; either John had lost his way or not set out at all. And she knew that in his devotion there was nothing foolhardy. He would never risk a storm beyond endurance, never permit himself a sacrifice likely to endanger her lot or future. They were both safe. No one would ever know. She must control herself—be sane like Steven. For comfort she let her hand rest a while on Steven’s shoulder. It would be easier were he awake now, with her, sharing her guilt; but gradually as she watched his handsome face in the glimmering light she came to understand that for him no guilt existed. Just as there had been no passion, no conflict. Nothing but the sane appraisal of their situation, nothing but the expectant little smile, and the arrogance of features that were different from John’s. She winced deeply, remembering how she had fixed her eyes on those features, how she had tried to believe that so handsome and young, so different from John’s, they must in themselves be her justification. The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross In the flickering light they were still young, still handsome. No longer her justification—she knew now—John was the man—but wistfully still, wondering sharply at their power and tyranny, she touched them a moment with her fingertips again. She could not blame him. There had been no passion, no guilt; therefore there could be no responsibility. Looking down at him as he slept, half-smiling still, his lips relaxed in the conscienceless complacency of his achievement, she understood that thus he was revealed in his entirety—all there ever was or ever could be. John was the man. MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 19  With him lay all the future. For tonight, slowly and contritely through the day and years to come, she would try to make amends. The Painted Door | Sinclair Ross 95 Then she stole back to the kitchen, and without thought, impelled by overwhelming need again, returned to the door where the draught was bitter still. Gradually towards morning the storm began to spend itself. Its terror blast became a feeble, worn-out moan. The leap of light and shadow sank, and a chill crept in again. Always the eaves creaked, tortured with wordless prophecy. Heedless of it all the clock ticked on in idiot content. They found him the next day, less than a mile from home. Drifting with the storm he had run against his own pasture fence and overcome had frozen there, erect still, both hands clasping fast the wire. “He was south of here,” they said wonderingly when she told them how he had come across the hills. “Straight south—you’d wonder how he could have missed the buildings. It was the wind last night, coming every way at once. He shouldn’t have tried. There was a double wheel around the moon.” She looked past them a moment, then as if to herself said simply, “If you knew him, though—John would try.” It was later, when they had left her a while to be alone with him, that she knelt and touched his hand. Her eyes dimmed, it was still such a strong and patient hand; then, transfixed, they suddenly grew wide and clear. On the palm, white even against its frozen whiteness, was a little smear of paint. Ross, Sinclair. “The Painted Door.” Literature: A Pocket Anthology. Eds. Gwynn, R. S. and Wanda Campbell. Toronto, ON: Pearson Education Canada Inc., 2004. 253-271. Print. ISBN: 0205655106. Key Terms: conflict, dilemma, externalization, flat character, foreshadowing, image, interior monologue, internal conflict, limited omniscient point of view, omniscient point of view, plot twist, point of view, round character, style, surprise ending, symbol, symbolism, third person point of view P a g e | 20 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School After the Sirens (1960) Hugh Hood (1928-2000) The only sound for miles around was the hum of a truck in search of survivors. They heard the sirens first about four forty-five in the morning. It was still dark and cold outside and they were sound asleep. They heard the noise first in their dreams and, waking, understood it to be real. “What is it?” she asked him sleepily, rolling over in their warm bed. “Is there a fire?” “I don’t know,” he said. The sirens were very loud. “I’ve never heard anything like that before.” “It’s some kind of siren,” she said, “downtown. It woke me up.” “Go back to sleep!” he said. “It can’t be anything.” 5 “No,” she said, “I’m frightened. I wonder what it is. I wonder if the baby has enough covers.” The wailing was still going on. “It couldn’t be an air-raid warning, could it?” “Of course not,” he said reassuringly, but she could hear the indecision in his voice. “Why don’t you turn on the radio,” she said, “just to see? Just to make sure. I’ll go and see if the baby’s covered up.” They walked down the hall in their pajamas. He went into the kitchen, turned on the radio and waited for it to warm up. There was nothing but static and hum. “What’s that station?” he called to her. “Conrad, or something like that.” “That’s 640 on the dial,” she said, from the baby’s room. He twisted the dial and suddenly the radio screamed at him, frightening him badly. 