Sensory Language In Andrea Ashworth's Once In A House On Fire

‘Once in a House on Fire’ was set in the 1970’s Manchester, where she was born. It is a memoir that Andrea’s writes to express her difficult childhood and the idea that she uses detailed sensory language, as if it was portrayed like a novel. Throughout her life she suffered untold sadness from the death of her father to the introduction of her new stepfather. This essay explores Andrea themes of emotional, physical and mental abuse, which is prevalent throughout the text. The essay has an exploration of many specific language techniques and sentence types to build a negative impression of Peter Hawkins.
The author uses the simple declarative sentence “Boots brushed and scraped on the door mat” (pg.4), to portray aggression and to create the

For example the connotation ‘red’ is the colour of fire, danger, power, caution and malice. ‘Red’ is an emotionally intense colour and is a consistent theme that builds up like a heated fire because Peter is full of rage and wrath and he is the “red herring” because he is distracting the mum from the truth about the abuse he is causing.
Andrea Ashworth is referencing to ‘fairy tales’ in the text, as ‘Once in a House on Fire’ is like ‘once upon a time’, which the quote “all the endings had been scrunched into paper fists and scattered over the carpet”(pg.18), suggests that her fairy tale ending has been destroyed and is taken away from her. Metaphorically speaking, it is like throwing away rubbish or unwanted possessions. The reader could also view this ‘metaphorical’ theme of being imprisoned, since it’s describing a modern fairy tale and Peter is the

20) to infer that she is using an aggressive tone, since she is mimicking Peter’s nasty behaviour, as if they were mirroring each other. This can be seen when the interrogative and exclamatory sentence “yer wot? Stop that flamin warbling!” Shows that Andrea is implying an idiolect to portray the characteristics of Peter and how his bad influence is reflecting on her attitude towards others. The phrase “all its dead flower’s” is how Peter is trying to destroy any evidence of her real dad, since he feels