Footprints Without Feet - The Stories

A Triumph of Surgery is written by James Herriot, the pen name of a British veterinary surgeon who turned his casebook into stories. The narrator is the vet himself, so the whole episode is seen through the eyes of the professional who has to manage a sick animal and a difficult owner at the same time.

The patient is Tricki, a small pet dog belonging to a wealthy woman called Mrs Pumphrey, who calls him Tricki-woo and treats him like a human child. Her love is genuine, but her method is disastrous. Tricki is given cream cakes and chocolates between meals, extra malt and cod-liver oil, and a bowl of Horlicks at night to help him sleep. He is never made to run. Even the old gardener, Hodgkin, has to spend his time throwing rubber rings so that the dog can exercise without any real effort. The result is an animal so fat that the narrator describes him as looking like a bloated sausage with a leg at each corner.

The vet warns Mrs Pumphrey plainly: cut down the food, cut out the sweet things, and give the dog proper exercise. She cannot bear to see Tricki look unhappy, so she quietly goes on feeding him. When Tricki finally stops eating, begins vomiting and lies about listless and miserable, the vet takes the only step that will work. He tells Mrs Pumphrey the dog must come into hospital for a fortnight. She is horrified and almost faints, but she lets him go.

At the surgery there is no medicine, no injection and no operation. Tricki is simply put in with the other dogs of the household and given no food for two days, only water. On the third day he begins to take an interest in what the other dogs are eating, and soon he is running with them, fighting over a stick and behaving like a dog instead of an ornament. His food is increased slowly. Within two weeks he is a lean, hard, muscular animal.

Meanwhile Mrs Pumphrey keeps sending in nourishment for her invalid - fresh eggs, then bottles of wine to strengthen his blood, then brandy - all of which the people at the surgery cheerfully finish themselves. When Tricki is finally driven home, he leaps out of the car straight into his mistress's arms, and Mrs Pumphrey declares the recovery a triumph of surgery. No surgery of any kind ever took place.

That is the joke at the heart of the story, and it is also the theme. Over-indulgence is not love; it made the dog ill. Discipline, plain food, water and exercise are what actually cured him. The vet is worth studying as a character too: he is tactful enough never to insult Mrs Pumphrey, patient enough to let her keep her illusions, and firm enough to take the dog away when it really matters.

The Thief's Story is by Ruskin Bond and it is told in the first person by the thief himself. That choice matters. We sit inside the head of a fifteen-year-old who has already decided that stealing is a trade like any other, and we watch that decision come apart in a single night.

The narrator introduces himself as Hari Singh, but he tells us at once that this is not his real name - he changes his name every month to stay one step ahead of the police and of his former employers. He calls himself an experienced and fairly successful hand at his work, and he chooses his victims by studying them first. At a wrestling match he picks Anil, an easy-going young man of about twenty-five, because Anil looks kind and careless. Hari flatters him, follows him home and asks for work.

Anil is a writer who earns money in fits and starts - well off one week and broke the next. He is honest about it and tells Hari straight away that he cannot pay him a salary. Hari offers to work only for his food, claiming he can cook. His first meal is so bad that it is fed to a stray dog, and he is told that he will have to be taught. So Anil teaches him to cook. He also teaches him to write his own name and promises to teach him whole sentences and how to add numbers next. It is Hari himself who works out what that promise is worth: once he can write like an educated man, he thinks, there will be no limit to what he can achieve.

Hari is also handed the money for the daily shopping, and he quietly keeps back a rupee from it each day. Hari is fairly sure Anil has worked out what is happening, and yet Anil says nothing at all. That silence stays with him far longer than a beating would have done.

The test comes when Anil is paid for a piece of writing and brings home a bundle of notes, which he pushes under his mattress. That night Hari takes the money and slips out. He reaches the station in the rain with the Lucknow Express in front of him, and he cannot make himself get on; he lets the train go without him. He works out that Anil will not really miss the money, because money comes and goes for a man like him. What Anil will miss is trust. The picture of that sad, hurt look on Anil's face is what turns Hari around.

He walks back through the rain and pushes the notes back where he found them. In the morning Anil hands him a fifty-rupee note and says he has been paid for his writing, so from now on Hari will be paid regularly. The note is still damp. Anil has known everything and has chosen to say nothing. Then he simply announces that they will start writing whole sentences today. The slow smile Hari gives at the end is the smile of a boy who has been handed a future instead of a punishment.

