Return to It!
An anthology of short reading texts
M. Saaib Shaikh
Summer Vacation Task
Table of Contents
A Portrait of the Journalist as a Young Woman
....................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
How this Scottish adventurer is pushing the
boundaries of exploration ............................... 3
from Rats .......................................................... 5
The Cat Theif .................................................. 8
The Story of An Hour ... Error! Bookmark not
defined.1
6 JULY 2023
A Portrait of the Journalist as a Young Woman
Amanda Baillieu
After my mother died last year my sister and I sold almost all the paintings, drawings and
prints that she and my stepfather, an art dealer, had amassed over fifty years. One of the eight
hundred items loaded onto a van was a youthful portrait of my
grandmother, the writer and journalist Mollie Panter-Downes.
A few months later I was sent a draft of the auctioneer’s catalogue.
The portrait had a reserve of £300 and the artist had been identified
as Eileen Robey, the daughter of Sir George Robey, one of the great
music hall performers. The women were born a few years apart,
Eileen in 1902 and Mollie in 1906.
Eileen Robey is a shadowy figure despite her obvious talent as a
painter. Portraits by her occasionally surface at auctions but she is
of Mollie Panter-Downes
not represented in any of the national galleries and my attempts to Portrait
by Eileen Robey
research her career were unsuccessful. The auction house catalogue
meanwhile described Mollie as a writer, ‘largely forgotten today’. If the portrait were sold to
a private buyer, I thought, wouldn’t I be helping to deepen her obscurity? I also felt a sense of
injustice. If it had been a portrait of a male writer by a male artist, would the description have
been so dismissive and the price so low? I withdrew the painting from the sale.
Mollie Panter-Downes was an emotionally distant grandmother. Her father, a colonel in the
Royal Irish Regiment, had been killed at Mons in 1914. After his death his widow and daughter
moved from one cheap hotel to the next, or took lodgings, but always striving to keep up
appearances.
Despite having no formal education, Mollie at the age of sixteen wrote a bestselling romantic
novel, The Shoreless Sea. The Daily Mirror bought serial rights and ads appeared on London
buses. The book went through eight editions in eighteen months. She was able to rent a flat in
Knightsbridge, hire furniture from Harrods and take on an agent.
As children, we knew Mollie was a bestselling novelist but none of us had read The Shoreless
Sea because she refused to have a copy in the house. She wrote three more novels between
1925 and 1931 but later disowned them and only returned to novel writing once, in 1947,
with One Fine Day, an account of a day in the life of a middle-class woman after the war.
Sorting through Mollie’s papers I found a scrapbook, compiled by her mother, of reviews
of The Shoreless Sea. Every newspaper cutting from the Dundee Courier to the Times had
been carefully saved, along with a congratulatory letter from Buckingham Palace asking if the
queen could buy three signed copies.
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I also found countless folders of correspondence with the New Yorker, which she wrote for
throughout the Second World War. Her short stories had already been published by the
magazine but in July 1939 – against her agent’s advice – she wrote a piece about a
Kindertransport arriving at Liverpool Street Station. Two months later she received a Western
Union cable inviting her to write a regular ‘Letter from London’. Her dispatches appeared in
the magazine every week or two during the war – the first of them on 3 September 1939, the
day Britain declared war on Germany – and she continued to contribute until the early 1980s.
The cables reveal the way she worked. She would make weekly visits to London and jot down
her observations in a little lined notebook, then take the train home to write it up in a hut in
her garden in Surrey. A few days later her typed copy would be taken to Haslemere station
and handed to the guard, who would carry it to the Western Union office at Waterloo where it
would be cabled to New York. Among the hundreds of letters in her archive is one from the
Ministry of Information praising her journalism for its contribution to the war effort.
She was modest to the end: ‘I’m a reporter,’ she said, ‘I can’t invent.’ But despite all she did
to explain life in wartime England to American readers, she never won a prize or any official
acknowledgment from the British government. When Eileen Robey’s painting of her came
back from the auction house we offered it to the National Portrait Gallery. It is now in their
collection and available to view online.
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4 AUGUST 2023
How this Scottish adventurer is pushing the
boundaries of exploration
Sacha Scoging
A former Royal Marine, the Scottish adventurer talks about extreme expeditions and
what exploration means today.
What kick-started your career as an extreme adventurer?
I joined the Royal Marines at 16, where I
enrolled into the British Commandos, the
longest, hardest infantry training in the
world. I spent seven months learning skills
including survival, orienteering and
signaling before going on to become one of
the
youngest
Elite
Commando
Reconnaissance Snipers in the UK armed
forces, serving in destinations from
Northern Ireland to the Middle East. This
career path taught me how to survive in
some of the world’s most extreme environments. I think that’s probably what set me
off on my path of adventure.
Since then, you’ve tackled expeditions in a variety of remote locations. Which proved
the most challenging?
From a physical point of view, it has to be rowing across the Atlantic with Team
Essence [a group of five British men] from mainland Europe to mainland South
America. We completed it in 50 days, 10 hours and 36 minutes. We’re not sure if
anyone had ever attempted the expedition before. This made it particularly
challenging as we didn’t know how long it would take or what the most treacherous
parts would be — a true adventure in every sense of the word. There’s a lot of
planning beforehand, but, ultimately, you row for two hours, then you rest for two
hours, and so forth. It’s a long time to spend in your own headspace. At one point,
the closest person to us was Tim Peake up in the International Space Station, which
makes you realise just how vast and lonely the Atlantic Ocean is.
You now run Vertical Planet, a company that provides safety consultation for TV and
film crews in high-risk environments. What has been your most exciting project?
Active volcanoes have to be the most extreme environments I’ve worked in. For the
10-part National Geographic series Welcome to Earth, we filmed Will Smith inside
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Mount Yasur in Vanuatu while it was erupting, which included explosions and lava
bombs. Everything’s telling you to get away: there are poisonous gasses and
hurricane-force winds, and the air is filled with particles of silica and glass. We
obviously spent as little time as possible in there, got the filming done and then got
the hell out.
What’s the role of exploration in the 21st century?
With so much of the planet left to understand, I think our role should still be to
explore, but to do it leaving as little trace as possible and giving back to the local
communities in the areas we’re working in or travelling to. When I look back to my
early days of exploring, it was a very selfish, self-centred activity. Now, particularly
in the last three to four years, I always try to tell a story, which is ultimately always
connected to how the environment and climate are changing. I’m fortunate to have
a large audience, so I feel it’s my duty to teach and pass these experiences on.
What would you change in the world of travel?
The carbon footprint. I have to travel quite a bit for work, so I’m constantly debating
if the journey is worthwhile and what my impact is. I flew to Greenland last year with
work, but once we arrived, we made sure we didn’t use any form of transport other
than walking and skiing.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
What we think about is what we become. I wish somebody had told me that as a child
— there’s so much power and control in allowing your thoughts to become your
reality. For anyone who wants to travel more, however, my advice is to just get out
there. Start small — it doesn’t have to be a crazy, month-long expedition.
Describe what adventure means to you in three words.
Expanding my mind. Everyone always asks, what’s the meaning of life? I think it’s to
understand who we are and to work out how we fit into this world. It’s why I go to
the places I go to, why I do what I do. Going on adventures and pushing myself helps
me understand what sort of person I am, what I can learn and what I can achieve.
4
from Rats
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan calls rats a city’s “most unwanted inhabitants.” But rats are also interesting animals with
incredible capabilities. Read the excerpt from Rats
A rat is a rodent, the most common
mammal in the world. Rattus norvegicus
is one of the approximately four hundred
different kinds of rodents, and it is
known by many names, each of which
describes a trait or a perceived trait or
sometimes a habitat: the earth rat, the
roving rat, the barn rat, the field rat, the
migratory rat, the house rat, the sewer
rat, the water rat, the wharf rat, the alley
rat, the gray rat, the brown rat, and the
common rat. The average brown rat is
large and stocky; it grows to be approximately sixteen inches long from its nose to its tail—
the size of a large adult human male’s foot—and weighs about a pound, though brown rats
have been measured by scientists and exterminators at twenty inches and up to two pounds.
The brown rat is sometimes confused with the black rat, or Rattus rattus, which is smaller and
once inhabited New York City and all of the cities of America but, since Rattus norvegicus
pushed it out, is now relegated to a minor role. (The two species still survive alongside each
other in some Southern coastal cities and on the West Coast, in places like Los Angeles, for
example, where the black rat lives in attics and palm trees.) The black rat is always a very dark
gray, almost black, and the brown rat is gray or brown, with a belly that can be light gray,
yellow, or even a pure-seeming white. One spring, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw a redhaired brown rat that had been run over by a car. Both pet rats and laboratory rats are Rattus
norvegicus, but they are not wild and therefore, I would emphasize, not the subject of this
book. Sometimes pet rats are called fancy rats. But if anyone has picked up this book to learn
about fancy rats, then they should put this book down right away; none of the rats mentioned
herein are at all fancy.
Rats are nocturnal, and out in the night the brown rat’s eyes are small and black and shiny;
when a flashlight shines into them in the dark, the eyes of a rat light up like the eyes of a deer.
Though it forages* in darkness, the brown rat has poor eyesight. It makes up for this with, first
of all, an excellent sense of smell. . . . They have an excellent sense of taste, detecting the most
minute amounts of poison, down to one part per million. A brown rat has strong feet, the two
front paws each equipped with four clawlike nails, the rear paws even longer and stronger. It
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can run and climb with squirrel-like agility. It is an excellent swimmer, surviving in rivers and
bays, in sewer streams and toilet bowls.
The brown rat’s teeth are yellow, the front two incisors being especially long and sharp, like
buckteeth. When the brown rat bites, its front two teeth spread apart. When it gnaws, a flap of
skin plugs the space behind its incisors. Hence, when the rat gnaws on indigestible materials—
concrete or steel, for example—the shavings don’t go down the rat’s throat and kill it. Its
incisors grow at a rate of five inches per year. Rats always gnaw, and no one is certain why—
there are few modern rat studies. It is sometimes erroneously stated that the rat gnaws solely
to limit the length of its incisors, which would otherwise grow out of its head, but this is not
the case: the incisors wear down naturally. In terms of hardness, the brown rat’s teeth are
stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. They are comparable to steel. With the
alligator-like structure of their jaws, rats can exert a biting pressure of up to seven thousand
pounds per square inch. Rats, like mice, seem to be attracted to wires—to utility wires,
computer wires, wires in vehicles, in addition to gas and water pipes. One rat expert theorizes
that wires may be attractive to rats because of their resemblance to vines and the stalks of
plants; cables are the vines of the city. By one estimate, 26 percent of all electric-cable breaks
and 18 percent of all phone-cable disruptions are caused by rats. According to one study, as
many as 25 percent of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused. Rats chew electrical cables.
Sitting in a nest of tattered rags and newspapers, in the floorboards of an old tenement, a rat
gnaws the head of a match—the lightning in the city forest.
