This is the opening extract of the novel, The Woman In Black. In this extract, the narrator discusses what his life is like now,
long after a traumatic ordeal with a ghostly woman who stole the life of his only son.
CHRISTMAS EVE
It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk’s Piece on my way home from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, towards the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.
I have always liked to take a breath of the evening, to smell the air, whether it is sweetly scented and balmy with the flowers of midsummer, pungent with the bonfires and leaf-mould of autumn, or crackling cold from frost and snow. I like to look about me at the sky above my head, whether there are moon or stars or utter blackness, and into the darkness ahead of me; I like to listen for the cries of nocturnal creatures and the moaning rise and fall of the wind, or the pattering of rain in the orchard trees, I enjoy the rush of air towards me up the hill from the flat pastures of the river valley.
Tonight, I smelled at once, and with a lightning heart, that there had been a change in the weather. All the previous week, we had had rain, chilling rain and a mist that lay low about the house and over the countryside. From the windows, the view stretched not farther than a yard or two down the garden. It was wretched weather, never seeming to come fully light, and raw, too. There had been no pleasure in walking, the visibility was too poor for any shouting and the dogs were permanently morose and muddy. Inside the house, the lamps were lit throughout the day and the walls of larder outhouse and cellar oozed damp and smelled sour, the fires sputtered and smoked, burning dismally low.
My spirits have for many years now been excessively affected by the ways of the weather, and I confess that, had it not been for the air of cheerfulness and bustle that prevailed in the rest of the house, I should have been quite cast down in gloom and lethargy, unable to enjoy the flavour of life as I should like and irritated by my own susceptibility. But Esme is merely stung by inclement weather into a spirited defiance, and so the preparations four our Christmas holiday had this year been more than usually extensive and vigorous.
I took a step or two out from under the shadow of the house so that I could see around me in the moonlight. Monk’s piece stands at the summit of land that rises gently up for some four hundred feet from where the little River Nee traces its winding way in a north to south direction across this fertile, and sheltered, part of the century. Below us are pastures, interspersed with small clumps of mixed, broadleaf woodland. But at our backs for several square miles it is quite a different area of rough scrub and a heathland, a patch of wildness in the midst of a well-farmed country. We are but two miles from a good-sized village, seven from the principal market town, yet there is an air of remoteness and isolation which makes us feel ourselves to be much further from civilization.
Bullet point what happens.
Find four references to the senses of sight and sound in the extract.
Write these into a paragraph.
Find four emotions in the extract and write these into a paragraph.
