Write an original short story that begins with the words: "It was raining hard that night. In my hurry to get into the house, I didn’t notice the black car parked across the road. I realized something was wrong when ..."

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 385 words)

THE BLACK CAR

It was raining hard that night. In my hurry to get into the house, I didn’t notice the black car parked across the road. I realized something was wrong when I found the front door already open, and my mother standing in the hallway with her coat still on.

She had not taken off her shoes. My mother has never in her life come into that house with her shoes on.

"Where is Dadu?" I said.

She said he was fine, which is the sentence people use when somebody is not fine, and then she said that he had fallen in the bathroom at four o’clock and that the car outside belonged to Dr. Bose from the second floor, who was upstairs with him now.

I went up two steps at a time.

My grandfather was sitting on the edge of his bed in his vest, looking thoroughly annoyed, while Dr. Bose wound a bandage round his forearm. There was a cut above his eyebrow that had been taped. He looked smaller than I had ever seen him look.

"It is nothing," he said, before I had said anything at all. "The floor was wet. Anyone would have slipped."

Dr. Bose said, without looking up, that anyone would not have slipped, and that the bathroom needed a rail on the wall and a rubber mat, and that he had been saying so since March.

My grandfather said he was not an invalid.

Dr. Bose said nobody had used that word.

They continued in this manner for some minutes while I stood in the doorway with rain running off my bag onto the floor, and I understood two things at once. The first was that my grandfather was frightened, and was managing it by being difficult. The second was that Dr. Bose had known him for thirty years and was letting him.

We fitted the rail on Sunday. My grandfather supervised the drilling from a chair and criticised the placement, and when it was done he held it and gave it two hard shakes and said it would do.

He uses it every day now. He has never mentioned it since.

I have not been able to see a black car parked in the rain without a small cold feeling in my stomach, and it has been three years.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The OPENING IS GIVEN, and it must be reproduced EXACTLY as the first words of your composition — all three sentences, including the trailing "when". Paraphrasing it, or starting somewhere else and working round to it, loses content marks before you have written anything of your own.

The given opening is generous: it hands you rain, a hurry, an unexplained black car and a sense of wrongness. Your only job is to complete the sentence — and the whole story follows from HOW you complete it.

THE OBVIOUS COMPLETIONS are a burglary, a kidnapping or a police car, and they are written by most candidates. They are also hard to finish well in 400 words. A DOMESTIC explanation — the car belongs to a doctor, a relative, a visitor — is fresher and far easier to end.

Note that the composition must not simply explain the car and stop. Show what the night CHANGED. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.