BSOEF

I found this extract in an old exam paper for English. Does anyone know what it's from?

'The new girl set herself apart by everything she did. It took only a couple of days for the school to know her old man was silly as a chook. You only had to see the way hedrove her up to the school gates on the back of his clapped-out tractor, sitting there at the wheel with a balaclava covering half his face and his hands in matching brown mittens, although it couldn’t have been cold because he wore shorts and cut-off gumboots. And the girl stood up there behind him, one hand balancing herself on her old man’s shoulder. That first morning she stared directly back at them when the playground stopped its milling and haring about and the kids raised their heads and looked at her dumbly as cows disturbed at their grazing. You might expect at any moment they would break out and yell at her and give her the treatment. But they were held back by what Bob later said you could only call her shining, her height and her white dress and her hair lifting slightly with the slow movement of the tractor, and more than these, the total sense of command he can find no word for. She stepped down from the metal bar at the back of the tractor without saying a word to her old man. Nor did he speak to her, or so much as turn his head. He wheeled the tractor back down the road he had come, to where the asphalt petered out into dust and grit during the summer term and clogging mud in winter. The man’s head, round and squat in its knitted cover, jogged with the grunting movement of his machine. His outline wavered in the oily fumes that rose behind him.'