40 animals perhaps and always singing, lay England which was London and the country called the Front, from which many of our neighbors never came back. It was a country to which only young men traveled. 5. At the beginning, the only “front” I knew was the little lobby before our front door. I could not understand how so many people never returned from there, but later I grew to know more, though still without understanding, and carried a wooden rifle in the park and shot down the invisible unknown enemy like a flock of wild birds. And the park itself was a world within a world of the sea town. Quite near where I lived, so near that on summer evenings I could listen in my bed to the voices of older children playing ball on the sloping paper-littered bank, the park was full of terrors and treasures. Though it was only a little park, it held within its borders of old tall trees, notched with our names and shabby from our climbing, as many secret places, caverns and forests, prairies and deserts, as a country somewhere at the end of the sea. 6. And though we would explore it one day, armed and desperate, from end to end, from the robbers’ den to the pirates’ cabin, the highwayman’s inn to the cattle ranch, or the hidden room in the undergrowth, where we held beetle races, and lit the wood fires and roasted potatoes and talked about Africa, and the makes of motor cars, yet still the next day, it remained as unexplored as the Poles ─a country just born and always changing. 7. There were many secret societies but you could belong to only one; and in blood or red ink, and a rusty pocketknife, you signed your name at the foot of a terrible document, swore death to all the other societies, crossed your heart that you would divulge no secret and that if you did, you would consent to torture by slow fire, and undertook to carry out by yourself a feat of either daring or endurance. You could take your choice: would you climb to the top of the tallest and most dangerous tree, and from there hurl stones and insults at grown-up passersby, especially postmen, or any other men in uniform? Or would you ring every doorbell in the terrace, not forgetting the doorbell of the man with the red face who kept dogs and ran fast? Or would you swim in the reservoir, which was forbidden and had angry swans, or would you eat a whole old jam jar full of mud? 41 8. There were many more alternatives. I chose one of endurance and for half an hour, it may have been longer or shorter, held up off the ground a very heavy broken pram we had found in a bush. I thought my back would break and the half hour felt like a day, but I preferred it to braving the red face and the dogs, or to swallowing tadpoles. 9. We knew every inhabitant of the park, every regular visitor, every nursemaid, every gardener, every old man. We knew the hour when the alarming retired policeman came in to look at the dahlias and the hour when the old lady arrived in the Bath chair with six Pekinese, and a pale girl to read aloud to her. I think she read the newspaper, but we always said she read the Wizard. The face of the old man who sat summer and winter on the bench looking over the reservoir, I can see clearly now and I wrote a poem long long after I’d left the park and the sea town called “The Hunchback in the Park.” 10. And that park grew up with me; that small world widened as I learned its secrets and boundaries, as I discovered new refuges in ambushes in its woods and jungles; hidden homes and lairs for the multitudes of imagination… 11. Never was there such a town as ours, I thought, as we fought on the sandhills with rough boys or dared each to climb up the scaffolding of halfbuilt houses. Never was there such a town, I thought, for the smell of fish and chips on Saturday evenings; for the Saturday afternoon cinema matinees where we shouted and hissed our threepences away; for the crowds in the streets with leeks in their hats on international nights; for the park, the inexhaustible and mysterious, bushy red-Indian hiding park where the hunchback sat alone and the groves were blue with sailors. 12. The memories of childhood have no order, and so I remember that never was there such a dame school 1 as ours, so firm and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repeat a little crime—the pulling of a girl’s hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature. Behind the school 1 dame school = grammar school for young children 42 was a narrow lane where only the oldest and boldest threw pebbles at windows, scuffled and boasted, fibbed about their relations— “My father’s got a chauffeur.” “What’s he want a chauffeur for? He hasn’t got a car.” “My father’s the richest man in the town.” “My father’s the richest man in Wales.” “My father owns the world.” And swapped gob-stoppers for slings, old knives for marbles, kite strings for foreign stamps. 