Grammar Tip 26: Before and the Past Perfect Tense

Talking about events in the past.

The past perfect tense indicates a time before the past tense. But it is only used when you have a past tense to relate it to.

Look at this example:

One hot summer's day, Mr and Mrs Smith from San Francisco were travelling home from Arizona where they had visited Mr's Smith's elderly grandmother.

In this sentence there are two levels of past time:

Level One: they were travelling
Level Two: they had visited

The travelling is in the past tense (past continuous). The visit, however, happened before the travelling, so is in the past perfect tense.

It's not always the case!

When describing two or more levels of time in the past, you do not always need to use the past perfect tense. If you use a word like 'before' to show a sequence of events, you may not need it. You could use the past tense throughout.

Take this example:

Last summer I visited Rome. Before Rome, I visited Paris and London. Before that, I spent two weeks in Scotland.

Here there are different levels of time in the past; but all the verbs are in the simple past tense. The past perfect is not needed. This is because the events are in a simple time sequence. They are not connected in any other way.

If, however, the events are related to each other in a more dependent way, the past perfect is usually needed.

Compare this example:

Last summer I visited Rome. I was struggling for money as I had visited Paris and London just before I went to Rome. I had also spent two weeks in Scotland at the start of my holiday. So in Rome I stayed in the cheapest hotel I could find.

Here the past perfect tense is used because the events are not in a simple time sequence. Instead, they are related by a story. The linking words 'however', 'as' and 'also' do the work. So 'visited' and 'stayed' are at one level of time (past tense); 'had visited' and 'had spent' are at an earlier level (past perfect tense).

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Test Yourself

Do you need to use past perfect tense anywhere in these five sentences?

1. I had lunch. Before that I had a meeting. And at the start of the day I finished a report.
2. The car I saw leaving the house was the same one I saw the night before.
3. Yesterday I phoned my mother to ask why she did not call me; but little did I know that she left a message on my answering machine only two days before.
4. We stopped for a rest just after we reached the outskirts of the city. We were driving the whole night and we needed a break.
5. Sherlock Holmes entered the room. Before that he carefully checked the door handle. When he first came into the house he inspected the door step with great interest.