10 “This is not an exercise. This is not an exercise. This is not an exercise,” the radio blared. “This is an air-raid warning. This is an air-raid warning. We will he attacked in fifteen minutes. We will he attacked in fifteen minutes. This is not an exercise.” He recognized the voice of a local announcer who did an hour of breakfast music daily. He had never heard the man talk like that before. He ran into the baby’s room while the radio shrieked behind him: “We will he attacked in fifteen minutes. Correction. Correction. In fourteen minutes, hi fourteen minutes. We will he attacked in fourteen minutes. This is not an exercise.” “Look,” he said, “don’t ask me any questions, please, just do exactly what I tell you and don’t waste any time.” She stared at him with her mouth open. “Listen,” he said, “and do exactly as I say. They say this is an air-raid and we’d better believe them.” She looked frightened nearly out of her wits. “I’ll look after you,” he said; “just get dressed as fast as you can. Put on as many layers of wool as you can. Get that?” MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 21  She nodded speechlessly. “Put on your woolen topcoat and your fur coat over that. Get as many scarves as After the Sirens | Hugh Hood you can find. We’ll wrap our faces and hands. When you’re dressed, dress the baby the same way. We have a chance, if you do as I say without wasting time.” She ran off up the hall to the coat closet and he could hear her pulling things about. “This will he an attack with nuclear weapons. You have thirteen minutes to take cover,” screamed the radio. He looked at his watch and hurried to the kitchen and pulled a cardboard carton from under the sink. He threw two can openers into it and all the canned goods he could see. There were three loaves of bread in the breadbox and he crammed them into the carton. He took everything that was wrapped and solid in the refrigerator and crushed it in. When the carton was full he took a bucket which usually held a garbage bag, rinsed it hastily, and filled it with water. There was a plastic bottle in the refrigerator. He poured the tomato juice out of it and rinsed it and filled it with water. “This will be a nuclear attack.” The disc-jockey’s voice was cracking with hysteria. “You have nine minutes, nine minutes, to take cover. Nine minutes.” He ran into the dark hall and bumped into his wife who was swaddled like a bear. 15 “Go and dress the baby,” he said. “We’re going to make it, we’ve just got time. I’ll go and get dressed.” She was crying, but there was no time for comfort. In the bedroom he forced himself into his trousers, a second pair of trousers, two shirts and two sweaters. He put on the heaviest, loosest jacket he owned, a topcoat, and finally his overcoat. This took him just under five minutes. When he rejoined his wife in the living room, she had the baby swaddled in her arms, still asleep. “Go to the back room in the cellar, where your steamer trunk is,” he said, “and take this.” He gave her a flashlight which they kept in their bedroom. When she hesitated he said roughly, “Go on, get going.” “Aren’t you coming?” “Of course I’m coming,” he said. He turned the radio up as far as it would go and noted carefully what the man said. “This will be a nuclear attack. The target will probably he the aircraft company. 20 You have three minutes to take cover.” He picked up the carton and balanced the bottle of water on it. With the other hand he carried the bucket. Leaving the kitchen door wide open, he went to the cellar, passed through the dark furnace room, and joined his wife. “Put out the flashlight,” he said. “We’ll have to save it. We have a minute or two, so listen to me.” They could hear the radio upstairs. “Two minutes,” it screamed. P a g e | 22 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  “Lie down in the corner of the west and north walls,” he said quickly. “The blast should come from the north if they hit the target, and the house will blow down and fall to the south. Lie on top of the baby and I’ll lie on top of you!” She cuddled the sleeping infant in her arms. “We’re going to die right now,” she said, as she held the baby closer to her. “No, we aren’t,” he said, “we have a chance. Wrap the scarves around your face and the baby’s, and lie down.” She handed him a plaid woolen scarf and he tied it around his face so that only his eyes showed. He placed the water and food in a corner and then lay down on top of his wife, spreading his arms and legs as much as possible, to cover and protect her. 25 “Twenty seconds,” shrieked the radio. “Eighteen seconds. Fifteen.” He looked at his watch as he fell. “Ten seconds,” he said aloud. “It’s five o’clock. They won’t waste a megaton bomb on us. They’ll save it for New York.” They heard the radio crackle into silence and they hung onto each other, keeping their eyes closed tightly. Instantaneously the cellar room lit up with a kind of glow they had never seen before, the earthen floor began to rock and heave, and the absolutely unearthly sound began. There was no way of telling how far off it was, the explosion. The sound seemed to be inside them, in their bowels; the very air itself was shattered and blown away in the dreadful sound that went on and on and on. They held their heads down, hers pushed into the dirt, shielding the baby’s scalp, his face crushed into her hair, nothing of their skin exposed to the glow, and the sound went on and on, pulsing curiously, louder than anything they had ever imagined, louder than deafening, quaking in their eardrums, louder and louder until it seemed that what had exploded was there in the room on top of them in a blend of smashed, torn air, cries of the instantly dead, fall of steel, timber, and brick, crash of masonry and glass—they couldn’t sort any of it out—all were there, all imaginable noises of destruction synthesized. It was like absolutely nothing they had ever heard before and it so filled their skulls, pushing outward from the brainpan, that they could not divide it into its parts. All that they could understand, if they understood anything, was that this was the ultimate catastrophe, and that they were still recording it, expecting any second to be crushed into After the Sirens | Hugh Hood blackness, but as long as they were recording it they were still living. They felt, but did not think, this. They only understood it instinctively and held on tighter to each other, waiting for the smash, the crush, the black. 