SUBJECT: ENGLISH - PAPER 2 - FICTION - (SET A) DATE: 15TH May, 2025

INSERT DURATION: 1H 10M

Text for Section A, an extract from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

A young girl called Margaret (or Meg for short) is unable to sleep during a storm.

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her
bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds
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scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through
them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

She wasn’t usually afraid of weather. —It’s not just the weather, she thought. – It’s the
weather 10
on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything
wrong. School. School was all wrong.

She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of
her teachers had said crossly, ‘Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with
parents as brilliant as yours
are supposed to be, can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to do a little better you’ll
15
have to stay back next year.’

And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books,
one of the boys had said something about her ‘dumb baby brother.’ At this she’d
thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of
strength she had, and arrived home with
her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye. 20

Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an
hour earlier than she did, were disgusted. ‘Let us do the fighting when it’s
necessary,’ they told her.

– A delinquent, that’s what I am, she thought grimly. – That’s what they’ll be saying
next. Not Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father –

But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her
mother 25
could talk about him in a natural way, saying, ‘When your father gets back –’

Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were
saying, must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it
did Meg. But if it did she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her
expression.

– Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything? The window
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rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt close about her. Curled up on
one of her pillows, a grey fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its
head under again, and went back to sleep.

Everybody was asleep. Everybody except Meg. Even Charles Wallace, the ‘dumb baby
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brother,’
who had an uncanny way of knowing when she was awake and unhappy, and who would
come, 35
so many nights, tiptoeing up the attic stairs to her – even Charles Wallace was asleep.

How could they sleep? All day on the radio there had been hurricane warnings.
How could they leave her up in the attic in the rickety brass bed, knowing that the
roof might be blown right off the house, and she tossed out into the wild night sky
to land who knows where?
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Her shivering grew uncontrollable. 40

– You asked to have the attic bedroom, she told herself savagely. – Mother let you
have it because you’re the oldest. It’s a privilege, not a punishment.

‘Not during a hurricane, it isn’t a privilege,’ she said aloud. She tossed the quilt down
on the foot of the bed, and stood up. The kitten stretched luxuriously, and looked up
at her with huge,
innocent eyes. ‘Go back to sleep,’ Meg said. ‘Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster
like 45
me.’

She looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible face, baring a
mouthful of teeth covered with braces. Automatically she pushed her glasses into
position, ran her fingers through her mouse-brown hair, so that it stood wildly on
end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy
as the wind. 50

The wide wooden floorboards were cold against her feet. Wind blew in the crevices
about the window frame, in spite of the protection the storm sash was supposed to
offer. She could hear wind howling in the chimneys. From all the way downstairs
she could hear Fortinbras, the big black dog, starting to bark. He must be
frightened, too. What was he barking at? Fortinbras
never barked without reason. 55

Suddenly she remembered that when she had gone to the post office to pick up
the mail she’d heard about a tramp who was supposed to have stolen twelve
sheets from Mrs Buncombe, the constable’s wife. They hadn’t caught him, and
maybe he was heading for the Murry’s house right now, isolated on a back road as
it was; and this time maybe he’d be after more than
sheets. Meg hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the tramp at the time, because the
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postmistress, with a sugary smile, had asked if she’d heard from her father lately.
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