Write an original short story entitled 'The Secret'.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

THE SECRET

My grandfather kept a locked steel trunk under his bed for as long as I was alive, and the family had a rule about it, which was that nobody asked.

The theories were extensive. My cousin Rohit maintained it held money. My aunt believed there were letters from a woman before my grandmother. I was nine and had decided, on no evidence whatever, that it contained a gun.

He died in the February I turned sixteen, quite suddenly, between one Tuesday and the next. After the ceremonies were over and the house had emptied of relatives, my father brought the trunk into the front room and set it on the table, and the four of us stood around it like people at a bomb disposal.

The key was in his desk, exactly where he had always said it was, which nobody had ever thought to check.

Inside were exercise books. Forty-one of them, in order, each with a year written on the cover in his small upright hand, beginning in 1961 and ending the previous December.

They were not a diary. They were letters — to my grandmother, written every week of their marriage, and never once given to her.

My father read three pages and put the book down and went out onto the balcony for a long time.

What the letters said, mostly, was ordinary. That the beans had done well. That she had been short with him on Thursday and he had deserved it. That he had watched her sleeping and could not account for his own luck. He was, it turned out, a man who had a great deal to say and had simply never been able to say it out loud, and so had said it to paper, every Sunday, for forty-one years.

My grandmother read them over four months, one year at a time, and would not let anyone sit with her while she did it.

She told me afterwards that she had known there was something in the trunk. She said she had always assumed it was money.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The TITLE IS GIVEN and is the only instruction, which makes the whole story answerable to one word: SECRET. Whatever you write must turn on something concealed, and the revelation must be the structural centre of the story.

TWO ROUTES are open, and the second scores better: the THRILLER route — a hidden treasure, a criminal, a murder discovered. Written by most candidates, and hard to resolve convincingly in 350 words. the EMOTIONAL route — a secret whose weight lies in what it reveals about a person. Easier to end well and far more likely to stand out.

THE ENDING decides this type. A story that stops at the moment of revelation has not finished; show what the secret changed. Notice that the model’s last line reframes everything that came before it — the grandmother knew, and was wrong about what she knew.

Keep to the past tense and give the story a definite shape: concealment, discovery, consequence. 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.