13. The lane was always the place to tell your secrets; if you did not have any, you invented them. Occasionally now I dream that I am turning out of school into the lane of confidences when I say to the boys of my class, “At last, I have a real secret.” “What is it—what is it?” “I can fly.” 14. And when they do not believe me, I flap my arms and slowly leave the ground only a few inches at first, then gaining air until I fly waving my cap level with the upper windows of the school, peering in until the mistress at the piano screams and the metronome falls to the ground and stops, and there is no more time. 15. And I fly over the trees and chimneys of my town, over the dockyards skimming the masts and funnels, over Inkerman Street, Sebastopol Street, and the street where all the women wear men’s caps, over the trees of the everlasting park, where a brass band shakes the leaves and sends them showering down onto the nurses and the children, the cripplers and the idlers, the gardeners, and the shouting boys: over the yellow seashore, and the stone-chasing dogs, and the old men, and the singing sea. The memories of childhood have no order, and no end. 43 Explain what is meant by: 1. … watched the dock-bound ships or the shops steaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions. 2. … on Saturday summer afternoons listened to the brass band, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white- horsed and full of fishes. 3. …lay England which was London and the country called the Front, from which many of our neighbors never came back. It was a country to which only young men traveled. 4. And the park itself was a world within a world of the sea town. 5. Though it was only a little park, it held within its borders of old tall trees, notched with our names and shabby from our climbing, as many secret places, caverns and forests, prairies and deserts, as a country somewhere at the end of the sea. 6. …undertook to carry out by yourself a feat of either daring or endurance. 7. And that park grew up with me; that small world widened as I learned its secrets and boundaries, as I discovered new refuges in ambushes in its woods and jungles; hidden homes and lairs for the multitudes of imagination… 8. …lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repeat a little crime—the pulling of a girl’s hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature. QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION 1. Does Dylan Thomas succeed in giving a full picture of his home town in the opening paragraph (2)? Cite some of the colorful visual images the author creates. Are they the 44 creation of a grown-up’s or a boy’s imagination? Account for your answer. 2. Comment on the author’s claiming his town as an ugly and lovely one. 3. What do you learn about Wales in paragraphs 3 and 4? What does the author imply by “the country called the Front”? 4. How are paragraphs 4 and 5 connected? 5. How does a child’s world perception expand? Comment on paragraph 5. 6. In what sense was the neighborhood park a place of mystery and adventure for Thomas and his friends? How effective is the author in conveying the image of the park? How does he achieve it? 7. What was the role of secret societies in the lives of the children? What kind of feat did they have to carry out to become a member of a secret society? Does the author provide enough concrete details for the readers to visualize their deeds? Did your neighborhood play the same role in your childhood? Do you attach any importance to imagination in one’s childhood? 8. What does Thomas mean by “that park grew up with me…”? 9. What reminiscences of his school years does Thomas include in his essay? 10. Comment on the last two paragraphs. How are they connected with the preceding part? How effective is Thomas’s conclusion in tying the paper together? 11. Comment on the composition of the essay. “The memories of childhood have no order,” Thomas says. Is there any discernible ordering or grouping apparent in the way he has narrated these remembrances of childhood? Into how many parts would you divide the essay? Explain. 12. Speak on the tone of the essay. 45 EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY 1. Write out the movement words from the text (“crawl”, “sprawl”…). 2. Write out some of the unusual words (“mounained”, “beachcombed”…). Do they add to the expressiveness of the essay? 3. Match the words in Column A with their definitions in column B A B 1) truant a) large brightly colored garden flower, often shaped like a ball 2) to litter b) the act of hiding and waiting for sb and then making a surprise attack on them 3) highwayman c) the ability to continue doing sth painful or difficult for a long period of time without complaining: 4) to divulge d) to leave things in a place, making it look untidy: 5) pram e) to tell a lie, usually about sth that is not important 6) ambush f) a man, usually on a horse and carrying a gun, who robbed travellers on public roads in the past 7) feat g) to fight or struggle with each other for a short time, in a way that is not very serious 8) scaffolding h) a simple weapon made from a band of leather, etc., used for throwing stones 9) to scuffle i) to tell a lie, usually about sth 46 that is not important 10) to fib j) an action or piece of work that needs skill, strength or courage 11) sling k) to give sb information that is supposed to be secret 12) endurance l) a small vehicle on four wheels for a baby to go out in, pushed by a person on foot YOUR TURN 1. Write reminiscently of a scene from your own childhood. Choose the verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs carefully. 2. Describe your neighborhood as perceived by a child. Create colorful images by providing enough details. 