ACME
06-07-2014, 10:18 PM
.
Today's story is called
Prizes
by
Janet Frame
//////
http://www.saudienglish.net/upload/image31931.html
This story is different than the others . It is a very moving story . It is longer
with a lot of new words and deep emotions
Actually some parts of it nearly brought me in tears
//
First , here is the audio for the story to enjoy listening to
http://www.mediafire.com/download/8d5naibi637u184/prizes.rar
Here is the text of the story
////////
Prizes
By
Janet Frame
Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.
One knew of the pit ahead, of the grownups lying there
rewarded, arranged, and faded, who were so long ago
bright as poppies. One learned to take one's own deserved
place on the edge, ready to leap, not to hang back in a
status-free huddle where bodies were warm together and
the future darkness seemed less frightening. Therefore, one
learned to win prizes, to be surrounded in sleep by a dream
of ordinal numbers, to stand in best clothes upon platforms
in order to receive medals threaded upon black-and-gold
ribbons, books "bound in calf," scrolled certificates. One's
face became, from habit, incandescent with achievement.
I had my share of prizes, and of resentment when nobody
recognized my efforts; for instance, year after year, when
the New Zealand Agricultural and Pastoral Society held its
show in the Onui Drill Hall, I made a buttonhole of a rose
and a sprig of maidenhair fern tied together with raffia,
which I entered for the Flower Display, Gentleman's But-
tonhole. It was never displayed, and it never won a prize.
One morning, a militant woman in a white coat made a
speech to the whole school from the front steps, before
Bertie Dowling played the kettledrum for us to march
inside, and in her speech the woman accused too many
people of entering for the Buttonhole Section, and advised
us not to try to make buttonholes, as they were an art
beyond our years that even grownups found difficult to
master. "It has never been explained," the woman said, "why
so many children enter buttonholes in the Flower Show."
(Bertie Dowling had the sticks raised, ready to play the
drum. He was very clever at it; he was a small, sunburned,
wiry boy with long feet like a rabbit.)
I felt antagonistic toward the woman visitor. Who was
she to order me not to make buttonholes for the Flower
Show? I persisted, as I say, year after year, yet always,
once I had surrendered my exhibit, neat in its little box
cadged from the jeweler's, I never heard of it again. I had
so much determination and so little wisdom that I never
grasped the futility of my struggle, although I realized that
when talents were being devised and distributed my name
was not included in the short list of those blessed with the
power to make gentlemen's buttonholes that would reach
the display table at the Flower Show in the Drill Hall and
win First, Second, or Third Prize.
I won six and four pence for handwriting. At that time,
I was in love with my parents; therefore, I decided to buy
my mother a best-china cup, saucer, and plate with the
entire six and four pence, even though at that time I also
had a fondness for Sante Chocolate Bars, jelly beans, and
chocolate fish whose insides were a splurge of pink rubbery
substance with tiny air holes in it. When I gave my mother
the best-china cup, saucer, and plate she said, "You shouldn't
have," and, wrapping the set carefully in tissue paper, she
placed it in the sideboard cupboard with the other dishes
that we never used — not even for the banquet to see the
New Year in — like the gravy boat, the tiny cream jug with
the picture of a Dutch girl, the vegetable dishes with the
picture of a rooster crowing on each one. Then my mother
locked the door. I never saw her using the cup, saucer, and
plate. It was best china, too, the man in Peak's told me. My
mother always said she was keeping the set for when she
could really use it, drinking out of the cup, resting a silver
spoon in the saucer, tasting (with a cake fork) a slice of
marble cake upon the plate. Although I could not then
discern the difference between using something and really
using it, there was evidently a distinction so important that
when my mother died she had still not been able to use,
really to use, my six-and-four penny gift to her.
My next prize was for a poem that revealed both my
lack of scientific knowledge and my touching disbelief
in change by concluding with the lines
And till the sky falls from above,
These things of nature I shall love.
