The Address

The story is told in the first person by a young woman who is never named. All we ever learn of her family name is that she is Mrs S's daughter. Marga Minco was a Dutch writer and the story is translated from the Dutch; the setting is a Dutch town after the Second World War, though the text itself names no country and speaks only of 'the War' and 'the Liberation'.

The first visit. The story begins with no set-up at all. The narrator is already on a doorstep asking, 'Do you still know me?' The door is open only a chink. The woman answers, 'No, I don't know you.' The narrator offers the only identification she has: she is Mrs S's daughter. The woman's face gives no sign of recognition, and she keeps a hand on the door so it cannot open further. The narrator even wonders whether she has rung the wrong bell.

Then she notices something. The woman is wearing her mother's green knitted cardigan, its wooden buttons 'rather pale from washing'. The woman sees her looking and half hides behind the door. That one object settles it. The woman's next words give the whole situation away: 'Have you come back? ... I thought that no one had come back.' The narrator answers, 'Only me.'

A door opens and closes in the passage behind her and a musty smell drifts out. The woman says she regrets she cannot do anything for her and that it is not convenient for her now. She closes the door cautiously, as though no one inside the house should be disturbed. The narrator stays on the step. The curtain in front of the bay window moves, so someone in the house is watching. She reads the name-plate again: Dorling, in black letters on white enamel, and on the jamb, a little higher, the number 46.

Flashback one: how the things left the house. Walking back to the station, so absorbed that she scarcely notices the way, she remembers her mother telling her about Mrs Dorling. It had been in the first half of the War. Home for a few days, the narrator had been struck at once that something about the rooms had changed. Her mother explained: Mrs Dorling was an old acquaintance she had not seen for years, who had suddenly turned up, renewed the contact and begun coming regularly, taking something home with her every time. She took all the table silver in one go, then the antique plates, then the large vases, then the crockery. The mother is emphatic that the idea was Mrs Dorling's own: she suggested it herself, she even insisted, she wanted to save all her nice things, because if the family had to leave they would lose everything. When the narrator asks whether they had agreed that Mrs Dorling should keep everything, her mother is offended, says it would simply be an insult to talk like that, and points to the risk Mrs Dorling runs each time she goes out of their door with a full suitcase or bag; she even worries that the crockery has given the poor woman a crick in her back. The mother looks at her reprovingly and the subject is dropped.

Flashback two: the only earlier sighting. In the train back, the narrator sees again the single time she actually met Mrs Dorling, the morning after that conversation: a woman with a broad back, in a brown coat and a shapeless hat, picking up a suitcase and struggling out of the house with it. Her mother said the address out loud, 'In Marconi Street ... Number 46. Remember that.'

Why she waited. She did remember it, but she did not go for a long time. After the Liberation she was absolutely not interested in the stored things, and was afraid of them, afraid of being confronted with objects that had belonged to a connection that no longer existed. She avoided going further than she had to, not wanting to upset herself with the sight of familiar streets. Then life slowly turned ordinary again: bread was getting to be a lighter colour, there was a bed you could sleep in unthreatened, a room with a view you grew used to glancing at each day. Only then did she become curious enough to want to see the possessions, touch them, remember.

The second visit. This time a girl of about fifteen opens the door and says her mother is out doing an errand, but will be back soon. The narrator says she will wait, and follows her in. In the passage, next to a mirror, hangs the family's old-fashioned iron Hanukkah candle-holder, which they had never used because it was much more cumbersome than a single candlestick. In the living room she stops, appalled. She is, in her own words, in 'a room I knew and did not know'. Her things are there, arranged in a tasteless way among ugly furniture, in a muggy smell, and she scarcely dares to look around her.

She sits down and stares at the woollen table-cloth, rubs it until her fingers grow warm, follows the lines of the pattern, and hunts along the edge for a burn mark that had never been repaired. The girl pours tea from a white pot the narrator remembers exactly, its only decoration a gold border on the lid, then opens a box and takes some spoons out. The narrator says it is a nice box, and hears her own voice as a strange voice. The girl is pleased: her mother says it is antique, and they have lots more; she points, but the narrator has no need to follow her hand. She looks instead at the still life over the tea-table, at the apple on the pewter plate she had always fancied as a child. She finds the burn mark.