When it is not gnawing or feeding on trash, the brown rat digs. Anywhere there is dirt in a city,
brown rats are likely to be digging—in parks, in flowerbeds, in little dirt-poor backyards. They
dig holes to enter buildings and to make nests. Rat nests can be in the floorboards of
apartments, in the waste-stuffed corners of subway stations, in sewers, or beneath old furniture
in basements. “Cluttered and unkempt alleyways in cities provide ideal rat habitat, especially
those alleyways associated with food-serving establishments,” writes Robert Corrigan in
Rodent Control, a pest control manual. “Alley rats can forage safely within the shadows
created by the alleyway, as well as quickly retreat to the safety of cover in these narrow
channels.” Often, rats burrow under concrete sidewalk slabs. Entrance to a typical under-thesidewalk rat’s nest is gained through a two-inch-wide hole—their skeletons collapse and they
can squeeze into a hole as small as three quarters of an inch wide, the average width of their
skull. This tunnel then travels about a foot down to where it widens into a nest or den. The den
is lined with soft debris, often shredded plastic garbage or shopping bags, but sometimes even
grasses or plants; some rat nests have been found stuffed with the gnawed shavings of the
wood-based, spring-loaded snap traps that are used in attempts to kill them. The back of the
den then narrows into a long tunnel that opens up on another hole back on the street. This
second hole is called a bolt hole; it is an emergency exit. A bolt hole is typically covered lightly
with dirt or trash—camouflage. Sometimes there are networks of burrows, which can stretch
beneath a few concrete squares on a sidewalk, or a number of backyards, or even an entire city
block—when Rattus norvegicus first came to Selkirk, England, in 1776, there were so many
burrows that people feared the town might sink. Rats can also nest in basements, sewers,
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manholes, abandoned pipes of any kind, floorboards, or any hole or depression. “Often,”
Robert Corrigan writes, “‘city rats’ will live unbeknownst to people right beneath their feet.”
Rats also inhabit subways, as most people in New York City and any city with a subway
system are well aware. Every once in a while, there are reports of rats boarding trains, but for
the most part rats stay on the tracks—subway workers I have talked to refer to rats as “track
rabbits.” People tend to think that the subways are filled with rats, but in fact rats are not
everywhere in the system; they live in the subways according to the supply of discarded human
food and sewer leaks. Sometimes, rats use the subway purely for nesting purposes; they find
ways through the walls of the subway stations leading from the tracks to the restaurants and
stores on the street—the vibrations of subway trains tend to create rat-size cracks and holes.
Many subway rats tend to live near stations that are themselves near fast-food restaurants. At
the various subway stations near Herald Square, for example, people come down from the
streets and throw the food that they have not eaten onto the tracks, along with newspapers and
soda bottles and, I have noticed, thousands of nolonger-charged AA batteries, waiting to leak
acid. The rats eat freely from the waste and sit at the side of the little streams of creamy brown
sewery water that flows between the rails. They sip the water the way rats do, either with their
front paws or by scooping it up with their incisors.
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8 NOVERMBER 2022
“The Cat Thief” – from Latest Issue of Freeman’s
Son Bo-mi and translated by Jannet Hong
“I was away from Korea for a long time,” he said.
We were having tea at a downtown café. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen him, but couldn’t.
When I made some offhand comment about the tea timer on top of our table and how pretty it
was, he reached for it at once and stuck it deep inside my purse. Shaped like an hourglass, the
timer contained blue ink that flowed in reverse from bottom to top.
“This is stealing,” I whispered, glancing around the café.
“I’m good at it. On my travels in the past few years, I’ve stolen many things.”
He kept the things he’d taken in a glass cabinet in his living room. A silver fork from a Paris
café, a teacup saucer from a London restaurant, a bamboo basket that had held orchids from a
New Delhi bed-and-breakfast, and a pen belonging to a worker at a museum information desk
in Berlin. There had also been an ashtray from an Osaka hotel (though he was caught redhanded and had no choice but to return it), as well as a cat from New York.
“Wait, you stole a cat?”
“Actually, that was the first thing I ever stole.”
He began to talk about the New York apartment he’d lived in after his divorce.
“It was a run-down building, but clean. Across the hall from me lived a man in his early sixties
named Emerson. He lived alone. Well, not exactly alone. He lived with his cat Debbie. He was
an old, overweight man living alone with his cat.”
Because of his weight, Emerson tottered comically when he walked. Surprisingly, he had an
extremely soft voice. They talked in the hallway now and then, and each time he had to strain
his ears in order to understand what Emerson was saying. Emerson had never been married.