Uncle Ted, of my favorite wireless station in Christchurch,
read my poem over the air, between a recording of "The
Nutcracker, Waltz of the Flowers," and the fifth episode of
David and Dawn in Fairyland, and two days later I
received through the post an order for ten shillings, with part
of which I bought for myself an unsatisfactory diary and
a John Bull Printing Set, which I used, printing my name,
and rude rhymes, and insults to the rest of the family, until
the ink dried on the navy-blue pad; the remainder of the
ten shillings I saved in a Post Office Bank, which could not
be opened unless it was taken to the Post Office. I broke
into it with a kitchen knife when my bathing cap perished
and the weather was warm enough for swimming.
Prizes. They arrived unexpectedly, or I waited greedily
for them at the end of every school year, when I received
one or two, sometimes three, books with the school motto,
"Pleasure from Work," inscribed on the flyleaf beneath
the cramped, detailed writing of the form mistress setting
out the reasons for my prize. Reasons were necessary, for
no school had yet learned to distribute prizes at random,
first come, first served, in the manner that my mother had
adopted, in exasperation, when she was pestered for raisins,
dates, or the last of the chocolate biscuits. I collected so
many books: Treasure Island; Silas Marner; Emma; Poems
of Longfellow, with a heart-throbbing picture of Hiawatha
bearing Minnehaha across the river:
Over wide and rushing rivers
In his arms he bore the maiden;
India, with illustrations colored as if with cochineal; Boys
and Girls Who Became Famous; and — during the war, when
books were scarce — a musty old rained-on and stained
volume of poems about blossoms, barns, and wine presses,
printed in tall, dark type, where snakes lurked in every
capital letter.
Prizes. Some did not get prizes. Dotty Baker with the
greasy hair never got a prize. Maud Gray, who found it
hard to read even simple sentences aloud, never got a prize.
Maud Gray! She was the stodgiest girl in the class; all the
teachers made fun of her, and most of the pupils, including
myself, followed their example. Her eyes were brittle and
brown, like cracked acorn shells; her face was pale and
blotched, like milk on the turn.
Years later, I was visiting Onui. I was walking desolately
in the rain along the main street, wearing my dirty old
gabardine and my dowdy clothes and feeling fifteen in-
stead of twenty-five, when, just beyond the bed of poppies
in the center of the street, I saw two beautiful women
wheeling prams, and their proud gait was so noticeable I
tried to recall when and where I had seen before that
superior parading of the victorious. And then I realized
that I had walked onto the platform in the same way, year
after year, to receive my prizes. Dotty Baker, Maud Gray!
As they passed with their cocooned, quilted, embroidered
treasure, I could not even assert my superiority by
whispering, "You cheated in history, you couldn't learn poetry
by heart, you never had your name in the paper. . . . First
in geometry, French, English, history. . . ."
They smiled at me and I smiled at them. We shared the
pit, each in her place. The rain poured upon the bed of
crushed poppies between us. Yet the delicacy and distance
of the two women were unmistakable; I grudged their
proud cloaks as they trooped, clients of love, on their
specially reserved side of the world. But — prizes. They never
won prizes. My only retaliation was prizes — listing them,
remembering.
I wrote to a children's newspaper, sending poems that
were awarded ten or five or three marks. When I had earned
one hundred marks, I received the usual prize of two
guineas. For one guinea my father bought me a tennis
racket, as he said, "on the cheap," but when he showed it to
me I was alarmed to discover that the strings were black
instead of white, and the name was unfamiliar — Double
Duke. I was the loneliest person in the world with my
black-stringed Double Duke. Why had my father not
realized that every other girl at school possessed a white-
stringed Vantage? Ah, it was sad enough to have an old
wireless at home with a name no one had heard of and
with tubes so few in number compared with the tubes in
other sets. The conversations in class went: "Have you got
a wireless at home? How many tubes?" The prestige of
owning things mattered so much, and to have a tennis
racket with a strange name and grotesque strings was
punishment indeed. I was so ashamed of my tennis racket
that I seldom used it.
