Bernard Returns to the Frozen Pond — Oundle School 11+ (2025)

Writing task

Continue the passage from Sliding, focusing on the boys’ actions and descriptions and on what Bernard thinks and feels.

Source passage

Read this extract from a short story called “Sliding.” It is wintertime and Bernard and his friends have decided to go and slide across the ice which has formed on a large pond.

After lunch they all went to the pond, protected by layers of clothing against the wind’s knives, their woollen hats pulled over their ears. Bernard began to feel very happy. He began to imagine the long quietness of his gliding over the ice. He thought of the thick ice, clear as glass, beneath which the cold fish swam, staring up with their goggle eyes at the sliding boys. He thought of the ice like a dazzling mirror set in the hills, on which they could skim above their own images, each brilliant slider like two perfect boys – one upside down- joined at their feet. In his happiness he bumped and jostled against Danny Kenyon.

But the pond was a disappointment. Winter had taken all life from the hills and the face of the ice was grey and blind – the colour of the flat sky above. Featureless, the ice stretched on, swept by an unhindered wind. The boys bent their heads down against the brutal cold. Their voices were feeble; they felt small and helpless. Only Randall Jenkins was unaffected. He ran onto the ice, planting his laughable feet one after the other. His legs rigid, both arms raised for balance, he slid with comic dignity. They all rushed after him, sliding and calling. The afternoon was suddenly warm and vigorous.

Bernard was a good runner, and he hurled himself along so the momentum of his first slide would be memorable. He raced past two of three boys and then stopped, his legs braced wide, head up, arms raised. He was expecting something birdlike, something approaching flight, but nothing happened. His rubber soles clung wickedly to the surface of the ice and he slid no more than a few yards. He was inconsolable.

He shuffled cautiously along the margins of the ice, tentative and humble. Far out, in the middle of the pond, he could see the dark figures of his friends, freely sliding, gyrating, crouching, skating on one leg. Their voices came bounding to him high and clear like the calling of seagulls. But he ran along on the edge of the lake, unable to slide. Then unexpectedly, without warning, he found himself free of the binding friction that had held him as the soles of his boots froze. He had begun to glide. He ran jubilantly into the heart of the pond, far out-stripping the loud boys, sliding far and fast, hearing their admiration and surprise. The pond was his.

Bernard thought he had never seen anything as lovely as the dark ice, hardly lit at all as the light faded and the still figures of his friends dotted about on it, not moving their arms in a variety of postures, their bodies bent or upright. He had never felt so light; he was full of fiery energy. He slid beautifully, and felt at once the speed of his sliding and he knew that no one had ever slid so far.

Adapted from “Sliding” by Leslie Norris.

Time: 25 minutes (as indicated for this published task).

Marks: 20.