Beginnings and Endings

First, identify using your skill and judgement which of the following are opening and which are closing sentences. They are all taken from real stories, which they indeed either begin or end!

Secondly, once you’ve done that, see if you can pair them up so that for each opening sentence you’ve chosen a closing sentence to go with it.

The important thing is to be clear as you do this what you’re thinking is when you make your decisions. Be prepared to talk about this!

Here they are:

Today Miss Webster was going to show them the snowdrops growing in the little three-cornered garden outside the school-keeper’s house, where they weren’t allowed to go.

She’s growing up - and so am I.

She was wide-eyed, and pale in the cold shadow, and he saw the tears run shivering off her face.

I love you I love you so much oh yes oh yes.

Robert Quick, coming home after a business trip, found a note from his wife.

The year the war began I was in the fifth grade at the Annie F Warren Grammar School in Winthrop, and that was the winter I won the prize for drawing the best Civil Defence signs.

And his hands, his acid-marked hands, would reach out to receive it.

After a while they couldn’t hear the singing any more, but Miss Webster continued to cry aloud in the midst of the frightened children.

I thought I knew you as well as I know this house.

Above the old man’s head was the dovecote, a tall wire-netted shelf on stilts, full of strutting, preening birds.

That was the year the war began and the real world, and the difference.

In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town.

Bill selected a sandwich from the lunch basket and walked over to have a look at the rods.

The pond in our park was circular, exposed, perhaps fifty yards across.