English Paper 1 Questionbank

Title: Barbecue Shakespeare
Text Type: Drama Script
Setting: A small flat in London. Evening. Books are scattered on the floor and a mug is perched precariously on the arm of a sofa.
Characters: MEG (early 30s, sharp, self-conscious), EDWIN (mid-30s, calm, observant)

(MEG sits cross-legged on the floor, sipping wine from a chipped glass. EDWIN stands by a bookshelf, leafing through a book. A comfortable silence—just barely—hangs in the air.)

MEG:
(sipping)
Hilary’s decided she’s going to “do” English literature now. Chaucer, no less.

EDWIN:
(looking up)
Middle English Hilary? That’s bold.

MEG:
She says she “always felt a connection” with medieval texts. Probably because Mum made us wear sackcloth once for a school pageant. She played a beggar. Very formative.

EDWIN:
(half-smiling)
You’re not being generous.

MEG:
Why should I be? She thinks if she reads The Canterbury Tales and puts on some glasses-without-a-prescription, she’ll suddenly be ‘cultured’ — with quote marks.

EDWIN:
(gently)
You sound... a bit snobbish.

MEG:
(mocking tone)
Oh Edwin. It’s not snobbery. It’s observation. You should hear her when she starts on Shakespeare. (putting on an exaggerated voice)
“Don’t you think King Lear really captures the emotional fragility of retirement?” Over sausages. At a barbecue. Next to the dog.

EDWIN:
(raises eyebrow)
Ah, the Royal Shakespeare Company... in thongs and aprons.

MEG:
Exactly. It’s the whole middle class back home. They’ve replaced wine with ‘relevance’ and think quoting Hamlet gives them depth.

EDWIN:
(sitting now, amused)
You once cried during a Globe performance of Twelfth Night.

MEG:
That was different. That was real. Not over a scorched snag with plastic chairs and “Would you like another chop, Polonius?”

(Pause.)

EDWIN:
Why does it bother you so much?

MEG:
(with forced brightness)
It doesn’t. It’s just... overwritten. All of it. You know? The whole literary canon. Should be more honest.

EDWIN:
(not letting her off)
Your tone says otherwise.

MEG:
(snaps, then softer)
I just wish she’d say something about my book. I sent it three months ago. Not even a “well done.”
(pause)
I just want a reaction.

(EDWIN watches her. There is a long silence. The mood shifts.)

EDWIN:
Have you asked her?

MEG:
(sighs)
No. That would be... needy. And if there's one thing she can't stand, it's need.

(She sets her glass down. For a moment, her performative tone slips.)

EDWIN:
Maybe it's not about Shakespeare. Or Chaucer. Or sausage-fuelled soliloquies.

MEG:
(small smile)
Maybe not. Maybe I just wanted her to say it mattered. That I mattered.

(Pause.)

EDWIN:
Well, I read it. Twice. And it mattered.

(They sit in the quiet. The tension has dissolved, replaced by something gentler.)

End Scene

The following text is an excerpt from The Red Mitten, a piece of prose fiction. The passage follows Maria, a woman grappling with the aftermath of a significant personal loss, as she navigates the quiet rituals of daily life on a rainy afternoon.

The rain had started again, tapping faintly against the kitchen window like a memory that wouldn’t quite leave. Maria stood by the sink, her hands still wet from washing the dishes, watching the garden blur into muted shades of green and brown. A single red mitten lay on the patio stones, soaked through, a remnant of a morning forgotten in the rush of everything.

She had meant to call her mother. She had meant to write to Elise. She had meant to pick up the dry cleaning, to return the library books, to apologize to Tom. But instead, she had stayed in, rearranging the spice cupboard and alphabetizing the condiments.

There was a comfort in order, even if it meant nothing. The world outside could be chaos—spilled coffee, sharp words, late trains—but inside her cupboards, the paprika always came before the rosemary.

Behind her, the radio murmured something about traffic delays and foreign elections. The kettle clicked off. Somewhere upstairs, the floor creaked—she told herself it was the house settling, but the hairs on her neck rose anyway. Silence followed.

It had been six months since Elise left, and still the quiet was heavier than Maria ever expected. Elise had taken the cat, most of her books, and the navy scarf Maria had knitted during the winter of 2020. In exchange, she left behind two chipped mugs, a tangled phone charger, and an ache that settled between Maria’s ribs whenever she turned the key in the front door and found no lights on.

The neighbours had stopped asking questions. At first, there had been polite interest—“How’s Elise doing?” and “We miss seeing you both at the market”—but Maria’s short answers and forced smiles eventually built a fence higher than any hedge.

She moved through the day with a kind of stillness. In the mornings, she brewed coffee and drank it slowly, letting the bitterness spread across her tongue like punishment. She reread old postcards from Elise, trying to decipher subtext in every loopy sentence. “The sun’s just come out after three days of rain. You’d love it here.” Was that an invitation? Or a farewell?

On this particular afternoon, Maria opened the back door and stepped outside barefoot. The cold stones shocked her soles. She bent and picked up the mitten, wringing the water out slowly. The wool clung to her fingers. She turned it over once, twice, as if inspecting it might answer something. Then, in one swift movement, she tossed it into the bin.

Inside again, she sat at the kitchen table and traced circles into the condensation on her tea mug. The house sighed around her—pipes expanding, wood groaning with age. She thought of calling Tom, but she couldn’t find the words that weren’t soaked in regret. Instead, she reached for a notepad from the drawer. The page was blank, painfully white.

She wrote one sentence:

Today it rained, and I didn’t cry.

It was something. Not poetry. Not closure.

But something.

The following text is an excerpt from The Edge, a piece of prose fiction. The passage follows Luca, a young man grappling with rejection and desperation after losing a life-changing opportunity. As he flees through the city at night, the extract explores themes of identity, self-worth, and resilience through a moment of emotional crisis.

He was already running when the sirens started.

Luca didn’t look back. His shoes slapped the pavement, too thin for the cold, too worn to hold much grip. Behind him, the alley narrowed, shadows peeling off the brick walls like smoke. He turned left, then right, then left again—his feet knowing the route even if his mind didn’t. The city blurred: rusted fences, broken lights, graffiti screaming in colour.

He had the envelope in his coat pocket. He could feel it crinkle with every movement, too thin to matter to anyone else, too heavy to leave behind.

He hadn't meant to take it. Not really. It had just been sitting there—on the desk, unguarded, open. A letterhead, a signature, a number. His name.

They had called it a mistake. “Administrative oversight,” they said. “Not eligible.” But it hadn’t felt like a mistake. It had felt like being erased.

He turned another corner and reached the footbridge. Below, the canal shimmered like black glass. He paused. His breath came in ragged bursts, clouding the air. The envelope crinkled again.

They would find out. Maybe they already had. He walked onto the bridge, footsteps echoing in the silence. The water below moved slowly, pulling scraps of leaves and wrappers along its surface like secrets it would never tell.

Luca stood still, his heart trying to punch its way out of his chest. He remembered how proud his mother looked when he told her about the scholarship. The way she held his face in both hands, her thumbs brushing his cheeks like he was still ten. He hadn’t told her it was revoked. Couldn’t. She already worked too many hours, already pretended too hard that things were fine.

The envelope was still there. Still real. He took it out, unfolded it slowly. The paper trembled in his hands. His name. The signature. The award, the sum, the promise. It was dated last month. It was no longer valid.

But it had once been true.

He let the paper hang between his fingers, the wind tugging at it gently. The sirens had faded. The city hummed below him—trains in the distance, laughter from a bar, the hum of streetlights waking up for the night.

He closed his eyes.

Then he folded the letter again, carefully this time, and tucked it back into his pocket.

When he turned around, the bridge behind him was empty. No sirens. No footsteps. Just the quiet.

Luca began to walk—not fast, not slow. Just forward.

The Forgotten Path

By Victor Graves

A winding path beneath the trees, Where shadows creep and footsteps fall, The leaves, they whisper in the breeze, A secret song, too faint to call. The air is thick with history, A thousand tales of days gone by, The echoes faint, the mystery, A world that’s lost and yet still high. The stones are old, the path is long, It curves and winds into the night, The wind, it howls a mournful song, That wraps the soul, without a light. I walk alone, yet not in vain, For every step I leave behind, The path is lost, but still remains, A trace within my restless mind. And though I know the end is near, I take another step, yet slow, For in the loss, there lies a fear, That I, too, may be lost, you know. But in this journey, I find peace, The path may fade, yet still I stay, For in the steps, my heart’s release, The lost becomes the found, today.

The following memoir recounts the narrator’s childhood habit of retreating to the fire escape to escape family tension and observe the world below.

The first time I climbed onto the fire escape, I was nine. It was summer, and the heat inside the apartment pressed against the walls like it was trying to escape too. My parents were arguing about something in the kitchen—money, probably—and I had quietly slid the window open and slipped through, barefoot. The fire escape was rusted and creaked beneath me, but it was cooler than inside. I sat down on the metal grating, knees pulled to my chest, and looked out at the other buildings. All of them packed together like a cluttered shelf, windows blinking yellow, blue, and television white. The city didn’t sleep. It just got quieter.

That became my place. When the apartment felt too small, too loud, or too full of questions I didn’t know how to ask, I climbed out there. Sometimes with a book, sometimes with a slice of toast, sometimes with nothing but myself. I liked watching people on the street below—delivery bikes darting past, couples arguing, someone chasing their dog into traffic. Life was always moving. I stayed still.

From that vantage point, I saw time change. The laundromat across the street changed owners twice. A tree lost its leaves and grew them back, again and again. The man who played saxophone on the corner disappeared one spring and didn’t come back. I didn’t ask why. I’d learned that adults rarely answered honestly when it came to disappearances. By the time I was twelve, I knew every crack in the metal frame. I had scratched a constellation into the paint beside where I sat. I called it my “escape map”—not a way out, but a way through.

It was there I watched my father leave for the last time. He didn’t know I was above him, pressed into the shadows, the metal cool against my back. He walked quickly, like the sidewalk burned. He didn’t take much. A suitcase, a jacket, the keys he never returned.

My mother cried in the living room while I counted blinking windows in the dark. Years later, when I came back to visit the building, everything was smaller. The windows, the stairwell, even the fire escape. I climbed out again, careful not to wake the sleeping city. The grating still creaked. The street had changed—new shops, different cars, fewer trees. But some things remained: the hum of traffic, the buzz of neon, the distant music of someone else's life.

I sat there and touched the constellation I had carved. It was faded, but still there. Like me.

The following text is an excerpt from Mirrors, a piece of prose fiction. The passage explores the quiet emotional distance between a mother and daughter as they navigate life after the loss of a family member, using reflective narration and domestic imagery to convey grief, memory, and unspoken connection.

Every morning, I find a new line on my mother’s face.

She sits in the kitchen as she always has—back straight, hands wrapped around a chipped mug, tea swirling in slow eddies as the spoon rests against porcelain. The clock ticks overhead, unbothered by the silence between us.

It’s not that we don’t speak. We do—about the bread going stale too quickly, the neighbour’s dog barking through the night, the price of onions. But never about the things that press against the edges of our words. Like how the garden has grown wild since Dad passed, or how my brother hasn’t called in four months.

There are photographs on the wall—sun-bleached memories of birthdays, holidays, smiles we used to wear more easily. One of them shows me at eight, a crooked fringe and missing tooth, squinting into the sun with a balloon in one hand and Mum’s fingers in the other.

