The Address — Class 11 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: The Address (Class 11 English)

Marga Minco's story of a young woman who survives the War and goes looking for her mother's possessions. She finds them all, in another woman's house, and decides to leave them there and forget the address.

Mrs Dorling

An old acquaintance of the narrator's mother who suddenly renewed contact during the first half of the War and thereafter 'every time she leaves here she takes something home with her'.

The address

Number 46, Marconi Street. The mother tells her daughter to remember it as Mrs Dorling leaves with a heavy suitcase, in a brown coat and a shapeless hat.

The first visit

Mrs Dorling opens the door a chink, denies knowing her, and says 'I regret I cannot do anything for you… It is not convenient for me now.'

The green cardigan

What proves the narrator has the right house: Mrs Dorling is wearing her mother's green knitted cardigan, its wooden buttons 'rather pale from washing'.

Have you come back?

Mrs Dorling's involuntary question — 'I thought that no one had come back' — reveals that she had counted on no survivor returning to claim anything.

The mother's trust

She refused to make any agreement: 'It would simply be an insult to talk like that.' She stressed the risk Mrs Dorling ran carrying full suitcases out of the door.

Why the delay

After the Liberation the narrator was 'absolutely not interested in all that stored stuff, and naturally I was also rather afraid of it'. Only as life grew normal did curiosity return.

The second visit

A girl of about fifteen lets her in. In the passage hangs the family's iron Hanukkah candle-holder; in the living-room she stops, 'horrified', among things she knew and did not know.

Proof by burn mark

She rubs the woollen table-cloth and finds the burn mark on the edge that had never been repaired — the private proof that these are her mother's things.

Objects made ordinary

The white teapot with a gold border on the lid; the still life with the apple on the pewter plate; the plates once eaten off — 'But it wasn't anything special,' says the girl.

The silver

The narrator tells how she had not known the everyday cutlery was silver until her mother asked her to polish it. As she leaves, she hears 'the jingling of spoons and forks'.

Why she forgets the address

'The 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.'