Each story has only a few quotations here, because every one was checked: against the AQA anthology's own printing for ‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’, against two published versions for ‘Korea’ and ‘A Family Supper’, against two transcriptions of Lawrence's 1914 text, against a full copy for ‘The Darkness Out There’, against Cambridge University Press's student book and a second study guide for ‘Chemistry’, and against at least two published study guides for ‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’. Published versions of ‘Korea’ differ by one small word in its last sentence, so that sentence is quoted only in part. If a word here ever differs from your anthology, trust your anthology.
“You must accept it – you can’t get it back – it’s the only way”
‘Chemistry’, Grandfather, after the launch sinks
On the surface he is talking about a toy boat, but the dashes break the sentence into short, effortful pieces, as if each one costs him something. He seems to be speaking about death too, and about his wife. The irony, which the rest of the story develops, is that the man who tells the family to accept loss is the one who cannot accept change.
“within the scope of this sad symmetry”
‘Chemistry’, the boy, on the year the three of them lived together after the two deaths
Symmetry means balance: a widower, a widow and a boy, each missing someone, holding each other level. The soft repeated s sounds make the arrangement sound hushed and fragile, and the word sad admits that this is not happiness but an equilibrium of grief. Ralph's arrival is what breaks it, which is why the boy resents him so fiercely.
“You don’t make things in chemistry – you change them. Anything can change.”
‘Chemistry’, Grandfather in his shed
This is the story's thesis, delivered as a science lesson. The Grandfather means substances, but the boy, and the reader, hear it as a statement about people: his daughter has changed, the household has changed. It also prepares for the ending, where the boy turns the idea into comfort, insisting that what changes is not lost.
“Laurel water. Prussic acid. Not for drinking.”
‘Chemistry’, Grandfather, naming the last bottle on his shelf
Three clipped phrases, like a label read aloud, and the last is a warning. It is the clearest piece of foreshadowing in the anthology: the poison is shown to the boy, named, and forbidden, and it is what the Grandfather later drinks. Swift lets the calm, factual tone carry the horror, so that the reader understands before the boy does.
“though things change they aren’t destroyed”
‘Chemistry’, the boy, in the final paragraph
The boy takes his Grandfather's chemistry and turns it into consolation: people are like elements, changed but not destroyed. Standing at the pond where the boat and the acid lie, he sees his Grandfather on the far side, the launch still coming towards him. One reading is that this is healing; another is that the boy has refused to let go, just as his Grandfather did.
“Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment.”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part I, the first description of Elizabeth
Lawrence tells us almost at once what the marriage has done to her. Calm and set suggests control that has hardened into habit, and a mouth closed with disillusionment makes her silence a result of experience rather than temperament. The long abstract noun at the end weighs the sentence down, as disappointment weighs on her, before we have seen her husband at all.
“It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part I, Elizabeth to Annie
The repeated flower ties every stage of the marriage together: wedding, birth and, in the rest of the sentence, the first time Walter was brought home drunk. To Annie the flowers smell beautiful; to Elizabeth they smell of a life gone wrong. By the end they will also mean death, so the title's odour gathers the whole marriage into one scent.
“He’ll come home when they carry him.”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part II, Elizabeth to the Rigleys
She means that he will be carried home drunk, and says it bitterly, to save face in front of the neighbours. The reader hears the second meaning she does not intend: he will be carried home dead. It is dramatic irony at its sharpest, and it shows how her anger has become a shield against the fear already growing underneath it.
“There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part II, the parlour, before the body arrives
The fire-lit kitchen of Part I has given way to a cold room with no fireplace, and the chrysanthemums are now deathly. Lawrence places the flowers in the room where Walter will be laid before we see his body, so the symbol arrives before the fact. When a miner knocks over a vase of them, the image is complete.
“they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part II, Elizabeth over Walter's body
The heart of the story. The repeated phrase in the dark makes their marriage a blind struggle in which neither saw whom they were fighting, and the verb fought admits her part as well as his. It links the literal darkness of the pit and the unlit cottage to a darkness between two people, which is the story's real tragedy.
“She was grateful to death, which restored the truth.”
‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, Part II, over the washed body
Gratitude is the last thing we expect a new widow to feel, and that is Lawrence's point. Death does not give Walter back to her, as the 1911 ending suggested; it shows her the truth that he was always separate. The sentence is short and plain amid long, troubled paragraphs, so it lands like a verdict.
“The Head beamed at nobody.”
‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’, the staffroom, as the Head announces Stefan's visit
Five words that sum up the Head. Beamed suggests warm, generous pleasure, but it is aimed at nobody, so the warmth is performance for an audience rather than contact with a person. Dunmore's comic precision makes the point without comment: in this building, the people at the top smile at the room and see no one in it.
“Mother, I’ve lost the words you gave me.”
‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’, a line of Stefan's poem, as Carla quotes it
Stefan turns what Carla told him about forgetting her Polish into a poem, and this line gives her loss a voice. Words here means both language and a mother's gifts, so losing them is losing part of herself. It shows what their letters are really about: not status but recognition, the thing nobody at her school offers her.
“It was a terribly hopeful tie.”
‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’, the staffroom, when Carla first sees Stefan
The adverb terribly pulls two ways, meaning both very and painfully, because Carla can see how exposed his hope is in a room that is laughing at him. Giving a tie an emotion is a small transferred epithet: the tie carries Stefan's openness, and Carla's tenderness towards it tells us she has already chosen his side.