She still has that dress from the photo, though it no longer fits. Once, I caught her folding it gently, placing it in a drawer lined with tissue paper as if it were something sacred. I didn’t ask why.

The mirror above the sink catches us both—me, still in yesterday’s sweater, hair unbrushed; her, with silver creeping into her hairline, the corners of her mouth tugged downward by time. I wonder if she sees me as I see her: a faded version of someone I used to know.

There are moments when I think I hear her crying at night. The quiet kind—no sobbing, no gasps—just the sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard. But when I knock, she always says, “Just the wind, love,” and smiles the way someone does when they don’t want to be comforted.

In the mornings, she hums while chopping carrots. She wipes the table twice. She sighs when the kettle takes too long to boil. She wears the same cardigan three days in a row.

Once, I found her sitting in the hallway, holding Dad’s watch. It had stopped at 5:47. She told me she couldn’t bring herself to wind it.

“Time should move forward,” she said. “But some things don’t follow.” Today, I ask her if she wants to walk with me to the corner shop.

“No, you go,” she says, as she always does. “Bring back some of those oat biscuits. The ones with the ridges.”

I go, but I walk slowly, hoping that when I return, she’ll have shifted somehow—turned a page, moved a cup, opened the window.

Something.

But when I come back, she’s still there, same chair, same mug, same silence.

Still, I pour the tea. Still, I sit across from her. And in the mirror above the sink, we look at each other, and say nothing.

But somehow, that feels like enough.

The Long Night

By Eleanor St. James

The night is long, but stars fade, As morning waits, soft and slow, The shadows stretch, the world unsaid, A quiet breath beneath the glow. The sky turns deeper, and time slips by, Each hour a fleeting, silent thread, A soft wind whispers, then passes by, A call for all things left unsaid. A lone bird calls in the hollow dark, Its wings a whisper in the night, The wind spins softly, leaves depart, Then returns with the first light. The moon begins its slow descent, Its pale face caught between two worlds, It speaks no words, yet still its presence Guides the lost thoughts of men and girls. And as the dawn begins to break, A single ray climbs in the sky, The night has gone for morning’s sake, But leaves the dream behind, to lie. In silence deep, the sky turns bright, The shadows flee, the world awakes, But still, the heart knows in the night, A memory of the past it takes.

The Distant Echo

By Amelia Hayes

An echo calls from far away, It trembles in the fading night, A voice that once was bright and gay, Now whispers soft in pale moonlight. The mountains hear, the valley sighs, The air is thick with words unsaid, A thousand thoughts beneath the skies, Of dreams that lived and hopes that bled. The echo calls again, it sings, Yet distant now, so far and deep, A memory’s shadow at my feet, A silence in which I still weep. It calls again with growing strength, A song of love, a song of loss, Yet it recedes with endless length, As day begins, the night is tossed. But when the dawn begins to rise, The echo fades, the voice is gone, And in its place, a new disguise, The sun that calls me to move on. And though the voice may never stay, The echo lingers deep inside, A silent prayer, a wordless sway, A call I cannot run from, wide.

The following text is an excerpt from The Shoe Repair Man, a prose non-fiction piece. The narrator recounts a childhood connection with Salim, a humble cobbler who repaired shoes beneath an underpass. Through vivid memories and quiet observations, the piece explores the dignity of unnoticed labour, the artistry of craft, and the deep human stories that exist in everyday encounters.

I first met him when I was ten, my school shoes worn to the soles. He sat at the edge of the underpass, his stall no more than a plank of wood, a hammer, and a collection of leather scraps folded into a biscuit tin. His hands were stained with polish and time. I held out my shoes timidly. He nodded without speaking, gesturing for me to sit. His fingers moved with quiet precision, tapping nails into the sole like a composer setting a rhythm. He never hurried.

His name, I later learned, was Salim. He had been fixing shoes in that same corner for thirty years. “Your shoes tell you how far you’ve walked,” he once told me. “But not where you’re going.”