They even joked about their marital status, calling themselves “the divorcé and the bachelor.”
Perhaps because of all the joking, they became quite comfortable with one another.
One weekend, Emerson invited him over to his place for a few beers. “And there she was—
Debbie. She was all black, except for her white belly and paws. Until then, I hadn’t known he
owned a cat. When we’d been smoking and chatting for a while, I noticed she was watching
us from under the couch, with just her head poking out. I’d never seen a cat so close up before.
I tried to pet her, but as soon as I raised my hand, she dashed under the couch. It was only then
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that I realized all the framed photos on the walls were of her. In other words, Debbie was
Emerson’s only family.”
After that, he and Emerson got together every so often. They joked, drank, and smoked
together, and Debbie would stare at them for a while and disappear under the couch. He found
his life satisfactory in its own way. Objectively speaking, though, it would have been a stretch
to call his life satisfying.
He had followed his American girlfriend to the States, despite not knowing a single soul in the
country, but after being married for less than three years, she had left him. Then due to various
overlapping circumstances, he was forced to quit his job.
“Because of her, I had my life stolen from me. Don’t you think?”
Still, he didn’t think his situation was all bad. Happiness and boredom, abundance and
loneliness filled his life with order, as if these emotions had been woven together in a plaid
pattern, and as a result, his life felt strangely balanced. To top everything off, he’d made a
friend named Emerson. However, while he was intoxicated by this sense of equilibrium, his
bank balance lost its equilibrium, which then unraveled the woven balance of his life.
“Luckily my old company called me. They said if I wanted to keep working for them, they
could transfer me to their Philadelphia branch. I no longer had any reason to stay in New York,
so I decided to leave. But first, I wanted to say goodbye to Emerson. The night before I left,
we got sloshed at his place. I may have cried. He may have patted me on the back, who knows.
Then I passed out on his couch.”
In the middle of the night, he felt a stare and snapped awake. Something in the dark was
watching him. It was Debbie. She was sitting elegantly before him and Emerson, who had also
fallen asleep on the couch. He got up, carefully moving Emerson’s arm that was splayed across
his feet. The entire time, Debbie kept her eyes on him. When he stepped into the hallway and
was about to close the front door, he realized Debbie was still watching. She walked slowly
toward him. She then sat on her haunches and gazed up, stretching her front paws up toward
him.
“It was as if she was saying, ‘I want to leave, I want to leave this place. Please take me with
you.’ All of a sudden, it seemed wrong to leave her behind. I don’t know why I thought that.”
Debbie’s eyes glittered in the dark. He picked her up. He walked out of the building and left
New York.
“That was a very bad thing you did,” I said.
“About two weeks later, I went back to New York with Debbie. I had to. Since I didn’t have
the courage to explain my actions to Emerson, I planned to secretly drop her off at his
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apartment. But his place was completely empty. When I asked the property manager what had
happened, he said that Emerson had committed suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“They found him a week after I’d left. He’d hanged himself.”
“Where’s Debbie now?”
“She’s home, back at my place. Why? Do you want to meet her?”
I hesitated for a moment. “No,” I said at last.
He nodded.
We talked about other things after that and had many good laughs. Yet, the whole time, I was
thinking, Murderer! When a little more time passed, that thought faded from my mind, and
instead I was picturing myself back in my own home, peering at the tea timer and the blue ink
making its way to the top.
10
The Story of An Hour
Kate Chopin
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to
her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half
concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in
the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently
Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its
truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in
bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to
accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms.
When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no
one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her
soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with
the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler
was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her
faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and
piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except
when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep
continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain
strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on
one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a
suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did
not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching
toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as
her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered
word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: "free, free,
free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They
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stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every
inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep
again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save
with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long
procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread
her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There
would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women
believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or
a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment
of illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could
love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she
suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for
admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are
you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through
that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and
all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It
was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish
triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped
her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at
the bottom.
Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a
little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the
scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at
Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.
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