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January 2023 QP-22

In this extract from 'Featherhood' by Charlie Gilmour, the author recounts finding a flightless baby magpie in a harsh urban environment filled with junk and pollution. The magpie is abandoned, and Gilmour reflects on its vulnerability and the challenges it faces without parental care. The narrative highlights the contrast between the bird's innocence and the grim surroundings it has landed in.

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277 views1 page

January 2023 QP-22

In this extract from 'Featherhood' by Charlie Gilmour, the author recounts finding a flightless baby magpie in a harsh urban environment filled with junk and pollution. The magpie is abandoned, and Gilmour reflects on its vulnerability and the challenges it faces without parental care. The narrative highlights the contrast between the bird's innocence and the grim surroundings it has landed in.

Uploaded by

von cauilan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

PMT

SECTION A

READING

Read the following extracts carefully and then answer Section A in the Question Paper.

Text One: Featherhood


In this extract, the writer, Charlie Gilmour, describes his experience of looking after a baby
magpie.
Somewhere in southeast London a flightless young magpie tumbles to the ground.

It is a harsh and very human environment into which this bird has prematurely arrived.
Cars with concertinaed bonnets and shattered windscreens wait in line to be scrapped
at the nearest junkyard. Fly-tipped fridges and sacks of rubble as immovable as boulders
block the pavements. Puddles of spring rain shine purple with petrochemicals and, 5
overhead, clouds of smoke and steam billow from the chimney of a huge waste disposal
facility that incinerates rubbish around the clock.
The only animals I’ve ever noticed there are pitbull dogs and rats, although a little further
afield, around the dump, there are flocks of gulls and pigeons along with a fleet of
raptors1 sleek as fighter jets that are employed by the waste disposal company to chase 10
the other birds away.
My partner Yana’s workshop is just around the corner on the edge of the junkyard. It’s a
part of the city that’s full of secrets and surprises, but they’re rarely cute and fluffy.
The creature scuttles around in the gutter, lurching towards the kerb like a drunk
staggering down an alleyway. Magpies leave home far too soon – long before they can 15
really fly or properly fend for themselves. For weeks after they fledge their nests, they’re
dependent on their parents for sustenance, protection and an education too. But this
bird’s parents are nowhere to be seen. They’re not feeding it, or watching it, or guarding it.
Yana sets the cardboard box, with its precious contents, very gently down on our
bedroom floor. Her sister found it this morning, she explains, and picked it up and 20
brought it to their workshop. In between hammering and drilling they’ve been feeding it
live grubs from the angling supplier.
A black and white ball of fluff the size of a child’s fist is curled up in a corner. It looks
dead. It smells dead. I click my tongue at the creature and one of its eyelids flutters open.
Its eye is mineral blue. 25
I try to call to mind
everything I know about
magpies. Yana says they’re
clever birds – very clever,
as all members of the crow 30
family are – although I seem
to recall that they’re widely
disliked for reasons I’ve
never quite understood. I
have no idea what you’re 35
meant to do with one.

2 P71972A
 

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