The theme is the power of trust and of education. Anil never lectures the boy or threatens him. He offers him literacy and a wage, and that offer is worth more to Hari than a stolen bundle of notes.

Footprints without Feet is an adapted extract from a novel by H.G. Wells, and its central character is Griffin, a brilliant but lawless scientist. The story opens like a mystery. Two boys in London see fresh, muddy footprints appearing on the steps of a house one after another, with nobody making them. As the mud wears off the prints grow fainter and stop altogether. The boys follow the trail, lose it, and the reader is left with a puzzle that the rest of the story explains.

Griffin had carried out experiment after experiment until he found drugs that made his body as transparent as a sheet of glass, although it stayed as solid as ever. He is not a hero. His very first act after the discovery is a crime. His landlord disliked him and tried to turn him out of the house, so in revenge Griffin set fire to the house; then he stripped off his clothes so that he could get away without being seen.

Invisibility turns out to be a miserable gift. It is midwinter in London. Griffin is naked and freezing, and every splash of mud, every patch of snow, gives him away - which is exactly what the two boys saw. To get out of the cold he slips into a large London store at closing time, helps himself to clothes from the counters, eats from the food department and sleeps there. He oversleeps, the assistants spot him in the morning, and he has to tear off the clothes and run once more.

Next he robs a theatrical company's shop in Drury Lane. He attacks the shopkeeper from behind, ties him up, and takes bandages, dark glasses, a false nose, side whiskers and a large hat - a disguise that lets him be seen without being recognised. Then he leaves London for the village of Iping, where he takes two rooms at an inn and pays with money he has stolen.

In Iping he becomes the strangest visitor the villagers have ever known. His bandaged face and his refusal to be disturbed make everyone suspicious. When his money runs out he burgles the clergyman's study; the clergyman and his wife hear the chink of coins and the desk being opened but can see nobody at all. On the same morning Mrs Hall, the landlord's wife, finds the scientist's room open, his clothes and bandages lying about, and the furniture moving on its own. A chair charges at her and pushes the couple out of the room, and she is convinced the room is haunted by spirits.

Mrs Hall then refuses to serve him any longer and demands to know where a man with no money suddenly found some. Losing his temper, Griffin tells them they do not understand who he is, and strips off his bandages, his glasses and his false nose in front of everyone, leaving a headless figure standing in the bar. Panic breaks out. The village constable Mr Jaffers has meanwhile arrived with a warrant for his arrest, but Griffin throws off the rest of his clothes, becomes completely invisible, and in the struggle Jaffers is knocked unconscious. The extract ends there, with the invisible man still free.

The story is exciting, but its point is serious. Griffin has a first-class scientific mind and no conscience whatsoever. Arson, robbery and assault all follow from a discovery that could have been used well. The theme is the danger of knowledge without responsibility - science in the hands of a person who feels answerable to nobody.

The Making of a Scientist is by Robert W. Peterson, and it traces how Richard H. Ebright grew from a boy chasing butterflies into a serious researcher. It is not a story about sudden genius. It is a story about a habit of asking questions, and about the people who helped him answer them.

Ebright grew up in a small town where, as he says himself, there was not much else to do, so he collected things - rocks, fossils, coins, and above all butterflies. By the time he was in the second grade he had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found around his home town. That could easily have been the end of it. Collecting alone does not make a scientist.

Two things kept the interest alive. The first was his mother. She encouraged everything he did, took him on trips, bought him telescopes, microscopes, cameras and mounting materials, and found things for him to learn from instead of simply giving him answers. By her own account she was his only companion until he started school, and every evening she gave him something to work at. The second was a book she gave him: The Travels of Monarch X by Dr Frederick A. Urquhart, which described how monarch butterflies migrate south and invited readers to help track them. Ebright began tagging butterflies for Dr Urquhart, and later raised a whole flock of monarchs in his basement so that he would have enough of them to tag.

The real turning point was a failure. In the seventh grade he entered a county science fair and lost. His entry was slides of frog tissue shown under a microscope; the winners had done actual experiments. He understood the difference immediately and never again confused a display with research. The next year he tried to find the cause of a viral disease that kills nearly all monarch caterpillars every few years. He suspected that a beetle might be carrying the virus, so he raised caterpillars in the presence of beetles. By his own account he got no real results, but he presented the work anyway, because this time he had actually tested an idea instead of displaying one.