30 But it became lighter and lighter, the glow in the cellar room, waxing and intensifying itself. It had no color that they recognized through their tightly-shut eyelids. It might have been called green, but it was not green, nor any neighbor of green. Like the MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 23  noise, it was a dreadful compound of ultimately destructive fire, blast, terrible energy After the Sirens | Hugh Hood released from a bursting sun, like the birth of the solar system. Incandescence beyond an infinite number of lights swirled around them. The worst was the nauseous rocking to and fro of the very earth beneath them, worse than an earthquake, which might have seemed reducible to human dimensions, those of some disaster witnessed in the movies or on television. But this was no gaping, opening seam in the earth, but a threatened total destruction of the earth itself, right to its core, a pulverization of the world. They tried like animals to scrabble closer and closer in under the north cellar wall even as they expected it to fall on them. They kept their heads down, waiting for death to take them as it had taken their friends, neighbors, fellow workers, policemen, firemen, soldiers; and the dreadful time passed and still they did not die in the catastrophe. And they began to sense obscurely that the longer they were left uncrushed, the better grew their chances of survival. And pitifully, slowly their feelings began to resume their customary segmented play amongst themselves, while the event was still unfolding. They could not help doing the characteristic, the human thing, the beginning to think and struggle to live. Through their shut eyelids the light began to seem less incandescent, more recognizably a color familiar to human beings and less terrifying because it might be called a hue of green instead of no-color-at-all. It became green, still glowing and illuminating the cellar like daylight, but anyway green, nameable as such and therefore familiar and less dreadful. The light grew more and more darkly green in an insane harmony with the rocking and the sound. As the rocking slowed, as they huddled closer and closer in under the north foundation, a split in the cellar wall showed itself almost in front of their hidden faces, and yet the wall stood and did not come in on top of them. It held and, holding, gave them more chance for survival although they didn’t know it. The earth’s upheaval slowed and sank back and no gaps appeared in the earth under them, no crevasse to swallow them up under the alteration of the earth’s crust. And in time the rocking stopped and the floor of their world was still, but they would not move, afraid to move a limb for fear of being caught in the earth’s mouth. The noise continued, but began to distinguish itself in parts, and the worst, basic element attenuated itself; that terrible crash apart of the atmosphere under the bomb had stopped by now, the atmosphere had parted to admit the ball of radioactivity, had been blown hundreds of miles in every direction and had rushed back to regain its place, disputing that place with the ball of radioactivity, so that there grew up a thousand-mile vortex of cyclonic winds around the hub of the displacement. The cyclone was almost comforting, sounding, whistling, in whatever stood upright, not trees certainly, but P a g e | 24 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  tangled steel beams and odd bits of masonry. The sound of these winds came to them in the cellar. Soon they were able to name sounds, and distinguish them from others which they heard, mainly sounds of fire—no sounds of the dying, no human cries at all, no sounds of life. Only the fires and cyclonic winds. 35 Now they could feel, and hear enough to shout to each other over the fire and wind. The man tried to stir, to ease his wife’s position. He could move his torso as far as the waist or perhaps the hips. Below that, although he was in no pain and not paralyzed, he was immobilized by a heavy weight. He could feel his legs and feet; they were sound and unhurt, but he could not move them. He waited, lying there trying to sort things out, until some sort of ordered thought and some communication was possible, when the noise should lessen sufficiently. He could hear his wife shouting something into the dirt in front of her face and he tried to make it out. “She slept through it,” he heard, “she slept through it,” and he couldn’t believe it, although it was true. The baby lived and recollected none of the horror. “She slept through it,” screamed the wife idiotically, “she’s still asleep.” It couldn’t be true, he thought, it was impossible, but there was no way to check her statement until they could move about. The baby must have been three feet below the blast and the glow, shielded by a two-and-a-half-foot wall of flesh, his and his wife’s, and the additional thickness of layers of woolen clothing. She should certainly have survived, if they had, but how could she have slept through the noise, the awful light, and the rocking? He listened and waited, keeping his head down and his face covered. 