Carbon Copies, by Patricia Ollerenshaw
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
Irene Daintith had been in the claims department of the Western Counties Assurance Society for twenty-two years, and for eleven of them she had been the person everyone came to. She knew which agents spelled ‘premium’ with two m’s and which branch managers wanted their letters signed ‘for and on behalf of’. She could do seventy words a minute on a machine with a sticking e. When the new girls cried in the cloakroom, it was Irene who found them a handkerchief and told them that Mr Bassett barked but had never been known to bite.
In the spring of 1957 Mr Bassett announced that the department would have a section head, and in the summer Irene was asked to show the new junior clerk, Malcolm Fry, how the work came in and went out. He was twenty-three and had a fiancée in Clifton and a habit of calling her ‘Mrs D’, though she had never been married. She showed him the ledgers and the dockets and the system of coloured carbons she had invented herself in 1949. He wrote everything down in a little notebook with his initials stamped on the cover.
The appointment was announced in September. Malcolm would be section head. Mr Bassett called Irene into his office to tell her himself, which she understood was meant as a kindness.
‘He’s a young man with prospects, Miss Daintith. Getting married. It’s the natural order of things. And between ourselves, the girls will take it better from a man.’ He beamed at her. ‘You’ll be his right hand, of course. I don’t know what we’d do without you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Bassett,’ she said.
The girls in the department were furious on her behalf. Brenda Cole said it was a scandal and that she would say so to Mr Bassett’s face, and did not. Somebody left a bunch of chrysanthemums on Irene’s desk with no card. Irene put them in a jam jar and went on typing.
Malcolm’s first report as section head was due on the Friday, a summary of the quarter’s claims for the board. He gave it to her on Thursday afternoon, handwritten on twelve sheets of foolscap, and said he was sure it would be no trouble.
She saw the mistake on page four. He had carried a figure from the motor claims into the household column, so that the household total was out by a little over three thousand pounds, and every percentage that followed from it was wrong. It was the kind of mistake she had caught for other people a hundred times, with a pencilled mark in the margin and a quiet word.
Irene sat for a moment with her hands in her lap. Then she fed a sheet into the machine, with its top copy and its two carbons, and began to type.
She typed all twelve pages without a single error of her own. She typed every figure exactly as he had written it. She set the finished report on his desk at five o’clock, squared at the corners, with a fresh paper clip.
It was not, after all, her place to correct the section head.
“Irene is presented as someone who accepts injustice without a fight.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 1.3.1 Identifying and interpreting themes, ideas and information, 1.3.2 Reading in different ways for different purposes, 1.3.4 Supporting a point of view with textual evidence, and 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.