With my other guinea from the newspaper I had the
unexpected fortune to be chosen by Hessie Sutton, a
woman up the road, as her pupil for music lessons — the
piano — at a reduced rate, and every Tuesday and Friday
after school I claimed an hour of Hessie Sutton's time in
the front room of the house where she lived with her mother
and a white parrot whose perpetual screaming inspired
complaining letters to the evening paper.
The front room was large and carpeted, with sparkling,
bubble-shaped windows. The piano made wonderfully
clean sounds as the keys sank into and sprang from their
green bedding; the sounds filled me with a polished sense
of opulence and cleanliness, and each note emerged bravely
and milkily alone and poured into me, up to my neck. I
swallowed. I liked Hessie Sutton's piano. We had none at
home. At my aunt's house, where I went to practice once
a week, there was an old piano with soapy yellow keys
that stuck halfway, and the lower or upper half of each
sound had been weathered down so that each note came
forth deprived, diseased, with an invalid petulance and
stricture.
"But you must not bite your nails," Hessie Sutton
warned me. "You will never be able to play the piano if
you bite your nails!" That was my first intimation that
Hessie Sutton was a spy. I clenched my fists, hiding my
fingernails.
At school, I said, "I learn music, do you?" Dotty Baker,
Maud Gray, and others learned music, but mostly they
were like uncooked pastry at it; they suffered a dearth of
warmth, expansion, gold finish. On the cold June days,
when the Music Festival was held, we sat miserably in the
hall, our coats over our knees, listening to a "Marche
Militaire" being played by schoolgirl dentists and carpenters.
My first piece was named "Puck." I went down to the
stationer's to by it on tick, and the ginger-haired boy
served me, and his face had a rust-colored blush, like a
dock leaf in autumn, because he had to go to the small
room at the back of the shop and ask his parents if it
would be all right to serve me, as our bill had not been paid.
On my way home with "Puck," I met Hessie Sutton and
smiled at her, shyly and excitedly, but when she glanced at
the parcel under my arm and the music half wrapped, and
gave an understanding smile, my face clouded in a fierce
frown. How dare she see me and divine my excitement!
How dare she! How I hated her!
That afternoon, when I went for my lesson, she
heightened my sense of shame. "I saw you." She pounced as soon
as I entered the room. "I saw you," she said, like a detective
giving evidence, "coming home with your new piece of
music. I guessed how excited you were!"
"I wasn't caring at all," I said sullenly.
"Yes, you were," Hessie Sutton insisted. "I saw it in your
face! I knew/"
I did not understand why she should appear so triumphant,
as if by seizing on a momentary aspect of my behavior she
had uncovered a life of deceit in me. Why, she honked with
triumph like the soldier who brought back the golden horn
from the underworld as proof of the secret activities of the
twelve dancing princesses! I did not realize that people's
actions are mysteries that are so seldom solved.
"I knew, I knew!" Hessie Sutton kept saying as I sat
down to try out "Puck."
From that day, I no longer enjoyed my music lessons. I
was weary of being spied upon. People were saying,
observing me closely, "She's filling out, she's growing tall, look at
her hair, isn't that Grace's chin she's got, and there's no
doubting where her smile comes from!"
You see how derivative I was made out to be? Nothing
belonged to me, not even my body, and now with Hessie
Sutton and her spying ways I could not call my feelings my
own. Why did people have so much need to stake their
claim in other people? Were they scared of the bailiffs'
arriving in their own house? I stopped learning music. I was
in despair. I could no longer use prizes as a fortress. In spite
of my books bound in calf, my scrolled certificates, the
prize essay on the Visit to the Flour Mill, and my marks of
merit in the children's newspaper, I was being invaded by
people who wanted their prizes from me.
And now I lie in the pit, finally arranged, faded, robbed
of all prizes, while still under every human sky the crows
wheel and swoop, dividing, dividing the spoils of the dead.
