Supplementary Reader (Footprints Without Feet selections)
What this text rewards
Footprints Without Feet questions usually ask about motive, turning points and the irony of titles. Each story carries one twist that holds most of the marks.
- A Triumph of Surgery: Mrs Pumphrey overfeeds Tricki; Herriot’s “surgery” is really a strict diet and exercise, so the triumph belongs to the vet, not to surgery.
- The Thief’s Story: Hari Singh steals Anil’s money, reaches the station and returns - the “greatest sentences” are Anil’s silent forgiveness.
- The Midnight Visitor: Ausable survives not with a gun but with a clever lie about a non-existent balcony.
- A Question of Trust: Horace Danby studies safes and robs one house a year, and is himself robbed by a woman pretending to be the owner.
- Footprints without Feet: Griffin is invisible yet still cold, hungry and hunted - science without humanity.
- The Necklace: ten years of hardship to replace a necklace that was false.
- The Hack Driver: the narrator spends a whole day searching for Lutkins in the company of Lutkins himself.
Worked example
Question: Why is the title The Necklace ironic? Model: The necklace Matilda borrows to appear rich is paste, worth at most five hundred francs, yet she and her husband spend ten years and thirty-six thousand francs replacing it. The object meant to lift her above her class is the very thing that sinks her into harsher poverty. Reasoning: state the object’s real value, the cost of replacement, and the reversal the title points to.
Traps
Writing the plot as the answer; missing the irony built into the title; confusing similar character names; asserting a moral the text never supports. Always link an action to the trait it reveals.