40 Supposing that they had survived the initial blast, as seemed to be the case; there was still the fallout to consider. The likelihood, he thought (he was beginning to be able to think) was that they were already being eaten up by radiation and would soon die of monstrous cancers, or plain, simple leukemia, or rottenness of the cortex. It was miraculous that they had lived through the first shock; they could hardly hope that their luck would hold through the later dangers. He thought that the baby might not have been infected so far, shielded as she was, and he began to wonder how she might be helped to evade death from radiation in the next few days. Let her live a week, he thought, and she After the Sirens | Hugh Hood may go on living into the next generation, if there is one. Nothing would be the same in the next generation; there would be few people and fewer laws, the national boundaries would have perished—there would be a new world to invent. Somehow the child must be preserved for that, even if their own lives were to be forfeited immediately. He felt perfectly healthy so far, untouched by any creeping MEI Secondary School | English 11 Course Pack P a g e | 25  sickness as he lay there, forcing himself and the lives beneath him deeper into their burrow. He began to make plans; there was nothing else for him to do, just then. After the Sirens | Hugh Hood The noise of the winds had become regular now and the green glow had subsided; the earth was still and they were still together and in the same place, in their cellar, in their home. He thought of his books, his checkbook, his phonograph records, his wife’s household appliances. They were gone, of course, which didn’t matter. What mattered was that the way they had lived was gone, the whole texture of their habits. The city would be totally uninhabitable. If they were to survive longer, they must get out of the city at once. They would have to decide immediately when they should try to leave the city, and they must keep themselves alive until that time. 45 “What time is it?” gasped his wife from below him in a tone pitched in almost her normal voice. He was relieved to hear her speak in the commonplace, familiar tone; he had been afraid that hysteria and shock would destroy their personalities all at once. So far they had held together. Later on, when the loss of their whole world sank in, when they appreciated the full extent of their losses, they would run the risk of insanity or, at the least, extreme neurotic disturbance. But right now they could converse, calculate, and wait for the threat of madness to appear days, or years, later. He looked at his watch. “Eight-thirty,” he said. Everything had ended in three- and-a-half hours. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I think so,” she said, “I don’t feel any pain and the baby’s fine. She’s warm and she doesn’t seem frightened.” He tried to move his legs and was relieved to see that they answered the nervous impulse. He lifted his head fearfully and twisted it around to see behind him. His legs were buried under a pile of loose brick and rubble which grew smaller toward his thighs; his torso was quite uncovered. “I’m all right,” he said, beginning to work his legs free; they were undoubtedly badly bruised, but they didn’t seem to be crushed or broken; at the worst he might have torn muscles or a bad sprain. He had to be very careful, he reasoned, as he worked at his legs. He might dislodge something and bring the remnant of the house down around them. Very, very slowly he lifted his torso by doing a push-up with his arms. His wife slid out from underneath, pushing the baby in front of her. When she was free she laid the child gently to one side, whispering to her and promising her food. She crawled around to her husband’s side and began to push the bricks off his legs. “Be careful,” he whispered. “Take them as they come. Don’t be in too much of a hurry.” 50 She nodded, picking out the bricks gingerly, but as fast as she could. Soon he was able to roll over on his back and sit up. By a quarter to ten he was free and they took time P a g e | 26 English 11 Course Pack | MEI Secondary School  to eat and drink. The three of them sat together in a cramped, narrow space under the cellar beams, perhaps six feet high and six or seven feet square. They were getting air from somewhere although it might be deadly air, and there was no smell of gas. He had been afraid that they might be suffocated in their shelter. “Do you suppose the food’s contaminated?” she asked. “What if it is?” he said. “So are we, just as much as the food. There’s nothing to do but risk it. Only be careful what you give the baby.” “How can I tell?” “I don’t know,” he said. “Say a prayer and trust in God.” He found the flashlight, which had rolled into a corner, and tried it. It worked very well. 55 “What are we going to do? We can’t stay here.” “I don’t even know for sure that we can get out,” he said, “but we’ll try. There should be a window just above us that leads to a crawl-space under the patio. That’s one of the reasons why I told you to come here. In any case we’d be wise to stay here for a few hours until the very worst of the fallout is down.” “What’ll we do when we get out?” “Try to get out of town. Get our outer clothes off, get them all off for that matter, and scrub ourselves with water. Maybe we can get to the river.” “Why don’t you try the window right now so we can tell whether we can get out?” 60 “I will as soon as I’ve finished eating and had a rest. My legs are very sore.” He could hear her voice soften. “Take your time,” she said. When he felt rested, he stood up. He could almost stand erect and with the flashlight was able to find the window quickly. It was level with his face. He piled loose bricks against the wall below it and climbed up on them until the window was level with his chest. Knocking out the screen with the butt of the flashlight, he put his head through and then flashed the light around; there were no obstructions that he could see, and he couldn’t smell anything noxious. The patio, being a flat, level space, had evidently been swept clean by the blast without being flattened. They could crawl out of the cellar under the patio, he realized, and then kick a hole in the lath and stucco which skirted it. He stepped down from the pile of brick and told his wife that they would be able After the Sirens | Hugh Hood to get out whenever they wished, that the crawl-space was clear.