Cambridge International Examinations

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ENGLISH 0844/02
April 2017
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IB17 05_0844_02/6RP
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Read this extract adapted from ‘The Secret Garden’ by Frances Hodgson Burnett and
then answer the questions.

Mary is an orphan who has been sent to live with her uncle on his large estate. In this
extract she hears a strange noise while she is playing alone in the garden and goes to
investigate where the sound is coming from.

***

It was a very strange thing indeed. She quite caught her breath as she stopped to look
at it. A boy was sitting under a tree, with his back against it, playing on a rough
wooden pipe. He was a funny-looking boy about twelve. He looked very clean and his
nose turned up and his cheeks were as red as poppies, and never before had
Mistress Mary seen such round blue eyes in any boy’s face. On the trunk of the tree
he leaned against, a brown squirrel was clinging and watching him, and quite near
him were two rabbits sitting up and sniffing with tremendous noses – and actually it
appeared as if they were all drawing near to watch him and listen to the strange, low,
little calls his pipe seemed to make.

When he saw Mary he held up his hand and spoke to her in a voice almost as low as,
and rather like, his piping.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘It’d flight them.’

Mary stood frozen, not daring to move a muscle. He stopped playing his pipe and
began to rise from the ground. He moved so slowly that it scarcely seemed as though
he were moving at all, but at last he stood on his two feet and then the squirrel
scampered back up into the branches of his tree and the rabbits dropped on all fours
and began to hop away, though not at all as if they were frightened.

‘I’m Dickon,’ the boy said. ‘I know you’re Miss Mary.’

He had a wide, red, curving mouth and his smile spread all over his face.

‘I got up like that,’ he explained, ‘because if you make a quick move it startles them. A
body has to move gently and speak low when wild things are about.’

He did not speak to her as if they had never seen each other before, but as if he knew
her quite well. Mary knew nothing about boys, and spoke to him a little stiffly because
she felt rather shy.

‘Did you get Martha’s letter?’ she asked.

He nodded his curly, rust-coloured head.

‘That’s why I came.’

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He stopped to pick up something which had been lying on the ground beside him
when he said, ‘I’ve got the garden tools you wanted. There’s a little spade and rake
and fork. Eh! They are good ones. And the woman in the shop threw in a packet of
white poppy when I bought the other seeds.’

‘Will you show the seeds to me?’ Mary said.

She wished she could talk as he did. His speech was so quick and easy. It sounded
as if he liked her and was not the least afraid she would not like him, even though he
was only a common country boy, in patched-up clothes and with a funny face and a
rough, rusty-red head. As she came closer to him, she noticed that there was a clean
fresh scent of heather* and grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of
them. She liked it very much, and when she looked into his funny face with red cheeks
and round blue eyes she forgot that she had felt shy.
Glossary
heather: a wild plant

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