The girl chats on. They use it for everything; they once even ate off the plates hanging on the wall, because she had wanted to so much, but it was not anything special. The narrator tells her about the day her mother asked her to help polish the silver, and how until then she had not known that the cutlery they ate off every day was silver. Then she says to the girl, 'I bet you don't know it is either.' The girl walks to the sideboard and wants to open a drawer.

The ending. The narrator jumps up, says she was forgetting the time and must catch her train, and leaves without waiting for Mrs Dorling, telling the girl she can find her own way. As she walks down the passage she hears the jingling of spoons and forks behind her. At the corner of the road she looks up at the name-plate: Marconi Street, it said. She had been at Number 46. The address was correct. But she will not go back, because objects linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times lose their value the moment you see them, severed from that life, in strange surroundings. And there is nowhere to put them: she lives in a small rented room where shreds of black-out paper still hang along the windows and no more than a handful of cutlery fits in the narrow table drawer. She resolves to forget the address, and adds that of all the things she has to forget, that would be the easiest.

The narrator. She has no name. She can only say 'I'm Mrs S's daughter', which is a strange, thin thing to be reduced to, and it is the first hint of how much has been taken. What drives her at the start is not greed and not revenge but something gentler and harder to satisfy: she says she wanted to see the possessions, touch them, remember. That is a wish to re-enter a life, not to recover property.

Notice how she behaves. She is watchful. She reads a door, a curtain, a cardigan, a smell. She doubts herself before she doubts anyone else, thinking she may have rung the wrong bell. She is honest about her own delay after the Liberation: she was afraid. And crucially, she never once asks for her belongings. On the first visit she says only that she has come specially on the train and wanted to talk for a moment. On the second, sitting in a room full of her own furniture, she says nothing whatever about ownership; she verifies it privately with a burn mark. Her only aggressive move is a small one, a needle rather than a knife: 'I bet you don't know it is either.' And when the girl reaches for the drawer, she goes. She would rather leave than watch her family's silver counted out in a stranger's hand.

By the end her motive has reversed completely. She came to remember; she leaves determined to forget. That is not weakness. It is the first free choice she makes in the story.

Mrs Dorling. Minco never lets us inside her head. We get only behaviour, and it is enough. During the War she is a broad back in a brown coat and a shapeless hat, hauling a heavy suitcase out of a door that has just been opened to her out of gratitude. She reappeared after years of silence at exactly the moment a family became vulnerable, she proposed taking their valuables, and by the mother's own account she 'even insisted'. She framed it as rescue: she wanted to save all her friend's nice things.

After the War the same manner turns to stone. The door opens a chink. Her hand stays on it. Her face shows nothing. She says flatly, 'No, I don't know you', then, 'I regret I cannot do anything for you', which is a polite sentence and a complete lie, since she could do a great deal. She half hides when the cardigan is noticed, which tells us she knows exactly what she is doing. And she is caught by one unguarded question. 'Have you come back?' is not a greeting; it is the sound of a plan going wrong.

She is also absent from the whole of the second half. She never appears again. She is present only through her furniture and her child, which is a quietly devastating way to characterise someone.

The mother, Mrs S. She appears only in memory and speaks only about Mrs Dorling. She is generous, warm and proud, and her generosity shades into a kind of blindness. When her daughter, more suspicious and more realistic, asks whether they have agreed that Mrs Dorling should keep everything, the mother is genuinely offended: it would simply be an insult to talk like that. She worries that lugging the vases and the crockery has given Mrs Dorling a crick in her back. She admires the risk being run for her each time a full suitcase goes out of the door. She will not think of the arrangement as a transaction, and so she leaves her daughter with nothing but a spoken address. Her last practical act in the story is to say, 'Number 46. Remember that.'

Mrs Dorling's daughter. A girl of about fifteen, also unnamed, with 'a broad back. Just like her mother', which is the only physical link the story draws between them. She is not a villain. She is hospitable, chatty and slightly proud of the house: she pours the tea from the white pot and brings it over, she opens the box of spoons, she says her mother calls the box antique and that they have lots more. She once wanted so much to eat off the plates hanging on the wall that they did, and it was not anything special.

