Any help is greatly appreciated.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT FOR “ONCE UPON A TIME” BY NADINE GORDIMER
1.THE OPENING NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR GIVES READERS SOME
VALUABLE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THIS STORY
WAS WRITTEN. WHY, IN THIS CASE, IS THE CONTEXT SO IMPORTANT?
2. WRITERS HAVE A NUMBER OF TECHNIQUES THEY USE TO INVOLVE
READERS IN THE STORY. WHAT TECHNIQUES DOES GORDIMER USE IN
THIS PARAGRAPH. EXPLAIN. “A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after
another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the
creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the
passage — to my door.”
3.THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS THAT SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING AT HER
HOME. WHAT CAN YOU INFER WAS GOING ON, BASED ON THE
INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS PARAGRAPH? “There was no human weight pressing on
the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I
sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stopes6 and
passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand
feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick,
cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last
muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might
have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been
disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.”
4. WHAT DOES THE WRITER INFER BY INCLUDING THIS PARAGRAPH,
CONSIDERING THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY? “subscribed to the local Neighborhood Watch,
which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a
would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and therefore proved the property
owner was no racist.”
5.THE CONCLUDING PARAGRAPH OF THE STORY IS INTENTIONALLY
UPSETTING. WHY? WHAT IS THE AUTHOR’S PURPOSE? EXPLAIN IN A FULL
PARAGRAPH (4 SENTENCES OR MORE) “One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a
fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who
braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a
ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first
fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The
trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose “day” it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with
him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly
into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the
bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried
it — the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener — into the house.’