The wrong change
An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.
Nora had served customers at the market stall since morning. When a farmer handed her a coin for a basket of apples, she gave him the wrong change. He counted it once, then laid the coins back on the counter and looked at her. Behind him, two women waited with their baskets.
Nora’s fingers closed around the coins. The market seemed suddenly noisy: wheels rattled over the stones, and somebody called across the square. She could feel the farmer watching her. For a moment she stared at the coins, unable to decide which one she had counted twice.
“I have made a mistake,” she said. She set the coins in a row on the counter and counted them again, slowly. The farmer waited while she returned the correct amount. Nora checked the next customer’s payment before putting it away. By midday, the queue had grown longer, but she no longer hurried her counting.
Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to show Nora’s changing response to her mistake. Support your answer with references to the passage.
In your answer, you could consider:
456 exam-style questions on Edexcel GCSE English Language 1.3 Content: prose fiction study requirements, covering 1.3.1 Read challenging prose fiction for the unseen 19th-century extract. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.