Cambridge IGCSE™

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 0475/41

Paper 4 Unseen May/June 2020

1 hour 15 minutes

You must answer on the enclosed answer booklet.

* 2 3 5 4 3 2 6 3 3 9 *

You will need: Answer booklet (enclosed)

INSTRUCTIONS
● Answer one question: either Question 1 or Question 2.
● Follow the instructions on the front cover of the answer booklet. If you need additional answer paper,
ask the invigilator for a continuation booklet.

INFORMATION
● The total mark for this paper is 25.
● All questions are worth equal marks.

This document has 8 pages. Blank pages are indicated.

DC (RCL (GO)) 185044/2

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You are advised to spend about 20 minutes reading the question paper and planning your answer.

Answer either Question 1 or Question 2.

Either

1 Read carefully the poem on the opposite page. The poet and his wife are watching their daughter
Julia’s swimming lesson.

How does the poet memorably convey this experience to you?

To help you answer this question, you might consider:

• how the poet portrays the role of the swimming instructor

• how he conveys the reactions of his daughter Julia and his wife to this experience
• what he suggests Julia will learn from this experience.

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For Julia, in the Deep Water

The instructor we hire

because she does not love you
Leads you into the deep water,
The deep end
Where the water is darker –
Her open, encouraging arms
That never get nearer
Are merciless for your sake.

You will dream this water always

Where nothing draws nearer,
Wasting your valuable breath
You will scream for your mother –
Only your mother is drowning
Forever in the thin air
Down at the deep end.
She is doing nothing,
She never did anything harder.
And I am beside her.

I am beside her in this imagination.

We are waiting
Where the water is darker.
You are over your head,
Screaming, you are learning
Your way toward us,
You are learning how
In the helpless water
It is with our skill
We live in what kills us.

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Or

2 Read carefully the following extract from the beginning of a novel. Richard, the narrator, is a young
man from Plano, a small town. He is going to study at Hampden College on the opposite coast of
the USA.

How does the writer vividly convey Richard’s powerful impressions of the college?

To help you answer this question, you might consider:

• how the writer portrays Richard’s arrival at the college

• how she portrays his first night there
• how she suggests his growing fascination with his new surroundings.

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Even today I do not fully understand the chain of events that brought me to
Hampden. Sympathetic professors wrote letters; exceptions of various sorts were
made in my case. And less than a year after I’d sat down on the gold shag carpet of
my little room in Plano and impulsively filled out the questionnaire, I was getting off
the bus in Hampden with two suitcases and fifty dollars in my pocket.
I had never been east of Santa Fe, never north of Portland, and – when I
stepped off the bus after a long anxious night that had begun somewhere in Illinois
– it was six o’clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over mountains, and
birches, and impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep
and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.
The dormitories weren’t even dorms – or at any rate not like the dorms I knew,
with cinderblock walls and depressing, yellowish light – but white clapboard houses
with green shutters, set back from the Commons1 in groves of maple and ash. All the
same it never occurred to me that my particular room, wherever it might be, would
be anything but ugly and disappointing and it was with something of a shock that I
saw it for the first time – a white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and
bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s2. On my first night
there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to
gold to black, listening to a soprano’s voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at
the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway
soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can’t
remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or
ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano.
Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room,
in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I’d
never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. A
group of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying, their shouts and laughter
carrying faintly over the velvety, twilit field. Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples
red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and
the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick,
white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at
night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than
imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

1 the Commons: the main building of the college

2 garret’s: attic room

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© UCLES 2020 0475/41/M/J/20