Ray Bradbury's story of an automatic house that goes on cooking breakfast, cleaning the floors and reading poetry aloud to a family who are no longer there.
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Ten words unlock the story. Work through the four short activities — say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Three words from today's discussion: oblivious · indifferent · futile. Match each definition to the right word — out loud, then reveal.
This story has no characters and almost no dialogue — only a house, a clock, and one animal. Here it is in three parts, retold; the phrases inside quotation marks are Bradbury's own. After each part there's a quick check (try it from memory first), then one thing to discuss.
At seven in the morning a voice-clock sings the household awake, over and over, as though it were afraid nobody would get up. Nobody does. In the kitchen the stove produces eight pieces of toast, eight eggs, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees and two glasses of milk — breakfast for four people, two of whom drink coffee and two of whom drink milk. A second voice announces the date, August 4th, 2026, and repeats it three times. It reads out the day's business: a neighbour's birthday, a wedding anniversary, the insurance, the water, the gas and the light bills.
At one minute past eight the clock calls everyone out to school and to work. No door slams; no shoe touches a carpet. It is raining, and a weather box by the front door sings a small rhyme about umbrellas. The garage chimes, lifts its door to show the waiting car, waits a long time, and closes again. By half past eight the breakfast has gone cold and hard, and is scraped into the sink. At quarter past nine little robot mice run out of holes in the walls, clean every room, and disappear back into their burrows.
Then, at ten o'clock, one flat sentence changes the whole story. The sun comes out. "The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes." It is the only building left standing for miles, and at night the ruins give off a glow that can be seen from a long way off. Outside, the sprinklers water the garden as usual. The whole west wall of the house is black — except for five pale places, where five shapes were burned into the paint in a single instant: a man mowing a lawn, a woman bending to pick flowers, a small boy with his hands thrown into the air, a ball, and a girl with her hands raised to catch "a ball which never came down".
1. The story never describes the family. So what does the breakfast tell us about them?
2. At what point do we learn what has happened to the city, and how is it described?
1. The quantities do the work: eight pieces of toast, eight eggs, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, two glasses of milk. Four people — two adults and two children. We assemble the family ourselves out of the portions.
2. At ten o'clock, roughly a third of the way in, in three short flat sentences with no emotional words at all — "a city of rubble and ashes", one house left standing, a glow over the ruins at night.
At noon a dog scratches at the front door, and the door recognises its voice and lets it in. It was once a big, heavy animal; now it is thin, and its skin is covered in sores. It runs upstairs, barking at every closed door, and finds only silence. Behind it the cleaning mice whirr out, angry — not sad, angry — at the mud on the floor. The dog smells pancakes cooking behind the kitchen door, cannot reach them, runs in circles, and dies. Two hours later the mice carry the body away to the incinerator in the cellar, which "sat like evil Baal in a dark corner". At quarter past two the story gives the whole event four words: "The dog was gone."
At twenty-five to three the house sets out card tables on the patio, deals the cards, pours the drinks, makes the sandwiches and plays music. Nobody comes. The cards are not touched. At four the tables fold themselves back into the walls "like great butterflies".
At half past four the nursery walls light up. Yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes and lilac panthers move across walls made of glass; there is the smell of a jungle, the hum of bees, the sound of warm rain falling on dry grass. It is the most beautiful writing in the whole story, and it is a playroom for two children who are now shapes on an outside wall. "It was the children's hour."
At five the bath fills itself with hot water. At nine the beds warm their own circuits. At five past nine a voice in the study asks Mrs McClellan which poem she would like this evening — and this is the first time in the entire story that anyone in the family is given a name. Nobody answers. "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random," the house says, and reads out a poem by Sara Teasdale.
1. How does the house respond to the dog — while it is dying, and afterwards?
2. What happens at 9:05, and which sentence there is the most unsettling?
1. While it dies, the house's only reaction is irritation — the mice are "angry at inconvenience", angry about the mud. Afterwards it detects the decay, removes the body to the incinerator, and closes the episode in four words: "The dog was gone."
2. The house asks Mrs McClellan to choose a poem, gets no answer, and says, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." It cannot tell the difference between no preference and nobody there.
"At ten o'clock the house began to die." The wind rises, a branch crashes through the kitchen window, and a bottle of cleaning solvent smashes over the stove. The room is alight in a second. The house fights. Voices shout "Fire!"; water is pumped from the ceilings; every door is shut tight. But the windows break in the heat, the wind feeds the flames, and the water runs out — the reserve was used up filling baths and washing dishes on all those quiet days. Then chemical foam pours down from the attic, and the fire retreats. So the fire climbs outside the house instead, reaches the pumps in the attic, and blows them apart.