3. Give a detailed description of a person who made an indelible impression on you in your childhood. Choose a person you can describe vividly, someone with striking or unusual qualities or one that has had a strong effect on you, either positive or negative. Develop your paper with sufficient details to adequately show the character, using description, narration, anecdotes, comparison, and explanation as needed. (See text “Miss Furness” in the Supplement) 47 UNIT 3 Exposition Exposition is writing chiefly addressed to the remembering and reasoning mind, rather than to the senses or the feelings. To generalize, it deals with ideas rather than with actions and images. However, like narrative and description, exposition is almost never ‘pure” but usually includes elements of the other types of prose. Exposition informs, explains, analyzes and reasons. Its typical raw materials are facts, ideas, logical relationships. Essays and articles in magazines, most newspaper items, lectures, and college textbooks (except literature anthologies) are expository. “Two and two makes four” is an expository statement (at least, in most circumstances); so is “Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo,” and “To every force there is an equal and opposite reaction force.” The purpose of exposition is to communicate what to the writer seems to be true – true about ancient Greek drama, forestry, radioactivity, elementary education, foreign policy, cancer of the lungs, mountain climbing, vitamins, or whatever he writes about. Exposition makes statements, and the writer of exposition is willing (or should be willing) to have the truth of his statements tested by facts or by reason or by both. The judge of the truth of expository statements is not the writer himself or his emotions or fantasies or sense impressions (as in literature). It is the world outside him: facts, general human experience, logic, other people, physical objects, the laws of nature. Expository writing is often harder to do than narration or description. In narration, the story unfolds in logical order as you move from event to event. It is relatively easy to organize. But in exposition, you have to decide on your own organization. You must be prepared to lay out clearly the process or the idea which you want to explain to your audience. 48 Limiting your Subject Matter A critical first step in the process of exposition is to decide on the limits of your subject. “Careers” for example, is too broad a topic, unless you intend to write an encyclopedia. Begin cutting down the size of the topic until you have reached one that can be covered in the time and space limits given. Some limited possibilities for careers are “Beautician” or “Auto Mechanic”. The general topic of “Diplomas” could be narrowed down to “Recent changes in Diploma Requirements.” Formulation of a point of View: Purpose As information presented in an expository writing often lies beyond the experience or knowledge of most readers, you are expected to state briefly and clearly what you plan to say about your topic, whether you are explaining how to operate a specific computer, telling who won an election in a given country, or analyzing the need to reexamine a specific country’s policy towards another country. The topic sentence, a succinct summary of the point you want to develop, is a necessary ingredient of clear, responsible writing – without it a paragraph may seem haphazard, hit-or-miss, and purposeless. Other ingredients, which are constant, are: you should arouse the reader’s interest. Challenging statements, provocative questions, humorous comments, eye-raising statistics, paradoxical remarks – all are possible openers. What is most important, however, is that the reader should not have to read too many lines before he knows where you are taking him. Add to clarify, do not merely restate Finally, a writer of a good expository essay takes pains to develop the topic with concrete examples, interesting illustrations, cogent reasons, or revealing details. Too many student compositions do not develop, expand or illustrate a basic idea but merely repeat the topic 49 sentence, sometimes in three or four different ways. The best way to avoid this error is to make certain that each sentence adds to, clarifies, or broadens the original thought instead of merely restating it. YOUR TURN Study the following student paragraph and try to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the paragraph by answering the questions below: Television has become the problem as well as the solution in education. Children spend too much time watching TV, but some programs are helpful. They may have learned a lot from TV but they can’t resist turning on the TV as soon as they get home. Certainly no educator would object to the dramatizations of famous books or the televising of important news events. Still, is there any educational value in sitting in front of the “boob tube” for three hours watching a football game? Television is a coin with two sides and it’s a toss-up whether it does more harm or good. 1. Has the author of this paragraph chosen a topic that can be handled in a single paragraph? 2. Is the author’s point of view clear? 3. Does the author develop the topic with concrete examples or illustrations? 4. Does the author do more than simply repeat the topic sentence? Tips for Successful Writing Introductory Paragraphs An introductory paragraph is a special kind of a paragraph. Its function is to acquaint the reader with the subject of the essay and . Front”? 4. How are paragraphs 4 and 5 connected? 5. How does a child’s world perception expand? Comment on paragraph 5. 6. In what sense was the neighborhood. remembrances of childhood? Into how many parts would you divide the essay? Explain. 12. Speak on the tone of the essay. 45 EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY 1. Write out