Task 1: Copy the table and complete the note.
Task 2: Read the text and explain your understanding of its meaning.
‘The Magic of Water’ by Laurie Lee
I discovered water at the age of four, at the mouth of our cottage pump. I remember
it not as a thing for merely washing and scrubbing, but as a plaything with a brilliant
life of its own. One could pump it in pure gulps out of the ground, and it came out
sparkling like liquid sky. It broke or ran, or quivered in a jug, or weighted one’s
clothes with cold. I found you could drink it, draw with it, swim beetles across it, or fly
it in bubbles in the air. You could bury your head in it, and open your eyes, and see
the old bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and smell the sharp lime
from the ground. It was a plaything of magic, which you could confine or scatter but
never destroy.
Perhaps none of us loses that early passion for water, for we are bound to it by
ancestral cords. The sight and sound of it cures our minds, and most of our pleasure
seems to be ordered around it. When we wallow in our baths, is it just to get clean, I
wonder, or is the pleasure something deeper than that, an indulgent return to the
weightless peace of the womb, or to the warm shallow lapping of those primeval
seas where all life is said to have begun?
Water has a thousand pleasures and a thousand faces, and it is the most versatile of
all the elements. Fire is masculine, monotonous, blundering, crude; water is
feminine and far more subtle. It can offer the heaped-up power of a murdering
ocean, or the miniature frolic of a municipal fountain; the pitiless sledgehammer of
an annihilating flood, or the bucolic vacancy of a summer duckpond. Water is the
puddle just big enough for a small boy’s boot, the thundering curtains of Niagara
Falls, the star in a snowflake, the mist on a cobweb, the protective arm round an
ancient city. It is the sting on the lips from a hill-cold spring, the chisel that cut out the
shape of Britain, the singing spout of a kettle, the last cry of a man in the desert.
Water is all things to all men, and most of them good. Most of all it is a great healer
and pacifier. We do not go to the river to fight or make trouble, but to sit and gaze at
it, or splash about. Man makes a special noise when he gets near water-you hear it at
the seaside and in the bathroom- a kind of wordless, ageless, happy yell, the cry of a
child in the arms of its mother.
Water is the great innocence left on earth, something which no one so far has
spoiled. Our littered lands may stretch right to the coast, but no one has yet put a
scar on the sea.
Think about
• Genre: What genre of text is it?
• Narrator: Who is the narrator?
• Fiction/non-fiction: Is it fiction or non-fiction?
• Analysis: Will I be able to analyse it?
• Comprehension: Will I understand it?