Christmas Holidays
READING WRITTEN TEXTS – PROSE
TEXT A: Christmas Holidays (autobiography)
by Janet Frame
In this passage, the New Zealand author Janet Frame is writing about her childhood in the late 1930s.
Read Text A below, then answer questions 1–3.
Christmas Holidays
Acres of Christmas holidays lay before us. We looked forward to the celebration of Christmas and New Year’s Eve which were happy family times. On Christmas morning there were always presents in the stockings (Dad’s grey work socks) lying on the macrocarpa branches in the dining-room fireplace, seldom the presents we asked for but welcome and exciting because they were presents and surprises; and on New Year’s Eve there was a midnight feast with the laden table that promised plenty throughout the year.
We spent the days at the beach or the baths*. Myrtle, Isabel and I were all good swimmers. We had discovered that the baths were a better place to watch the boys, because they were either in the water, easily observed, or stretched out on their towels at their end of the baths by the diving boards, or flexing their muscles and showing off because they knew they were being watched. When Jack Dixon started going to the baths, and we saw how pale his skin was, not at all like Errol Flynn’s or Clark Gable’s†, Myrtle lost interest in him. “He’s weedy,” she said. Weediness was a boy’s ultimate disgrace.
So, from our vantage point on the seats, we watched the boys arriving and leaving with their towels and trunks draped around their necks, and we heard their casual references to their ‘togs’‡, whereas we arrived with our ‘togs’ carefully rolled in a parcel under our arm and left with them again rolled tightly, and as we went out into the street, we endured with a certain delight the way the boys flipped their towels at us in a gesture of challenge while we, our togs rolled more tightly than ever, walked haughtily on our way home.
Then, as the days moved from quiet blue January into February and another summer, they were long and hot and full of cloudy doom and weariness. I dreaded returning to school, for I needed yet another school uniform for the senior high, another tunic, dark grey serge, with a black felt hat and black beret for winter and a white panama hat for summer; grey flannel blouses and white cotton blouses, a white dress for the garden party at the end of the year and the school breakup in the Opera House. Fortunately, Aunty Polly had volunteered to sew my school tunic and, hoping that all would be well but dreading that it wouldn’t, I waited for the parcel from Petone.
Everything that had been blooming was in the first stages of decay; the fluffy asters in every pastel shade were curling and browning at the ends of their petals; the cream banksia roses of the summerhouse were already shrivelled and fallen.
* “baths” is another name for “public swimming pools”
† Errol Flynn and Clark Gable were famous movie stars in the 1930s
‡ “togs” are swimwear
Source (abridged and adapted): Janet Frame, Janet Frame: An Autobiography (Century Hutchinson New Zealand: Auckland, 1989).
Support all answers with specific examples and include language terminology as appropriate.
READING WRITTEN TEXTS – PROSE
TEXT A: Christmas Holidays (autobiography)
Read Text A in the Resource Booklet, then answer questions 1–3.
1. What is suggested by the metaphor in the opening sentence (line 1)?
2. Analyse differences shown between the boys and the girls in lines 8–22. “Differences” could include differences in behaviour, dialogue, or attitude. (NB: Line numbers are incorrect)
3. A negative attitude is presented in lines 23–33. (NB: Line number are incorrect)
(a) Explain, in detail, why the narrator has this negative attitude.
(b) Analyse how the negative attitude is presented, with close reference to the language used in lines 23–33.
ANSWERS
TEXT A: Christmas Holidays (autobiography)
by Janet Frame
In this passage, the New Zealand author Janet Frame is writing about her childhood in the late 1930s.
Read Text A below, then answer questions 1–3.
Christmas Holidays
Acres of Christmas holidays lay before us. We looked forward to the celebration of Christmas and New Year’s Eve which were happy family times. On Christmas morning there were always presents in the stockings (Dad’s grey work socks) lying on the macrocarpa branches in the dining-room fireplace, seldom the presents we asked for but welcome and exciting because they were presents and surprises; and on New Year’s Eve there was a midnight feast with the laden table that promised plenty throughout the year.
We spent the days at the beach or the baths*. Myrtle, Isabel and I were all good swimmers. We had discovered that the baths were a better place to watch the boys, because they were either in the water, easily observed, or stretched out on their towels at their end of the baths by the diving boards, or flexing their muscles and showing off because they knew they were being watched. When Jack Dixon started going to the baths, and we saw how pale his skin was, not at all like Errol Flynn’s or Clark Gable’s†, Myrtle lost interest in him. “He’s weedy,” she said. Weediness was a boy’s ultimate disgrace.
So, from our vantage point on the seats, we watched the boys arriving and leaving with their towels and trunks draped around their necks, and we heard their casual references to their ‘togs’‡, whereas we arrived with our ‘togs’ carefully rolled in a parcel under our arm and left with them again rolled tightly, and as we went out into the street, we endured with a certain delight the way the boys flipped their towels at us in a gesture of challenge while we, our togs rolled more tightly than ever, walked haughtily on our way home.
Then, as the days moved from quiet blue January into February and another summer, they were long and hot and full of cloudy doom and weariness. I dreaded returning to school, for I needed yet another school uniform for the senior high, another tunic, dark grey serge, with a black felt hat and black beret for winter and a white panama hat for summer; grey flannel blouses and white cotton blouses, a white dress for the garden party at the end of the year and the school breakup in the Opera House. Fortunately, Aunty Polly had volunteered to sew my school tunic and, hoping that all would be well but dreading that it wouldn’t, I waited for the parcel from Petone.
Everything that had been blooming was in the first stages of decay; the fluffy asters in every pastel shade were curling and browning at the ends of their petals; the cream banksia roses of the summerhouse were already shrivelled and fallen.
* “baths” is another name for “public swimming pools”
† Errol Flynn and Clark Gable were famous movie stars in the 1930s
‡ “togs” are swimwear
Source (abridged and adapted): Janet Frame, Janet Frame: An Autobiography (Century Hutchinson New Zealand: Auckland, 1989).
Support all answers with specific examples and include language terminology as appropriate.
READING WRITTEN TEXTS – PROSE
TEXT A: Christmas Holidays (autobiography)
Read Text A in the Resource Booklet, then answer questions 1–3.
1. What is suggested by the metaphor in the opening sentence (line 1)?
2. Analyse differences shown between the boys and the girls in lines 8–22. “Differences” could include differences in behaviour, dialogue, or attitude. (NB: Line numbers are incorrect)
3. A negative attitude is presented in lines 23–33. (NB: Line number are incorrect)
(a) Explain, in detail, why the narrator has this negative attitude.
(b) Analyse how the negative attitude is presented, with close reference to the language used in lines 23–33.
ANSWERS