The End
//////
.
Today's story is called
Prizes
by
Janet Frame
//////
http://www.saudienglish.net/upload/image31931.html
This story is different than the others . It is a very moving story . It is longer
with a lot of new words and deep emotions
Actually some parts of it nearly brought me in tears
//
First , here is the audio for the story to enjoy listening to
http://www.mediafire.com/download/8d5naibi637u184/prizes.rar
Here is the text of the story
////////
Prizes
By
Janet Frame
Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.
One knew of the pit ahead, of the grownups lying there
rewarded, arranged, and faded, who were so long ago
bright as poppies. One learned to take one's own deserved
place on the edge, ready to leap, not to hang back in a
status-free huddle where bodies were warm together and
the future darkness seemed less frightening. Therefore, one
learned to win prizes, to be surrounded in sleep by a dream
of ordinal numbers, to stand in best clothes upon platforms
in order to receive medals threaded upon black-and-gold
ribbons, books "bound in calf," scrolled certificates. One's
face became, from habit, incandescent with achievement.
I had my share of prizes, and of resentment when nobody
recognized my efforts; for instance, year after year, when
the New Zealand Agricultural and Pastoral Society held its
show in the Onui Drill Hall, I made a buttonhole of a rose
and a sprig of maidenhair fern tied together with raffia,
which I entered for the Flower Display, Gentleman's But-
tonhole. It was never displayed, and it never won a prize.
One morning, a militant woman in a white coat made a
speech to the whole school from the front steps, before
Bertie Dowling played the kettledrum for us to march
inside, and in her speech the woman accused too many
people of entering for the Buttonhole Section, and advised
us not to try to make buttonholes, as they were an art
beyond our years that even grownups found difficult to
master. "It has never been explained," the woman said, "why
so many children enter buttonholes in the Flower Show."
(Bertie Dowling had the sticks raised, ready to play the
drum. He was very clever at it; he was a small, sunburned,
wiry boy with long feet like a rabbit.)
I felt antagonistic toward the woman visitor. Who was
she to order me not to make buttonholes for the Flower
Show? I persisted, as I say, year after year, yet always,
once I had surrendered my exhibit, neat in its little box
cadged from the jeweler's, I never heard of it again. I had
so much determination and so little wisdom that I never
grasped the futility of my struggle, although I realized that
when talents were being devised and distributed my name
was not included in the short list of those blessed with the
power to make gentlemen's buttonholes that would reach
the display table at the Flower Show in the Drill Hall and
win First, Second, or Third Prize.
I won six and four pence for handwriting. At that time,
I was in love with my parents; therefore, I decided to buy
my mother a best-china cup, saucer, and plate with the
entire six and four pence, even though at that time I also
had a fondness for Sante Chocolate Bars, jelly beans, and
chocolate fish whose insides were a splurge of pink rubbery
substance with tiny air holes in it. When I gave my mother
the best-china cup, saucer, and plate she said, "You shouldn't
have," and, wrapping the set carefully in tissue paper, she
placed it in the sideboard cupboard with the other dishes
that we never used — not even for the banquet to see the
New Year in — like the gravy boat, the tiny cream jug with
the picture of a Dutch girl, the vegetable dishes with the
picture of a rooster crowing on each one. Then my mother
locked the door. I never saw her using the cup, saucer, and
plate. It was best china, too, the man in Peak's told me. My
mother always said she was keeping the set for when she
could really use it, drinking out of the cup, resting a silver
spoon in the saucer, tasting (with a cake fork) a slice of
marble cake upon the plate. Although I could not then
discern the difference between using something and really
using it, there was evidently a distinction so important that
when my mother died she had still not been able to use,
really to use, my six-and-four penny gift to her.
My next prize was for a poem that revealed both my
lack of scientific knowledge and my touching disbelief
in change by concluding with the lines
And till the sky falls from above,
These things of nature I shall love.
