Summary

Situation & Plot: Susan Hill's radio play 'On the Face of It', part of the CBSE Class 12 English NCERT Vistas reader, is set mainly in Mr Lamb's garden. Derry, a fourteen-year-old boy with an acid-burnt face, climbs the wall into the garden of Mr Lamb, an old man with a tin leg. Through their conversation Mr Lamb challenges Derry's self-pity and fear of others' reactions, using his own disability and his love of life as examples. Derry begins to see beyond his disfigurement and, defying his mother, resolves to return. When he comes back, he finds Mr Lamb has fallen from a ladder while picking crab apples; the boy kneels beside him and weeps.

Characters:

• Derry: A sensitive, embittered boy whose burnt face makes him believe he is ugly and that people will always stare or recoil. He is trapped in self-loathing until Mr Lamb shows him a different way to see himself and the world.
• Mr Lamb: An old man with a tin leg, cheerful and philosophical. He lives alone but keeps an open gate, finds beauty in small things — the wind, the bees, the weeds — and refuses to let his disability define him.

Themes: Physical disability and the loneliness and prejudice it brings; the power of a positive attitude; inner worth over outward appearance; and human connection overcoming isolation.

Key symbols:

• The garden, with its always-open gate, standing for openness, growth and acceptance.
• The tin leg and the burnt face — external marks society uses to label people, which Mr Lamb treats as unimportant but Derry treats as a curse.
• The ladder, whose fall is bitterly ironic: the man who taught Derry to live fully dies in a mundane accident. …