From the Diary of Anne Frank: Class 10 First Flight · Chapter 4

4.1 Before you read

Imagine you turn thirteen and someone gives you a blank notebook with a hard cover. What would you write on the first page? Most of us share our news with friends. But what if you had plenty of friends and still felt that nobody really knew you? That is where this chapter begins.

The prose text is a short extract from the most famous diary of the twentieth century. Its writer, Anne Frank, was a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam. Read her life story below first: it will change how you hear the cheerful, cheeky voice of the extract.

4.1.1 Diary, journal, log or memoir?

A diary is only one kind of personal record. Three others are often confused with it: the journal, the log and the memoir. Ask two questions to tell them apart. Who is it for? And when is it written: on the day, or years later? Fig. 4.1 sorts them for you.

4.2 Reading the diary

The extract in your book falls into three parts: Anne's thoughts on why she is starting a diary, a quick sketch of her life so far, and a lively letter about school dated 20 June 1942. Read each part in the textbook, then use the notes below to check that you have followed it.

4.2.1 Part I: A friend called Kitty

Anne opens by thinking aloud. Why should a girl who has never written anything of her own start a diary? Surely nobody, not even she herself, will care one day about the private thoughts of a thirteen-year-old. She settles the doubt quickly: she simply feels like writing, and she has a great deal she wants to unload.

An old saying came to her on a dull, low day at home, and it sums up her mood:

A notebook never gets bored, interrupts or judges. Anne also means to keep it to herself, unless she one day finds a real friend to share it with. That brings her to the true reason for the diary: she has no real friend.

On paper, she seems to have everything: loving parents, a sister of sixteen, aunts, a comfortable home and some thirty people she calls friends. Yet her talk with those friends never goes beyond fun and everyday chatter. Nobody shares anything deep, and Anne honestly wonders whether the fault is partly hers.

So she decides against a dry list of facts. She wants the diary itself to be the close friend she lacks, and she names that friend Kitty. From here on, her entries are letters that begin Dearest Kitty, written to a friend who will always listen.

4.2.2 Part II: Anne's life in brief

Before telling Kitty anything else, Anne realises that a new friend would be lost without some background. So she gives a short sketch of her life, though she says she does not enjoy doing it.

Family. Anne was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, three years after her sister Margot, and lived there until she was four. Her parents had married fairly late (her father at 36, her mother Edith at 25), and Anne clearly adores her father.

The move. The family was split up for a few months in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power in Germany. Her father went ahead to Holland (the Netherlands), and her mother joined him in September. Meanwhile the girls stayed with their grandmother in Aachen, a German town close to the Dutch border. Margot was sent on in December and Anne in February; Anne jokes that she was plonked on the table as a birthday present for her sister. Follow the journey in Fig. 4.2.

School. In Holland, Anne went to a Montessori school from nursery onwards. In her last year there, the sixth form, her teacher was the headmistress, Mrs Kuperus. When they said goodbye at the end of the year, both of them cried.

Grandma. In the summer of 1941 Anne's grandmother was ill and needed an operation, so Anne's birthday passed almost without a celebration. Grandma died in January 1942, and Anne still misses her deeply. So the 1942 birthday was a big one, to make up for the year before, and among its candles was one for Grandma. The sketch ends in the present: all four of them are well, and it is 20 June 1942.

4.2.3 Part III: The chatterbox essays

Exam nerves fill the first real letter to Kitty, dated Saturday, 20 June 1942. A teachers' meeting will soon decide who goes up to the next class, and the class has turned it into a betting game. Two boys have even bet their holiday savings, and their endless squabbling over who will pass makes Anne laugh.

Anne's own view is blunt: plenty of classmates deserve to fail, perhaps a quarter of them, though teachers are impossible to predict. She expects that she and her friends will pass; only maths worries her.

Her one problem is Mr Keesing, her old-fashioned maths teacher (she is on good terms with the other eight). Anne talks so much in his lessons that, after warning her several times, he gives her an extra essay to write: A Chatterbox.

That evening she thinks hard about how to do it well. Padding the pages would be easy, but she wants a real argument for talking. Her three-page defence is clever. Chattering, she argues, simply comes with being a student, and in her case it is also inherited: her mother talks at least as much as she does, and nobody can change what they inherit. So she will try to keep it in check, but she can never cure it. Mr Keesing is amused, yet in the very next lesson Anne is chattering again.

That earns her a second title, An Incorrigible Chatterbox, which buys two peaceful lessons. Then Mr Keesing's patience runs out, and the third title is meant to make her look ridiculous: Quack, Quack, Quack, Said Mistress Chatterbox. The whole class bursts out laughing.

Out of fresh arguments, Anne gets help from her friend Sanne, a good poet: together they will write the essay in verse. Anne's plan is to turn the teacher's joke back on him. Their poem tells of a father swan who bites his three ducklings to death because they quack too much.

The plan works. Mr Keesing enjoys the joke so much that he shares the poem, with his own remarks, in several classes. The punishments stop, Anne is free to talk, and the once-stern teacher now jokes in class himself. Fig. 4.3 shows how the battle unfolds.

4.2.4 Words and the order of events

4.3 Thinking about the text

4.3.1 Anne as a person

A diary shows its writer from the inside. We learn about Anne less from what she says about herself than from what she admits, laughs at and remembers. Fig. 4.4 links six of her traits to the evidence in the extract.

Notice the mix. Anne can be sharp about her classmates and still be gentle about her grandmother. She can tease a teacher and also cry when she leaves another. That mix of humour and feeling is why readers trust her voice.

4.3.2 Themes and message

• Lonely in a crowd. Anne has many friends but nobody to confide in. The diary fills that gap.
• Writing as a friend. Putting feelings on paper brings relief and helps her understand herself.
• Wit beats punishment. Humour and creativity end a conflict that arguing could not.
• Teachers are human too. A strict teacher softens once he sees the joke and laughs at himself.
• Love and memory. Warm memories of a father, a grandmother and a favourite teacher run through the sketch.

There is also a sad irony behind this light-hearted extract. Anne doubted that anyone would ever read a schoolgirl's thoughts. Barely two weeks after this entry, her family went into hiding, and her diary later became one of the most widely read books in the world. Knowing her fate makes her jokes about chatterboxes even more touching.

4.4 Thinking about language

Anne writes the way a lively teenager talks: joined-up words, verbs with little add-ons, colourful fixed phrases and lots of short forms like I've and can't. This section explains each of these, with practice and answers.

4.4.1 Compound words

A compound word joins two or more words to make one word with its own meaning. Compounds are written in three ways: closed (notebook, chatterbox), hyphenated (long-awaited, thirteen-year-old) or open (fountain pen, bus stop). A dictionary tells you which spelling is usual.

• Nouns: toothpaste, passer-by, birthday, schoolgirl
• Adjectives: hard-working, sugar-free, kind-hearted
• Verbs: proofread, spoon-feed, window-shop

The meaning is not always the sum of the parts. A bookworm is not a worm, and a blackboard may be green. So learn compounds as whole words, the way you learn any new word.

4.4.2 Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb pairs a verb with a little word such as up, in or on (an adverb or a preposition). Sometimes the meaning is easy to guess: in She climbed up the tree, the words mean exactly what they say. Often the pair takes on a special meaning: Look up the word means search for it in a dictionary, and We ran out of rice means we used it all.

A few are made of three words, verb + adverb + preposition, as in put up with (tolerate), look forward to and come up with (think of). In a sentence the parts can be split by the object: Hand your copy in means the same as Hand in your copy.

4.4.3 Idioms

An idiom is a fixed group of words whose meaning you cannot work out from the single words. It's a piece of cake means it is very easy; I'm under the weather means I feel unwell. You cannot change the words of an idiom: nobody says a slice of cake for an easy task. Phrasal verbs whose meaning is hard to guess are called idiomatic too.

4.4.4 Finding idioms in a dictionary

Where do you look up an idiom or a phrasal verb? Start with the first meaningful word, skipping small grammar words like a, the, my or to. Then change it to its base form, because dictionaries list catch, not caught, and hand, not handed. In the entry, the word's own meanings come first; idioms and phrasal verbs follow, often marked IDM and PHR V in learner's dictionaries. If the idiom is not there, try the next important word: dictionaries do not all follow the same rule. Fig. 4.5 walks through one search.

The word heart has a whole family of idioms. Anne's class keeps telling each other not to lose heart. Here are more, with our own examples.

4.4.5 Contracted forms

When we speak, we squeeze words together: cannot becomes can't and I have becomes I've. These contracted forms are written with an apostrophe where letters are left out. A diary is like talking to yourself, so Anne uses them all the time. You also find them in plays, stories and letters to friends, but not in formal writing such as an application.

Two contractions need care, because each can stand for two full forms. Look at the word that comes next.

Two traps. In a passive sentence, 's before a past participle means is: it's made in Agra. And 's after a name can show possession, which is not a contraction at all. Anne's diary means the diary that belongs to Anne.