His best-known school work began with a small question: what are the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa for? Almost everyone assumed they were only decoration. Working with another student, Ebright showed that the spots produce a hormone that the butterfly needs in order to develop fully. He went further and grew monarch wing cells in a culture, showing that they would turn into normal wing scales only when that hormone was supplied. This work took him to the International Science and Engineering Fair. He also spent time in real research laboratories, including the entomology laboratory of the Department of Agriculture at Beltsville and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

At university he stayed with the same hormone. When he saw a photograph of its chemical structure, he thought he could see how it might act as a key that unlocks the cell's DNA. He and his roommate drew pictures and built plastic models of molecules to work out how it would function, until they had a theory of how a cell can read the blueprint of its DNA, and they wrote it up for publication. If the theory proves correct, the chapter says, it will be a big step towards understanding the processes of life. Ebright graduated with the highest honours, second in a class of more than fifteen hundred students.

His social studies teacher, Mr Richard A. Weiherer, who was the adviser to the debating and Model United Nations clubs, said that what set the boy apart was that he put all his energy into whatever he took up and always wanted to be the best. The chapter names three ingredients that make a scientist of the first rank: a first-rate mind, curiosity, and the will to win for the right reasons. Ebright himself was not only a laboratory person - he was a debater, a public speaker, a canoeist and a keen photographer, which is part of the story's message about a full life.

The Necklace is by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, and the whole story is built to deliver one cruel twist that changes the meaning of everything before it.

Matilda Loisel is pretty and charming but born into a family of clerks, with no dowry and no expectations, and she is married to a little clerk in the Board of Education. She suffers constantly - not from real poverty, but from the gap between the life she has and the life she believes she deserves. She is ashamed of her shabby walls, worn chairs and ugly curtains, and dreams of silent antechambers, delicate dinners and silver dishes, and of being admired and envied. Her husband is her opposite: easily pleased, delighted by a good bowl of soup, and quietly generous.

Her chance arrives in the form of an invitation to a grand evening reception at the Ministry. Instead of being pleased she cries, because she has nothing suitable to wear. Her husband gives up the four hundred francs he had saved to buy a gun so that she can have a dress made. Then she is unhappy again because she has no jewels, and he suggests that she borrow something from her rich school friend, Madame Forestier. Out of the jewel box Matilda picks a superb diamond necklace.

At the ball she is the prettiest woman in the room. Everyone notices her, everyone wants to be introduced, and she dances in a cloud of happiness. Then, at home, standing before the mirror for one last look at herself, she finds that the necklace is gone.

The search is desperate. Her husband retraces the route on foot, goes to the police, the cab offices and the newspapers, and offers a reward. Nothing. In the end they find a necklace that looks the same at a jeweller's and buy it for thirty-six thousand francs, using the eighteen thousand her husband had inherited from his father and borrowing the rest from money-lenders on ruinous terms. Matilda returns it to Madame Forestier, who is annoyed at the delay and does not even open the case.

Then come the ten years. They dismiss the maid and move to an attic. Matilda washes the dishes and the clothes with her own hands, carries water up the stairs, and argues in shops over every last coin, while her husband works in the evenings copying pages for a few sous each. When the debt is finally cleared she has become a hard, rough, loud woman of the poor, and her looks are gone.

One Sunday, out walking, she sees Madame Forestier - still young, still charming, still beautiful. Matilda tells her the truth at last, almost proudly. Madame Forestier is deeply moved, takes her hands, and tells her that the borrowed necklace was false and was worth at most five hundred francs.

Everything about the story depends on that last line. Matilda's ten lost years were caused by pride - by dreaming of a life she did not have, by refusing to admit a loss, and by taking the shine of a thing as proof of its value. The theme is appearance against reality, and the cost of vanity. Notice too the quiet second victim: her husband, who lost his inheritance, his gun and a decade of his life for a mistake that was not his.

Bholi is by K.A. Abbas, and it follows a girl who is written off by her whole village and who, by the last page, is the strongest person in the room.