I began to visit more often—sometimes with torn sandals, sometimes with no shoes at all. He told me stories: of monsoons that swept shoes away in streams, of brides whose heels snapped before ceremonies, of a German tourist who mailed him a thank-you card and a packet of Swiss chocolate. He spoke sparingly, but always with purpose. It was as though every word was measured like the leather he cut.

One day, I brought my grandfather’s old boots. The leather was cracked and tired. Salim ran his hand along the seam and said nothing for a long time. Then, slowly, he began to stitch. It was the only time I saw him pause, not for thought, but for memory.

He kept a small transistor radio by his foot, always tuned to the same station that played classical Bengali songs. Sometimes, he would hum. People passed him every day without noticing. But for those who stopped, he gave more than just mended soles. He offered quiet ritual, and something resembling grace.

When he died, a woman took his place. The sign changed. The biscuit tin was gone. Her hands were just as skilled, but the radio played something else. The rhythm was different.

Years later, I still pass that underpass. The bench has been replaced. The cracks in the pavement have been filled. But I remember the feel of his bench under my legs, the smell of glue and polish, and the way Salim stitched stories into shoes without needing to say a word.

The following text is an excerpt from Market Days, a piece of prose non-fiction. The narrator reflects on the vibrancy and rituals of a local Sunday market, using rich sensory detail and personal anecdotes to explore themes of community, tradition, and the beauty of the everyday.

On Sundays, the market breathes. It doesn’t wake up slowly. It exhales all at once—rattling shutters, boots on gravel, the clang of crates being stacked like fragile monuments to commerce. At six in the morning, the light is bruised and soft, but already the air smells of rosemary and oranges, fish scales and diesel. Vendors shout greetings in half-laughed syllables, stretching vowels like dough.

I come for the noise as much as the goods. The cheese seller, Luca, always waves with his knife. “You again?” he says with mock disbelief, as though I haven’t come every Sunday for the past three years. His stall smells like caves and old winters, and I never leave without a wedge of something wrapped in wax paper and warning.

Further down, there’s Rosa with her heirloom tomatoes—gorgeously imperfect, all craters and folds, like the faces of the women who sit behind her gossiping in dialect too fast for me to catch. They sell basil in bunches so thick your fingers stay green until lunch.

The market is not a place for secrets. People here speak with their hands, with their faces. Prices are negotiable, especially if your child is cute, your smile sincere, or your dog elderly. Grandmothers barter over beans while babies nap on crates of cucumbers. A man plays accordion near the eggs, and a woman dances in place with a baguette under her arm.

I find poetry in the mundane. The way the scales tip. The soft crack of bread crust being tested by a tap. The flash of a silver fish mid-scoop, a flicker of life before it’s weighed and bagged. These are the details the city forgets during the week, when everything is boxed, barcode-scanned, and silent.

Once, I asked Rosa why she didn’t move to a bigger shop, somewhere indoors, insulated, predictable. She looked at me as though I’d offered her tinned peaches at a wedding. “This is the shop,” she said, gesturing to the morning—sun slicing through the awnings, voices overlapping like birdsong. “This is the roof. The wind. The walls. The mess. The life.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

At ten, the market is thick with elbows and baskets. Tourists gawk at mushrooms. Teenagers eat ricotta with their fingers. Old men inspect lemons like they’re holding time. I carry a bag filled with too much of everything and none of what I planned.

By noon, the stalls begin to disappear. A slow vanishing act. Bread goes first. Then fruit. Then fish. Plastic sheets cover whatever remains. The air changes—less olive oil, more sweat and departure. Vendors count coins. Children cry. Shouted goodbyes fold into tired waves.

By one, the market is gone.

But if you know where to look, you’ll see traces: a single tomato rolled into the gutter, a grape crushed on the cobblestones like a burst jewel, the ghost of fennel on your sleeve.

And next Sunday, it will breathe again.