One Umbrella, Two Friends: Writing a Narrative or Descriptive Piece on Friendship

Everyone who writes about a friend faces the same problem: the reader has never met them. Telling the reader that your friend is "kind", "funny" and "loyal" does not solve it, because every writer says the same about every friend. What solves it is a moment: one afternoon, one gesture, one sentence that nobody else would have said. In this lesson you study two short models, a narrative that tells the story of how a friendship began, and a description that paints a friend so clearly that the reader could pick him out in a crowd. Then you write your own.

1Model 1: a narrative

Written by Ganzaa. The people are imagined.

The Umbrella

When I moved to Musanze in S3, I knew nobody, and I owned no umbrella. In Musanze, the second fact matters more than you might think.

On my third day, the rain arrived at four o'clock, exactly as the bell rang. It did not so much fall as drop, in one grey sheet, and the path outside turned into a brown stream. I stood in the classroom doorway, holding my new books against my chest, and calculated how long they would survive.

"Which way do you go?" said a voice behind me. A tall boy from the back row, whose name I had not yet learned, was opening a large black umbrella with one broken spoke.

"Towards the hospital," I said.

"Me too," he lied.

We walked for twenty minutes under an umbrella that was big enough for one and a half people. He held it over me and my books, and by the time we reached my gate, his left side was soaked from shoulder to shoe. When I tried to thank him, he only laughed. "See you tomorrow, Hirwa," he said, and splashed away into the rain. He had learned my name on the first day. I had not learned his.

His name was Byiringiro. The next morning I asked him where he really lived, and he admitted that it was three kilometres the other way. That weekend I spent my pocket money on an umbrella, the biggest the shop had.

We are in S4 now, and we have shared that umbrella many times, usually with somebody new underneath it. I still think about those twenty minutes, when a stranger chose to get wet so that I would not. Friendship, I have learned, often begins when someone decides that your problem is also theirs.

2Model 2: a descriptive piece

Written by Ganzaa. The people are imagined.

The Tailor at the Corner

Mr Ntwali's shop is a wooden kiosk no wider than a bed, squeezed between a phone-charging stall and a shop that sells plastic buckets. You hear it before you see it: the steady clatter of a black sewing machine worked by a foot pedal and, above it, a small radio that is always tuned to the football.

He is over seventy, as thin as a measuring tape, with reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, where he usually forgets them. His hands are the busiest thing about him. Even while he talks, they are folding, pinning, smoothing.

He is patient in a way that I am not. When I bring him trousers that I have torn climbing a fence, he never asks how. He holds them up to the light, clicks his tongue twice, and says, "Come back at five."

For two years now I have spent many Saturday afternoons on the bench outside his shop. He has taught me to thread a needle at the first attempt and to sew on a button so that it never comes off. I have taught him to send photos on his phone. We do not talk much. We do not need to.

When I think of friendship now, I hear that sewing machine: steady, patient, holding things together.

3Questions on the models

1. Find the turning point of "The Umbrella". Which short sentence makes the reader smile, and why?
2. How does the writer show, without saying so, that Byiringiro is generous?
3. Which tenses does "The Tailor at the Corner" mainly use, and why?
4. Find a simile and a metaphor in the description.
5. Which senses does the first paragraph of the description use?
6. Both pieces end with a reflection. Copy each final sentence. Why is ending this way effective?

Show answersHide answers

1. "Which way do you go?" begins the turn; "'Me too,' he lied" makes the reader smile, because we realise at once that he is going out of his way, before the narrator does.
2. Through actions: he lies about where he lives, holds the umbrella over Hirwa's books and gets soaked himself, and laughs off the thanks.
3. The present simple (is, sells, holds, says) for habits and lasting facts, and the present perfect (has taught, have spent) for the two years of friendship up to now.
4. Simile: "as thin as a measuring tape". Metaphor: the sewing machine, "holding things together", stands for the friendship.
5. Hearing (the clatter, the radio) before sight (the kiosk, the buckets).
6. "Friendship, I have learned, often begins when someone decides that your problem is also theirs." "When I think of friendship now, I hear that sewing machine: steady, patient, holding things together." They turn one person's story into an idea about friendship that the reader can take away.

4Punctuating dialogue

British writers often use single quotation marks ('…') and many Rwandan schools use double ("…"). Either is correct: choose one and keep to it.