That last remark is the most painful line in the story, and the girl has no idea she has said anything at all. She has grown up inside a stolen household, and to her it is simply home. She is living proof of the narrator's conclusion: these objects have already stopped meaning what they meant. And she is proof of something worse, that the theft is being absorbed into an ordinary family's ordinary life and will pass to the next generation as furniture.

Things are only as alive as the life around them. This is the story's central argument, and unusually it states it outright near the end: objects that are linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times instantly lose their value when, severed from them, you see them again in strange surroundings. The white pot has not changed. The still life has not changed. The apple on the pewter plate is exactly where it was when she was a child. What has gone is the household that made them worth anything, and no amount of recovering the crockery brings that back. The story spends its whole second half proving this by demonstration rather than assertion, which is why the argument convinces.

War is what is left afterwards. There is no fighting in this story, no soldier, no bomb, no camp. There is a woman getting off a train, a closed door, a cup of tea and a train home. Minco's claim is that the aftermath is where war actually lives: in a survivor who does not want to upset herself with the sight of familiar streets, in a rented room with black-out paper still stuck to the windows, in the fact that a bed you can sleep in unthreatened is worth mentioning as a novelty. The catastrophe is measured in ordinary details that have gone slightly wrong.

Trust, and what people do with it under cover of a crisis. The moral centre of the story is not a robbery. It is an offer of help. Mrs Dorling proposed to save the family's things, and the mother accepted with such gratitude that she refused to insult her friend by discussing terms. War gave that offer its plausibility and its urgency. It also guaranteed that if the family did not come back, nobody would ever ask. This is what makes the betrayal feel modern and recognisable: it needs no cruelty, only opportunity and the calculation that there will be no witness.

The unnamed catastrophe. The words Jew, Nazi, German, deportation and camp appear nowhere in this story. There is only 'the War' and 'the Liberation'. The genocide reaches us through two things: a woman's remark at a door that she thought no one had come back, and an old-fashioned iron Hanukkah candle-holder hanging in a stranger's passage, Hanukkah being the Jewish Festival of Lights. That is the entire representation. Because the reader has to supply the history, the reader also has to feel it, and the silence does more than a description could.

Memory against survival. The narrator arrives wanting to remember and leaves choosing to forget, and the story treats the second as growth. She discovers that the past cannot be re-entered through its furniture, that there is no justice available to her, and that a small rented room cannot hold a household. So she puts the address down. The final sentence prevents any misreading of this as coldness: calling the address the easiest thing she has to forget admits a whole list of things she cannot. Her forgetting is deliberate and costly, an attempt to have a future.

Identity reduced to an initial. Worth noticing as a theme in itself: the survivor has no name, her mother is a letter, and the only precisely documented identity in the story belongs to the woman who took their possessions, in black letters on white enamel, at a verified street number.

First person, and deliberately narrow. Everything comes through one pair of eyes, and that pair of eyes is trained on objects rather than on feelings. When the narrator is most upset, she describes a table-cloth. This narrowness is the technique: because she will not tell us what she feels, we have to read her the way she reads Mrs Dorling, through small physical evidence.

An opening that withholds everything. The story begins on a line of dialogue, 'Do you still know me?', with no names, no place, no date and no explanation. This is in medias res, starting in the middle. For the first page we are as disoriented as the woman on the step, and the tension comes entirely from not knowing what is at stake.

Two flashbacks, each tied to a journey. The explanation is delivered in two instalments. Walking back to the station, so absorbed that she scarcely notices the way, she remembers her mother's account of Mrs Dorling emptying the house. In the train back she sees again the one morning she actually met her, ending with her mother saying the address aloud. Only after that does the narrative return to the present for the second visit. So the story runs: present, past, further past, an explained gap, present again. That shape is worth naming in a structure question.

Understatement as the whole method. The most terrible information in the story is carried in the politest sentences. 'Have you come back? ... I thought that no one had come back' is how we learn a family was destroyed. 'Only me' is how the narrator confirms it, in two words. There is no weeping and no accusation anywhere in this story, and the flatness is what makes it land.

Objects as the engine of the plot. Almost every turn of the story is an object. The green cardigan identifies Mrs Dorling when her face refuses to. The burn mark on the table-cloth, sought out by fingertip, proves ownership without a word being spoken. The white pot, whose only decoration is a gold border on the lid, is remembered exactly and shows how completely the narrator knows this house. The still life with the apple on the pewter plate reaches back to her childhood. The Hanukkah candle-holder carries the family's identity into a stranger's passage. And the spoons and forks end the visit. The story's argument about objects is delivered by making objects do all the narrative work.

Small sensory details doing moral work. A musty smell comes out of the passage on the first visit; a muggy smell hangs in the living room on the second. Neither is explained. Together they make the house feel closed, unaired and wrong, and they cost Minco three words. The wooden buttons on the cardigan are 'rather pale from washing', which quietly tells us how long it has been worn, and condemns Mrs Dorling more efficiently than any speech could.

A motif of things being opened. The door opens 'a chink', and a hand holds it there. A curtain in front of the bay window moves. A door opens and closes in the passage behind. Then, in the second half, a girl opens a door freely, a box of spoons is opened, and finally a hand goes to a drawer of cutlery. The story is a series of openings that are blocked, and then, when at last something is about to open, the narrator is the one who leaves. The final sound, the jingling of spoons and forks, reaches her from behind as she walks down the passage.

The estranged voice. 'I heard my own voice. It was a strange voice.' She hears herself from outside, as though someone else were speaking. Sitting among her mother's furniture, drinking tea as a guest, she has become a stranger to her own belongings and her own speech. It is the most precise image of alienation in the story.

The ending's structure. The close is built in three moves: a fact (the address was correct), a principle (things severed from their life lose their value), and a practical reality (a rented room, black-out paper, a narrow drawer). Only then comes the resolution, and the last sentence turns the whole story with a single comparative: 'the easiest'. The word implies everything harder that she is not going to talk about.

Questions on The Address come in three shapes: extract-based questions built on a short passage, short answers of about 40-50 words, and long answers of about 120-150 words. The examiner is checking whether you have understood the story, not whether you can retell it. Retelling the plot is the commonest way to write a long answer that earns half marks.

Building a short answer (40-50 words). Three moves and stop. Make the claim in the first sentence. Give one piece of evidence, ideally a fragment in inverted commas. Close with the consequence. For example, on why Mrs Dorling behaves coldly: she believed the family had died, evidence 'I thought that no one had come back', consequence, she had already treated the goods as her own and had no intention of returning them.

Building a long answer (120-150 words). Open by taking a clear position on the exact question asked. Give two or three developed examples with short quotations, each explained in your own words. Close with a sentence that answers the question again rather than summarising the story. Two or three short paragraphs read better than one block.

Using quotations. Three to six words inside inverted commas, then your explanation. Long copied passages earn nothing extra and cost you time. Six memorised fragments will cover almost any question on this text:

• 'I'm Mrs S's daughter.'
• 'I thought that no one had come back.' and the reply, 'Only me.'
• 'I regret I cannot do anything for you.'
• 'She suggested it to me herself. She even insisted.'
• 'a room I knew and did not know'
• 'Of all the things I had to forget, that would be the easiest.'

Errors that cost marks. These are all common in answer scripts and all checkable against the text.

Questions to prepare, with a one-line plan for each.

1. Why did the narrator decide to forget the address? Objects had lost their meaning, seeing them in use hurt more than losing them, and she had nowhere to keep them.
2. Character sketch of Mrs Dorling. Opportunist: she initiated the arrangement, she wore the cardigan, she refused politely, and one unguarded sentence exposed her.
3. What kind of person is the narrator? Observant, self-controlled, dignified; she verifies with a burn mark and asks for nothing.
4. How does the second visit change her? She came to remember and left resolved to forget.
5. Significance of the title. A lifeline from her mother, the shape of the plot, and finally the thing she gives up.
6. The mother's trust: was it foolish? Generous but blind; she refused even to discuss terms, so her daughter was left with no claim.
7. The role of the girl. Innocent inheritor of a stolen household; living proof that the objects mean nothing now.
8. How is war shown without being described? Omission, understatement, one Hanukkah candle-holder and a room with black-out paper.