Uncle Ted, of my favorite wireless station in Christchurch,
read my poem over the air, between a recording of "The
Nutcracker, Waltz of the Flowers," and the fifth episode of
David and Dawn in Fairyland, and two days later I
received through the post an order for ten shillings, with part
of which I bought for myself an unsatisfactory diary and
a John Bull Printing Set, which I used, printing my name,
and rude rhymes, and insults to the rest of the family, until
the ink dried on the navy-blue pad; the remainder of the
ten shillings I saved in a Post Office Bank, which could not
be opened unless it was taken to the Post Office. I broke
into it with a kitchen knife when my bathing cap perished
and the weather was warm enough for swimming.
Prizes. They arrived unexpectedly, or I waited greedily
for them at the end of every school year, when I received
one or two, sometimes three, books with the school motto,
"Pleasure from Work," inscribed on the flyleaf beneath
the cramped, detailed writing of the form mistress setting
out the reasons for my prize. Reasons were necessary, for
no school had yet learned to distribute prizes at random,
first come, first served, in the manner that my mother had
adopted, in exasperation, when she was pestered for raisins,
dates, or the last of the chocolate biscuits. I collected so
many books: Treasure Island; Silas Marner; Emma; Poems
of Longfellow, with a heart-throbbing picture of Hiawatha
bearing Minnehaha across the river:
Over wide and rushing rivers
In his arms he bore the maiden;
India, with illustrations colored as if with cochineal; Boys
and Girls Who Became Famous; and — during the war, when
books were scarce — a musty old rained-on and stained
volume of poems about blossoms, barns, and wine presses,
printed in tall, dark type, where snakes lurked in every
capital letter.
Prizes. Some did not get prizes. Dotty Baker with the
greasy hair never got a prize. Maud Gray, who found it
hard to read even simple sentences aloud, never got a prize.
Maud Gray! She was the stodgiest girl in the class; all the
teachers made fun of her, and most of the pupils, including
myself, followed their example. Her eyes were brittle and
brown, like cracked acorn shells; her face was pale and
blotched, like milk on the turn.
Years later, I was visiting Onui. I was walking desolately
in the rain along the main street, wearing my dirty old
gabardine and my dowdy clothes and feeling fifteen in-
stead of twenty-five, when, just beyond the bed of poppies
in the center of the street, I saw two beautiful women
wheeling prams, and their proud gait was so noticeable I
tried to recall when and where I had seen before that
superior parading of the victorious. And then I realized
that I had walked onto the platform in the same way, year
after year, to receive my prizes. Dotty Baker, Maud Gray!
As they passed with their cocooned, quilted, embroidered
treasure, I could not even assert my superiority by
whispering, "You cheated in history, you couldn't learn poetry
by heart, you never had your name in the paper. . . . First
in geometry, French, English, history. . . ."
They smiled at me and I smiled at them. We shared the
pit, each in her place. The rain poured upon the bed of
crushed poppies between us. Yet the delicacy and distance
of the two women were unmistakable; I grudged their
proud cloaks as they trooped, clients of love, on their
specially reserved side of the world. But — prizes. They never
won prizes. My only retaliation was prizes — listing them,
remembering.
I wrote to a children's newspaper, sending poems that
were awarded ten or five or three marks. When I had earned
one hundred marks, I received the usual prize of two
guineas. For one guinea my father bought me a tennis
racket, as he said, "on the cheap," but when he showed it to
me I was alarmed to discover that the strings were black
instead of white, and the name was unfamiliar — Double
Duke. I was the loneliest person in the world with my
black-stringed Double Duke. Why had my father not
realized that every other girl at school possessed a white-
stringed Vantage? Ah, it was sad enough to have an old
wireless at home with a name no one had heard of and
with tubes so few in number compared with the tubes in
other sets. The conversations in class went: "Have you got
a wireless at home? How many tubes?" The prestige of
owning things mattered so much, and to have a tennis
racket with a strange name and grotesque strings was
punishment indeed. I was so ashamed of my tennis racket
that I seldom used it.
With my other guinea from the newspaper I had the
unexpected fortune to be chosen by Hessie Sutton, a
woman up the road, as her pupil for music lessons — the
piano — at a reduced rate, and every Tuesday and Friday
after school I claimed an hour of Hessie Sutton's time in
the front room of the house where she lived with her mother
and a white parrot whose perpetual screaming inspired
complaining letters to the evening paper.
The front room was large and carpeted, with sparkling,
bubble-shaped windows. The piano made wonderfully
clean sounds as the keys sank into and sprang from their
green bedding; the sounds filled me with a polished sense
of opulence and cleanliness, and each note emerged bravely
and milkily alone and poured into me, up to my neck. I
swallowed. I liked Hessie Sutton's piano. We had none at
home. At my aunt's house, where I went to practice once
a week, there was an old piano with soapy yellow keys
that stuck halfway, and the lower or upper half of each
sound had been weathered down so that each note came
forth deprived, diseased, with an invalid petulance and
stricture.
"But you must not bite your nails," Hessie Sutton
warned me. "You will never be able to play the piano if
you bite your nails!" That was my first intimation that
Hessie Sutton was a spy. I clenched my fists, hiding my
fingernails.
At school, I said, "I learn music, do you?" Dotty Baker,
Maud Gray, and others learned music, but mostly they
were like uncooked pastry at it; they suffered a dearth of
warmth, expansion, gold finish. On the cold June days,
when the Music Festival was held, we sat miserably in the
hall, our coats over our knees, listening to a "Marche
Militaire" being played by schoolgirl dentists and carpenters.
My first piece was named "Puck." I went down to the
stationer's to by it on tick, and the ginger-haired boy
served me, and his face had a rust-colored blush, like a
dock leaf in autumn, because he had to go to the small
room at the back of the shop and ask his parents if it
would be all right to serve me, as our bill had not been paid.
On my way home with "Puck," I met Hessie Sutton and
smiled at her, shyly and excitedly, but when she glanced at
the parcel under my arm and the music half wrapped, and
gave an understanding smile, my face clouded in a fierce
frown. How dare she see me and divine my excitement!
How dare she! How I hated her!
That afternoon, when I went for my lesson, she
heightened my sense of shame. "I saw you." She pounced as soon
as I entered the room. "I saw you," she said, like a detective
giving evidence, "coming home with your new piece of
music. I guessed how excited you were!"
"I wasn't caring at all," I said sullenly.
"Yes, you were," Hessie Sutton insisted. "I saw it in your
face! I knew/"
I did not understand why she should appear so triumphant,
as if by seizing on a momentary aspect of my behavior she
had uncovered a life of deceit in me. Why, she honked with
triumph like the soldier who brought back the golden horn
from the underworld as proof of the secret activities of the
twelve dancing princesses! I did not realize that people's
actions are mysteries that are so seldom solved.
"I knew, I knew!" Hessie Sutton kept saying as I sat
down to try out "Puck."
From that day, I no longer enjoyed my music lessons. I
was weary of being spied upon. People were saying,
observing me closely, "She's filling out, she's growing tall, look at
her hair, isn't that Grace's chin she's got, and there's no
doubting where her smile comes from!"
You see how derivative I was made out to be? Nothing
belonged to me, not even my body, and now with Hessie
Sutton and her spying ways I could not call my feelings my
own. Why did people have so much need to stake their
claim in other people? Were they scared of the bailiffs'
arriving in their own house? I stopped learning music. I was
in despair. I could no longer use prizes as a fortress. In spite
of my books bound in calf, my scrolled certificates, the
prize essay on the Visit to the Flour Mill, and my marks of
merit in the children's newspaper, I was being invaded by
people who wanted their prizes from me.
And now I lie in the pit, finally arranged, faded, robbed
of all prizes, while still under every human sky the crows
wheel and swoop, dividing, dividing the spoils of the dead.
The End
//////
.