Assignment B: Model Answer (Edexcel IGCSE English Language A): Revision Note

The first thing I noticed was the sound.

The train doors slid apart with a soft sigh, and the station breathed me out into a town that was supposed to be familiar. I had rehearsed this arrival in my head for weeks, imagining the same sharp tang of diesel, the same worn posters, the same grey benches that always felt slightly damp even in July. Instead, the air smelled of coffee and fresh paint. Somewhere above me, a speaker played a bright little tune to announce the next service. I blinked, as if the scene might settle into the correct version if I stared hard enough.

I walked slowly, dragging my suitcase over paving stones that used to be cracked. Now they were even and pale, laid in neat stripes. The newsagent on the corner was gone, replaced by a glass-fronted place advertising smoothies in letters the size of my head. I paused outside it, half expecting Mr Patel to look up from behind the counter and call me “love” the way he always had. Nobody did. Inside, people sat at tall tables like they belonged there.

I carried on.

The route to home was muscle memory. Left past the bakery, right at the traffic lights, up the hill that used to make my legs ache when I was younger. Yet even that hill felt gentler now. Maybe I was fitter, or maybe the town had quietly smoothed itself while I was away.

At the top of the road, I stopped.

The park, the one that used to open out like a secret, had become something else entirely. The old iron gate had been replaced with a wide wooden archway. The chipped swing set was gone, and in its place stood a bright climbing frame with nets and slides that curled like sea creatures. A new path cut through the grass in a clean curve. There were benches with metal arms, and small trees planted in careful lines, each guarded by a ring of stakes.

For a moment I felt oddly winded, as if I had arrived too late for something.

I stepped inside.

When I was little, this park was where Saturdays happened. We came with a football and a carrier bag of crisps. We balanced on the low wall by the pond pretending it was a tightrope. We wore our knees raw on the rough grass and never once cared. The old oak tree still stood near the centre, but even it had been tidied, its lower branches trimmed away so that its shape looked cleaner, less wild.

A group of children ran past me, shrieking with delighted energy, and I had to smile because that part, at least, was the same. Their trainers thudded on the new rubber flooring. Their voices bounced off the shiny equipment. The park had not lost its purpose. It had just been re-written.

I sat on a bench that was not mine. The metal was warm from the weak sun. I watched a toddler wobble towards a slide while his dad hovered nearby, hands out as if ready to catch a gust of wind. A dog chased a tennis ball with the seriousness of a job. Somewhere close, a bicycle bell chimed and a couple drifted past, arguing gently about directions.

I took out my phone, almost on instinct, and scrolled through old photos. There I was at twelve, grinning on the rusted swing, hair split into uneven plaits, feet in the air. There was the pond with its green film and “No Swimming” sign that everyone ignored. There was the oak with its low branches that had once been perfect for hiding.

I looked up from the screen, and the present clicked into focus. The new pond was clearer. The sign was different. The branches were higher. But the space between the trees still held the same light. The wind still stitched its way through the leaves with the same whispering sound. My memories had not been demolished. They were simply not the whole story any more.

A voice behind me said, “They’ve done it up nice, haven’t they?”

I turned. An older woman with a shopping bag stood on the path, nodding at the park like it was an old friend in a new coat. I nodded back.

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice.”

She smiled once, then continued on, and that was it for dialogue, because nothing else needed saying.

I stayed a while longer, letting the change settle. It felt strange, yes, but not wrong. I realised I had brought an older version of the town with me like a photograph folded in my pocket. I had been comparing everything to it, expecting the world to match my hand-me-down map.

But places do not wait. They grow, the way people do.

When I finally stood up, my suitcase felt lighter. I walked out of the park, not as someone returning to a paused past, but as someone stepping into a present that had been carrying on all along.

Everything had changed.

And I was ready to change with it.