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U. A. Fanthorpe, from Neck-Verse, 1992
A complete GCSE guide to Fanthorpe's gently subversive poem about a small boy kept behind after school who cannot tell the time: the child's-eye narration, the invented compound words, themes of time, authority and escape, key quotations with analysis, context and exam tips.
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Half-past Two tells a small, true-feeling story. A young boy does “Something Very Wrong” at school (so trivial that the adult narrator admits to having forgotten what it was) and his teacher tells him to stay in the schoolroom “till half-past two”. But she forgets one thing: she has never taught him how to read a clock. Left alone, unable to find half-past two anywhere in his world of named times (getting-up time, TV time, kiss time), the boy slips out of measured time altogether into a dreamy, timeless present, until the teacher rushes back, releases him, and normal scheduled life resumes.
The punishment accidentally becomes a gift. For a few unmeasured minutes the boy lives where “time hides tick-less”, fully absorbed in smells, sounds and stillness, an escape the adult world rarely allows. The final stanza tells us he “never forgot” it (AO1). Fanthorpe, who spent years as a teacher, writes with double vision: the poem is funny about adult forgetfulness and bureaucratic time, and quietly serious about what children know that adults have lost.
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