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Comprehension

1) The passage describes a family driving through the countryside looking for a house. They get lost but see a castle in the distance. 2) After a long drive down a narrow lane, they discover the castle. It is large with grey stone walls. They explore the gatehouse and courtyard. 3) The daughter feels a sense of mystery and history from being in the castle. They are surprised to find a colorful, half-timbered house attached instead of more castle ruins.

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57 views2 pages

Comprehension

1) The passage describes a family driving through the countryside looking for a house. They get lost but see a castle in the distance. 2) After a long drive down a narrow lane, they discover the castle. It is large with grey stone walls. They explore the gatehouse and courtyard. 3) The daughter feels a sense of mystery and history from being in the castle. They are surprised to find a colorful, half-timbered house attached instead of more castle ruins.

Uploaded by

V H
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Section 1: English - Comprehension

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

How We Came to the Castle


by Dodie Smith
This story is told by Cassandra, a teenage girl. Sometime in the past, her parents had had a
noisy argument when having tea in their garden. Their neighbour, looking over the fence,
had seen the father shouting and waving a cake knife about. He was worried the father was
going to stab the mother. The neighbour had leapt over the fence, but the father had
knocked him down. The result was that the father had been sent to jail for assaulting the
neighbour. He had never intended to hurt his wife.

When father was in jail, we lived in a London boarding-house, Mother not having fancied
settling down again next to the fence-leaping neighbour. When they let Father out, he
decided to buy a house in the country. I think we must have been rather well-off in those
days as Jacob Wrestling had sold wonderfully well for such an unusual book and Father's
5 lecturing had earned much more than the sales. And Mother had an income of her own.

Father chose Suffolk as a suitable county so we stayed at the King's Crypt hotel and drove
out house-hunting every day - we had a car then; Father and mother at the front, Rose,
Thomas and I at the back. It was all great fun because Father was in a splendid mood -
goodness knows he didn't seem to have any iron in his soul then. But he certainly had a
10 prejudice against all neighbours; we saw lots of nice houses in villages, but he wouldn't even
consider them.

It was late autumn, very gentle and golden. I loved the quiet-coloured fields of stubble and
the hazy water meadows. Rose doesn't like the flat country but I always did - flat country
seems to give the sky such a chance. One evening when there was a lovely sunset, we got
15 lost. Mother had the map and kept saying the country was upside down - and when she got
it the right way up the names on the map were upside down. Rose and I laughed a lot about
it; we liked being lost. And Father was perfectly patient with Mother about the map.

All of a sudden, we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly
decided that we must explore it though Mother wasn't enthusiastic. It was difficult to find
20 because the little roads twisted and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we
caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that
Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last, we came to a neglected signpost with To BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on
it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in at once and we crawled along
25 with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back - I remember thinking of the
prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high
and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept
saying we ought to back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles
away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was - but not the lonely tower
30 on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level
ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in
amazement.

How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first
glimpse - see the sheer grey stone walls against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle
35 stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-
weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no sound of any kind came to us.
Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.

Father pointed out the gatehouse - it had two round towers joined halfway up by a room with
stone-mullioned windows. To the right of the gatehouse nothing remained but crumbling
40 ruins, but on the left a stretch of high - battlemented walls joined it to a round corner tower. A
bridge crossed the moat to the great nail-studded oak doors under the windows of the gate-
house room, and a little door cut in one of the big doors stood slightly ajar - the minute
Father noticed this, he was off towards it. Mother said vague things about trespassing and
tried to stop us following him, but in the end, she let us go, while she stayed behind with
45 Thomas, who woke and wept a little.

How well I remember that run through the stillness, the smell of wet stone and wet weeds as
we crossed the bridge, the moment of excitement before we stepped in at the little door!
Once through, we were in the cool dimness of the gatehouse passage. That was where I first
felt the castle - it is the place where one is most conscious of the great weight of stone
50 above and around one. I was too young to know much of history and the past, for me the
castle was one in a fairy tale; and the queer heavy coldness was so spell-like that I clutched
Rose hard. Together we ran through to the daylight; then stopped dead.

On our left, instead of the grey walls and towers we had been expecting, was a long house
of whitewashed plaster and herring-boned brick, veined by weather-bleached wood. It had
55 all sorts of odd little lattice windows, bright gold from the sunset, and the attic gable looked
as if it might fall forward at any minute. This belonged to a different kind of fairy tale - it was
just my idea of a 'Hansel and Gretel' house and for a second, I feared a witch inside had
stolen Father. Then I saw him trying to get in at the kitchen door. He came running through
the overgrown courtyard garden, calling that there was a small window open near the front
60 door and that he could put Rose through to let us in. I was glad he said Rose and not me - I
would have been terrified to be alone in the house for a second. Rose was never frightened
of anything; she was trying to scramble up to the window even before Father got there to lift
her. Through she went and we heard her struggling with heavy bolts. Then she flung the
door open triumphantly.

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