1 This story is about John Duncan (forty-five-year-old man). He was a honest man and he was very poor, too. He and his two children were living in the small, miserable flat. The furniture was 20 years old, the wallpaper and carpets were cheap and dirty. He was a windower, because his wife, Rachel, drowned in the storm. When she had been alive, they used to live in big house in the country, with a large garden. They had everything that they needed. Then they (John and Rachel) had started the boat-building company, but after Rachel died he couldn't work, so the company had closed and he lost everything.
2 This story is about John Duncan (forty-five-year-old man). He was a honest man and he was very poor, too. He and his two children were living in the small, miserable flat. The furniture was 20 years old, the wallpaper and carpets were cheap and dirty. He was a windower, because his wife, Rachel, drowned in the storm. When she had been alive, they used to live in big house in the country, with a large garden. They had everything that they needed. Then they (John and Rachel) had started the boat-building company, but after Rachel died he couldn't work, so the company had closed and he lost everything.
When Mr Duncan got the work in paint factory, they were starting a new life. He and his children: Christine (sixteen-year-old girl) and Andrew (he was thirteen) moved to the new comfortable, house with a large field beside it and it was only half a kilometre from the river, so they bought a boat.
3 Mr Duncan was a very good biologist and in factory all day he had to test different types of paints. One day he split some of the waste products on his leg and he had to go to the doctor, because in left a red, painful place on his skin.
4 John Duncan worked with Mary Carter (the chemist, who had discovered new paint for cars). Once he invited her to a meal in the new house, but it wasn't a good meeting. Mary came again and John took them all (his children, too) out in their new boat. Andrew and Christine had started to like her.