As it burns, the house is described as a body. Oak bones, a skeleton, wires like nerves, the skin torn off "as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air". Paintings by Picasso and Matisse are eaten "like delicacies". Voices go out one by one, "like children dying in a forest, alone, alone". In the nursery the painted animals run from the flames towards a river that is not there. In the kitchen the stove, in the last seconds, cooks breakfast at a "psychopathic rate" — ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast — until the attic falls into the kitchen, the kitchen into the cellar, and the cellar into the ground. "Smoke and silence."
At dawn, one wall is still standing. Inside it, one voice is still working, repeating the same sentence into the steam and the rubble: "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"
1. What actually destroys the house in the end — and why is that ironic?
2. What is the final image, and what has changed since the story's first page?
1. A tree branch through a window and a bottle of its own cleaning solvent. The house survived the bomb that destroyed an entire city, and is finished off by the weather and its own housekeeping. It also runs out of water because it had been using the reserve to wash dishes nobody ate from.
2. One wall, one voice, announcing the date into empty air — exactly how the story opened. The only difference is the date: it has moved forward one day, to August 5th. And the last sentence is cut off in the middle.
Almost nothing in this story has a person doing it. The breakfast is cooked, the dishes are washed, the floors are cleaned, the city is destroyed — and there is no one anywhere in the sentence. That is the passive, and Bradbury uses it as an argument, not just as a style.
The tense you need is shown in brackets.
1. Every morning the rooms (clean) by small robot mice. (present simple)
2. By half past eight the cold breakfast (scrape) into the sink. (past simple)
3. Five shapes (burn) into the paint of the west wall in a single instant. (past simple)
4. Once the reserve water had gone, the fire (cannot / stop). (modal)
1. are cleaned
2. was scraped
3. were burned (or were burnt — both are correct in British English)
4. could not be stopped (modal + be + participle)
Complete each gap with the passive verb — and add by + the agent only where the agent is genuinely worth naming. In one of these three, it is.
1. The kitchen window (break) .
2. The breakfast dishes (wash) and dried before nine o'clock.
3. By the time the story begins, the entire city (reduce) to rubble.
1. was broken · by a falling branch — this is the one. The branch is news: it is what starts the fire.
2. were washed — no agent. Everyone knows it was the house, and saying so would slow the sentence down.
3. had been reduced — no agent, and here the absence is the point: the story never tells us who did it.
Fill each gap with the right passive form, then read the whole paragraph aloud.
Breakfast (cook) at seven for a family who never came down. The eggs (fry), the toast (brown), and by half past eight the whole meal (throw) away. Outside, the city (destroy) — the story never tells us by whom. Five human shapes (burn) into the west wall, and the rest of the paint (strip) down to charcoal.
was cooked · were fried · was browned · had been thrown · had been destroyed · were burned · had been stripped
Now read it back. Not one sentence in that paragraph needs a person in it — and that is Bradbury's whole method. Ask yourself where the past perfect passive (had been + participle) is doing something the past simple couldn't.
Hold on to these forms — in the Speak tab you'll retell the story in the passive, and then argue about who, if anyone, this story blames.
Bradbury published this in 1950 — five years after the end of the Second World War, and at the start of the Cold War, when a great many people expected the world to end more or less like this. He set it in August 2026, seventy-six years into his own future. You are reading it in the month he chose.
The title is not his. It comes from a poem written by the American poet Sara Teasdale at the end of the First World War, and the house reads that poem aloud in the study at five past nine, to an empty chair.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale, 1918
This is the heart of the lesson — do all of it out loud. The timer is there to keep you going: fill the time with detail rather than racing through it.
Tell the story of There Will Come Soft Rains in your own words, as if to a friend who has never heard of it. Move through the arc: the voice-clock at seven → breakfast for four → the announcements → the empty garage → the cleaning mice → ten o'clock and the ruined city → the five shapes on the wall → the dog → the party for nobody → the nursery → the poem at 9:05 → the fire → the last voice at dawn.
Use at least four passive verbs and at least five key words (charred, rubble, silhouette, oblivious, indifferent, futile, relentless, eerie, frenzy, ominous).
Take a side and argue it properly. Is this a story about the danger of machines — or about people, with the machines only left behind as evidence? Build your case with at least three reasons, deal with the strongest objection to your own position, and say what you think the story wants its reader to do differently.
Then swap: argue the opposite side for one minute. It is harder — and it is where the good language comes out.
Describe one full day in a place you know well — your street, your office, your school — on the first day after everybody has gone. What keeps running? What breaks first? What is the last thing still working a year later? Use the passive as much as you can: the doors are still locked at six; the lights are switched off automatically; nothing has been repaired.
Prefer a different angle? Pick one of these and run with it: