Anyway, I went through this and asked him to read the text prior to 'devilish pairs of eyes' more carefully, and he realised his mistake there fairly easily.
I suggested that 'phrase' in the second question was more specific, although I wasn't sure if his answers here was completely wrong: '"their armoured bonnets" and "their impervious metal roofs" was what I thought they were looking for here.
Not too bad.
Then for question three I asked him to think about the language and atmosphere being conveyed by the story.
He wasn't sure what 'impervious' meant, so I explained, and I asked him why he thought the author talked about 'armoured bonnets' and 'impervious metal roofs', he thought it was something to do with them being proud of their cars.
So I asked kinds of things are 'armoured', and he said 'knights', and I added 'tanks', and I asked 'what would you associate those things with?' and he said 'fighting'. 'Or war', I said.
'What do you think it would tell you about the people if they had been described instead as "riding their horses down the street, whispering words of encouragement in their ears, patting their manes".' So he said 'that they were loving people.' 'So what's the difference here when the men are described as in 'armoured' cars with 'devilish eyes'. Didn't get it, so I asked 'do you know what dehumanised means'.
He didn't. I said 'do you think it would matter if we had a whole lot of old toys and crushed them.' 'No that wouldn't matter', he said. 'How about if we had a lot of people and we killed them.' 'Yes of course that would be bad'.
I asked him 'what is the name of the literary device when the author says 'back and forth, back and forth, back and forth'?'. He didn't know. Eventually I said 'repetition'. I asked him why the author might emphasise that, what types of things do the same thing over and over again. After saying 'yes' to 'people' doing the same thing over and ever, he suggested a pendulum, to which I said 'well machines generally do the same thing over and over without stopping or getting bored'.
'So you see that the atmosphere/imagery used here is of machines, rather than people.', I said.
I went on to talk about the people in the cars, and where they might be going. 'To a restaurant?', he suggested. 'Not in the morning when people are going to school.' 'Ok to work.'
I asked him 'if people are all the same, we might call them clones, but what word do we use to describe the fact that people are actually all different'. He wasn't sure. 'Individual.' 'Oh yeah' was his reply.
'What in the passage tells you that the people were all the same?' 'In each', he replied.
'Ok, so what does "leaden" mean?'
'Don't know'
'What's lead?', I asked
'A metal.'
'What do you know about lead?'
'It's poisonous, it's grey.'
'And what else?'
'Don't know.'
'How about a "lead weight". If someone was carrying a lead weight, why might they drop it?'
'Because it's boring?'
'No, because it's heavy.'
I then looked up 'leaden' online, and it gave a definition which was much 'heavy', 'grey', or 'slow'.
I asked him to think about what the weather was like, he said 'rainy'. 'What other clues are there to the weather?' He didn't notice the car lights suggesting it was dark or overcast, and had to be heavily prodded to figure out the steam from the bonnets suggested it might be cold.
We then spent about 10 minutes discussing umbrellas.
'What does "insubstantial" mean?' I asked.
'Don't know', he said.
I looked up 'substantial' and gave the definition as 'large' or 'strong'. 'So what does insubstantial mean?'
'Not large'
'Yes, but what do we say if something is not large'
It took a good bit of prodding to get the answer 'small'.
He thought that the umbrella might be too small. I asked him what other problems you might have with an umbrella, what problems he had seen with umbrellas. He suggested not being waterproof, so I asked him to think about weather and what kind of weather we might have with rain. He didn't know, so I asked him to list all the kinds of weather. He went through snow, sun, and so on, I'm not sure if I said 'windy' or he did in the end.
It was then quite a struggle to get him to the point that an umbrella might get damaged by wind. I showed him two umbrellas, one intact, the other blown inside out by the wind.
I asked him 'if you had bought this umbrella and it got blown inside out and broken by the wind the first time you used it, would you buy another one?'
'No'
'Why not?
'Because it's broken.'
'Yes but the one in the shop wouldn't be broken, it would be a new one. Why wouldn't you buy another one the same in the shop, what's wrong with the one in the shop?'
Eventually I had to give the answer 'because the umbrella in the shop is not strong enough'.
(I guess 'insubstantial' here means small, given the context of a woman with children, and there's no suggestion of wind, but I wanted to see if he would pick up the concept of umbrellas being vulnerable to wind, and needing strength, but he did not)
It took quite some to cover this, less than a third of the marks, and I think it was a little dispiriting for both of us.
Am I doing it wrong? Am I discussing this at too high a level for an NT 10-year-old, let alone an ASD one? (Like I said, I am not a teacher, nor am I 10, so I find it hard to adjust my expectations as I am not sure where they should be.)