On the Face of It — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: On the Face of It (Class 12 English)

Susan Hill's three-scene play. Derry, a fourteen-year-old whose face was burnt by acid, climbs into the garden of Mr Lamb, an old man with a tin leg. Their conversation changes how Derry sees himself. He defies his mother and returns — to find that Mr Lamb has fallen from his ladder.

The two characters

Derry, fourteen, with one side of his face burnt away by acid; and Mr Lamb, an old man whose real leg was blown off in the war and who now has a tin one.

The opening

'Mind the apples!' Mr Lamb warns him about the crab-apple windfalls in the long grass. Derry had climbed the garden wall, although 'the gate's always open'.

What Derry believes

'People are afraid of me.' He reads their thought: 'That's the ugliest thing I ever saw'. 'When I look in the mirror, and see it, I'm afraid of me.'

The acid

'Not in a fire. I got acid all down that side of my face and it burned it all away. It ate my face up. It ate me up.'

The weed garden

'Why is one green, growing plant called a weed and another flower? Where's the difference. It's all life.... growing. Same as you and me.' The question is really about Derry.

Lamey-Lamb

The children shout the nickname, and Mr Lamb is untroubled: 'They're not afraid of me. Why should they be? Because I'm not afraid of them, that's why not.'

Beauty and the beast

Derry rejects the fairy story in advance — the beast 'would have stayed a monstrous beast. I won't change.' Mr Lamb agrees only about Derry's face: 'In that way? No, you won't.' Later, when Derry says he will still have half a face when he is old, Mr Lamb answers: 'So you will. But the world won't. The world's got a whole face, and the world's there to be looked at.'

The woman at the bus-stop

'That's a face only a mother could love.' Mr Lamb's reply is the play's turn: 'is that the only thing you ever heard anyone say, in your life?'

The man in the locked room

Afraid of buses, germs, donkeys, lightning, love and banana skins, he locked himself in — and 'A picture fell off the wall on to his head and killed him.' Derry laughs a lot.

Worse than acid

'That'd do you more harm than any bottle of acid. Acid only burns your face… You can burn yourself away inside' — said about hating people.

Loneliness admitted

Mr Lamb claims 'hundreds' of friends, but alone with his bees he murmurs: 'I'll come back. They never do, though. Not them. Never do come back.'

The ending

Derry defies his mother — 'if I don't go back there, I'll never go anywhere in this world again' — and returns to find Mr Lamb fallen from the ladder. 'Lamey-Lamb. I did.....come back.' Derry begins to weep.