• One full form: I've (I have), I'm (I am), don't (do not), doesn't (does not), didn't (did not), haven't (have not), won't (will not), can't (cannot), it's (it is), that's (that is), there's (there is), they're (they are), you're (you are), we'll (we will), who'll (who will), who's (who is).
• Two possible full forms, used both ways in the diary: I'd means I had when Anne says she had finished her other homework or had better give a sketch, and I would when she decides to worry later or plans to make the joke rebound on the teacher. He'd is he had when Mr Keesing has had enough. In Mr Keesing's always making jokes, 's is is.

4.5 Speaking, writing and listening

4.5.1 Speaking: make a scene sound real

Written dialogue with every word in full sounds stiff, like a robot reading a form. Real people say don't, I've and we'll. Your book gives a scene from a one-act play to bring to life. Practise the same skill first on the short scene below.

4.5.2 Writing: a week in your diary

Your task is to keep a diary for one week. A diary is private, but write as if a friend might read it one day, the way Anne writes for Kitty. Make your thoughts convincing, choose words that show your feelings and paint pictures, and keep each entry short.

4.5.3 Listening: notes from a diary read aloud

In the textbook task, your teacher reads a 1666 diary entry by Samuel Pepys about the Great Fire of London, and you complete a summary while you listen. The skill is note-taking: catching dates, names, times, numbers and places on the first hearing.

• Before: read the blanks and guess what each needs: a date, a name, a time, a number or a place.
• While: write key words only, not full sentences. Listen hard for numbers and names.
• After: fill gaps at once while you still remember, then check the grammar of each sentence.

4.6 Amanda!

The poem of this unit is about another girl who escapes into a private world, not through a diary but through daydreams. Before you read it, think about the instructions you hear at home every day.

The poem has seven stanzas and two voices. Stanzas 1, 3, 5 and 7 are spoken by an adult, almost certainly Amanda's mother, and each ends with the girl's name like a refrain. Stanzas 2, 4 and 6 sit inside brackets, a parenthesis: they are Amanda's silent daydreams, never spoken aloud. Fig. 4.7 shows the pattern.

4.6.1 Stanza by stanza

Stanza 1. The poem opens in the middle of a stream of corrections about Amanda's body and habits: what she does with her nails, her shoulders and the way she sits. Every order ends with an exclamation mark. Even her posture is being watched.

Stanza 2. Amanda slips away in her mind to a calm green sea that belongs to her alone. As a mermaid she has nothing to do but float, happy and unhurried, with nobody to correct her. The sea stands for calm, space and freedom.

Stanza 3. The adult moves from habits to duties: homework, a messy room, dirty shoes. They look like questions, but no answer is expected; they are checks and complaints. The last line shows that Amanda has been told before.

Stanza 4. Now Amanda imagines herself as an orphan, wandering alone and barefoot. An orphan has no parents to give orders, so the dream is about freedom, not sadness. She sums up what she treasures most in that life: "The silence is golden, the freedom is sweet."

Stanza 5. Food, looks and attention: no chocolate, think of your pimples, and look at me when I speak. The last order tells us the adult has noticed that Amanda is not listening.

Stanza 6. Amanda becomes Rapunzel, the fairy-tale girl shut up in a tower, who lets down her long hair so that others can climb up. Amanda's Rapunzel is carefree and would never let her hair down. She wants the tower's rare peace, and does not want to be rescued or disturbed.

Stanza 7. The adult now attacks Amanda's mood: sulking, always moody. Then comes the twist: "Anyone would think that I nagged at you". After six stanzas of nagging, this denial is the poem's sharpest irony: the speaker cannot see herself.

4.6.2 Speaker, tone and theme

Amanda seems to be in her early teens: she has homework and a room to keep tidy, and she is warned about chocolate and acne. The adult is not a villain. Her worries are ordinary and come from care. But the sheer number of orders, and the tone in which they come, push Amanda into a world of her own.

Message: children, especially teenagers, need some space and freedom. Constant correction, even when well meant, does not make them listen; it makes them withdraw. The poem gently asks adults to talk with children, not only at them.

4.6.3 Poetic devices

4.7 Board exam practice

The CBSE literature section tests this unit in three ways. Extract-based questions give you a passage or stanza and ask for short, exact answers. Short answers need about 40–50 words: a direct answer plus one or two details from the text. Long answers need about 100–120 words: an opening sentence, two or three points each backed by an event from the text, and a closing line. The extracts below are pointed to by a description; open your textbook to the matching passage before you answer.