“It was a flag from another country”
‘My Polish Teacher's Tie’, the final paragraph
The tie becomes a flag, a symbol of belonging, and the country it stands for is not simply Poland: the sentence goes on to call it better than the countries either of them lives in. One reading is that the country is friendship itself, a place where a catering assistant and a teacher meet as equals. Her last words, liking the tie, claim that country.
“there was something calculating in the face”
‘Korea’, on the river, as the father asks about his son's future
The first warning. Calculating means both shrewd and working out sums, which the story will make literal when the father's plan turns out to be about money. The vague word something shows the son sensing danger he cannot yet name, and the detached phrase the face, rather than his face, already sets a distance between them.
“I was wary of the big words.”
‘Korea’, the son, when his father praises America
The father calls America the land of opportunity, and the son hears that the phrases are borrowed; the next sentence says they were not in his own voice. McGahern shows the son's intelligence, and the father's evasiveness, in one plain sentence. It prepares us for the overheard conversation, where the father's real voice is excited and counting.
“I knew my youth had ended”
‘Korea’, in the dark of the lavatory, after the son overhears his father
The climax is stated with brutal plainness at the end of a long sentence that places the son among boxes of crawling worms in the dark. The setting of dirt, clay and darkness turns the moment into a kind of burial. There is no shouting: the end of his childhood is a piece of knowledge, quietly acquired and never spoken aloud.
“It’ll be my own funeral”
‘Korea’, the son, repeating his father's words that evening
When the son refuses to go to America, his father says it will be his own funeral, and the son simply repeats it. The echo is loaded: the son knows that in America the funeral his father imagined might have been literal, like Luke Moran's. Repetition lets him answer his father's plan without ever admitting that he overheard it.
“The proof is, as it were, in the eating.”
‘A Family Supper’, the opening paragraph, on fugu
A cosy proverb made sinister: you only know whether the fish was prepared safely when you have eaten it and survived, or not. The dry, almost joking tone is typical of the narrator's control. The opening plants the fear that governs the whole story, so that when the father serves fish the reader, not the narrator, is the one who panics.
“For some moments my sister did not move.”
‘A Family Supper’, the kitchen, when the father orders Kikuko to help
A tiny act of resistance, and the conflict in this family is all tiny acts. Kikuko's pause before obeying says what she cannot say aloud about her father's authority. Ishiguro gives the moment its own plain sentence and no explanation, trusting the reader to feel the tension in a silence that lasts only moments.
“Perhaps I should have been a more attentive father.”
‘A Family Supper’, the room with the model battleship
The nearest the father comes to an apology, and it is hedged with perhaps and spoken over a child's plastic toy. It shows regret, and loneliness, in a man who has lost his firm, his partner and his wife. Straight afterwards he says his wife's death was no accident, which turns the regret into something darker and makes the supper more frightening.
“One side of his face had fallen into shadow.”
‘A Family Supper’, the supper, as the father lifts the lid of the pot
The single lantern leaves half the father's face lit and half dark, a visual image of his divided nature and of how little his son can read him. It comes at the moment he pushes the fish towards his son, so it works as suspense: we cannot see his intentions, literally or figuratively, and neither can the narrator.
“Is what Columbus did want? Who invite him here?”
‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’, Hortense, answering in front of the Inspector
Hortense switches from the Standard English the classroom demands into Jamaican speech, and with the switch comes the real question: not what Columbus did, but by what right he came. Her own language carries her own history. It is the most dangerous thing a child can say in a colonial classroom, and she is punished for it.
“Words gush out of my mouth”
‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’, Hortense, just before her question about Columbus
The present tense puts us inside the moment, and the verb gush makes her words a flood she can no longer hold back, as if they have been building up for a long time. What pours out is her challenge about Columbus, so the sentence marks the instant when a silent girl in the back row becomes a speaker.
“the culture of the back row”
‘Invisible Mass of the Back Row’, Hortense's school in England
In England she is placed in a low stream full of other Caribbean children, and calls what they learn there, hair plaiting, make-up and swearing rather than lessons, a culture. The phrase is ironic, but not only: the back row also becomes a community, with its own language and loyalties, and by the end a place from which voices are raised.
“She would fall in love”
‘The Darkness Out There’, Sandra's thoughts as she walks to the cottage
One of a run of daydreams, all in the same would pattern: blue seas, love, a good job, a new sewing machine. The repeated would makes her future sound certain and simple, which is exactly the innocence the story will end. Lively lets us like her dreams while seeing how little she yet knows about people.
“Her eyes investigated, quick as mice.”
‘The Darkness Out There’, Mrs Rutter, on the teenagers' arrival
Everything soft about Mrs Rutter is contradicted by her eyes. The verb investigated makes her a watcher who assesses her visitors, and the simile quick as mice is small, darting and faintly unpleasant, suggesting something that scurries in the dark. Read a second time, the story is full of these warnings that Sandra misses.
“Tit for tat, I said to Dot.”
‘The Darkness Out There’, Mrs Rutter, explaining why she left the airman
A childish playground phrase, made worse by the jingling rhyme with Dot, used to justify leaving a trapped young man to die. It shows that her grief for her husband became simple revenge on the enemy, and that decades later she still thinks of it as a fair exchange. The lightness of the language is what makes it horrifying.
“The darkness was out there and it was a part of you”
‘The Darkness Out There’, Sandra's realisation at the gate, at the end of the story
The title returns with its meaning changed. The darkness is no longer the wood, the ghosts or the imagined men in Packer's End; it is the knowledge of what people can do, and once known it cannot be shut out. The shift to you makes the realisation universal, drawing the reader into Sandra's loss of innocence.