Her real name is Sulekha, but nobody uses it. When she was ten months old she fell from her cot and hurt her head, and after that she was slow to learn. At the age of two an attack of smallpox left her body covered with deep pockmarks; only her eyes were saved. She stammered when she spoke, and the other children mimicked her and laughed, so she spoke very little. The family called her Bholi, the simpleton, and treated her as a burden. Her father, Ramlal, was the numberdar of the village and a man of some standing, but his youngest daughter was the one child nobody thought about.

Everything changes when a primary school for girls is opened in the village and the Tehsildar tells Ramlal that a man in his position must set an example by sending his daughters. Ramlal's wife objects, because in her view a girl who goes to school will never find a husband. So they send Bholi, on the reasoning that nobody is likely to marry her anyway. On the morning she leaves, she is bathed, her hair is oiled and combed, and she is given clean clothes. For the first time in her life she is the centre of attention, and she does not understand why.

At school she is terrified. The noise, the strange faces and her own stammer make her want to run home. Then the teacher speaks to her gently, asks her name, tells her not to be afraid, and promises that if she reads her books she will one day speak without stammering and know more than anyone else in the village. That kindness is the hinge of the whole story; from that day the girl who had been treated as a burden has something to hope for.

Years later a marriage is arranged with Bishamber Nath, a well-to-do grocer from a nearby village who is much older than Bholi and lame. Her parents are simply grateful that anyone is willing to take her. On the wedding day, when the bridegroom lifts her veil and sees the pockmarked face, he stops the ceremony in front of everyone and demands five thousand rupees before he will garland her. Ramlal, humiliated in front of the whole village, is ready to pay.

Then Bholi speaks. She throws the garland away and refuses to marry a man greedy enough to sell his consent for money, and she tells her father to take his money back. Her parents are stunned. Her mother asks who will look after her now, and who will marry her. Bholi answers calmly that she will look after her parents in their old age and teach in the same school where she learnt so much. Her teacher, standing in the crowd, watches with quiet pride.

The story is not really about a wedding at all. It is about what education does to a person. It does not change Bholi's face and it does not cure her past. What it gives her is a voice, and a voice turns out to be enough to change her life. Two other themes run alongside: the cruelty of judging a girl by her looks, and the ugliness of the dowry system, which the story exposes at the exact moment it is meant to look most respectable.

These six stories look completely unlike one another, but a few ideas run through the whole set, and noticing them makes long answers much easier to write.

Appearance against reality is the strongest link. Matilda destroys ten years of her life over jewellery that turns out to be false. Mrs Pumphrey believes her dog has been saved by surgery when he has really been saved by hunger and exercise. Griffin cannot be seen at all, and yet mud, snow and a bandaged face keep giving him away. Bholi is judged by a pockmarked face by everybody except her teacher, who looks at what she can become. In each case the characters who trust the surface are the ones who suffer.

Trust and second chances connect The Thief's Story and Bholi in particular. Anil never confronts Hari Singh; he simply keeps offering food, lessons and finally a wage, and the boy reforms himself. Bholi's teacher never scolds her for stammering; she promises her a future, and Bholi grows into it. In both stories an adult chooses patience over punishment, and in both stories it works.

What people do with what they know is the pair of ideas behind Footprints without Feet and The Making of a Scientist, and the two stories are easy to compare. Griffin and Richard Ebright are both gifted. Griffin works alone, hides his discovery and uses it for arson, theft and assault. Ebright works with his mother, with Dr Urquhart, with his teacher and with a fellow student, publishes what he finds, and adds to what everyone knows. The difference is not talent. It is purpose and character.

Kindness that helps and kindness that harms is worth one more line. Mrs Pumphrey's love nearly kills Tricki because it has no discipline in it. Bholi's parents think they are being kind by accepting the first man who will take her. Real help in these stories always involves some difficulty - two days without food, a night of guilt at a railway station, a science fair that is lost.

When you write a long answer, name the story and the author in your first line, give two or three specific incidents as evidence, and finish with the theme in one sentence of your own words. Avoid retelling the whole plot; the examiner has read it. And be careful with details that students often mix up: Tricki belongs to Mrs Pumphrey and the narrator is the vet who treats him; the scientist at Iping is Griffin; Bholi's real name is Sulekha; Bishamber Nath demands five thousand rupees; and the necklace was returned in a case that was never opened.