Write an original short story beginning with the words: It was midnight and the doorbell rang...

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

THE VISITOR

It was midnight and the doorbell rang.

My grandmother did not move. She was ninety-one that winter and slept very little, and she sat in her chair by the window with her hands flat on the arms, listening. The bell rang again.

"Don’t," she said, when I got up.

But I was seventeen and had never been afraid of anything in that house, so I went down the stairs in the dark and opened the door on the chain.

A man stood on the step with a cardboard suitcase. He was perhaps sixty, soaked through, and he was looking not at me but past me, into the hall, at the staircase and the barometer and the brown coats on their hooks.

"Is this still number fourteen?" he said.

I said it was.

"Then I have come to the right place." He put the suitcase down as though it had become suddenly heavy. "I lived here. Until I was eleven."

Behind me, on the landing, my grandmother said his name. Just the one word, in a voice I had never heard her use.

What followed took until three in the morning and I understood perhaps half of it. There had been a quarrel in 1974 about a piece of land and a letter that was never answered. He had gone to Dubai. He had written twice. She had not replied, because replying would have meant admitting that she had been wrong, and by the time she was ready to admit it she no longer had an address.

They sat at either end of the dining table, two old people, being careful with each other.

At dawn I made tea for three, and he asked whether the mango tree was still in the back garden, and she said it had come down in the storm of 2009, and he nodded for a long time.

He stayed eleven days. He is coming again in April.

I think about it often — that a doorbell at midnight can be the worst sound in the world or the best, and that you cannot tell which until you open the door.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The opening line is GIVEN, and it must be your first words — reproduced EXACTLY, including the three dots. Candidates who paraphrase it ("One midnight the bell rang") lose content marks before they have written a sentence.

The given line is a gift: it hands you atmosphere and a question (who is at the door?) at no cost. Use it. Do not spend three paragraphs getting to the doorbell, because the doorbell has already rung.

A midnight caller invites melodrama — ghosts, murderers, police. Those stories are written by half the candidates every year and are hard to make fresh. A quieter answer to the question "who is at the door?" stands out, and is easier to end well.

THE ENDING is where this type is won or lost. A story that stops at the revelation has not finished; show what the visit 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.