Fear of crime
Text 1: A Month of Terror in Holly Grove, by Emily Vosper
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
My dear Kate, You will laugh at us, and you will be right to. Since the newspapers began to fill with garrotting, there is not a household in Holly Grove that sleeps soundly. Every evening Mr Vosper goes round the house three times with a candle, trying the bolts, and he has bought a stout stick with a leaded end which he calls a life-preserver and keeps beside the bed, where I fall over it nightly. Cook will not go to the pillar box after dark. The girl has hung a bell on the area door. Mrs Marlow next door has taken to walking out with her late husband’s pistol in her muff, unloaded, I sincerely hope.
We have not slept a whole night in a month. Every creak of the stairs is a burglar, every cat on the wall a garrotter, and twice Mr Vosper has gone down in his nightshirt, stick in hand, to confront the kitchen clock. I have grown thin and cross, and the children have caught our terror as they catch a cold, so that Florence now looks under her bed each night before she will say her prayers.
And then, on Tuesday, we were robbed in earnest. Someone walked in at the front door, which the girl had left on the latch while she shook the mats, and walked out again with Mr Vosper’s second-best overcoat from the hall stand. That was the whole of it. Nobody saw him; nobody was hurt; the coat was old. I confess that when we discovered it I laughed until I cried. A month of terror, and the monster turned out to be a man who was cold. I slept that night better than I have since Easter.
Text 2: Anyone Else Hear That?, by Neil Hargreaves
An original contemporary article.
Our street has a WhatsApp group. It was set up to share information about bin collections and lost cats, and for a while that is what it did. Then, two winters ago, someone posted a blurry doorbell video of a man in a hooded top walking past the houses at eleven at night, and everything changed. Within a week the group had three hundred messages. A van parked for too long was ‘casing the street’. A teenager on a bike was ‘definitely the same one’. People started posting at two in the morning: ‘Anyone else hear that?’
I was as bad as anyone. I bought a doorbell camera and checked it on my phone during meetings. My daughter stopped walking home alone from the bus stop, though nothing had ever happened to anyone at the bus stop. When my car was broken into in March, and the thief took a phone charger and a bag of loose change, I was almost relieved. It was so much smaller than the thing I had been imagining.
But I want to be fair, because the statistic-quoters who say fear is always worse than crime have not met Margaret at number fourteen. Her house was burgled while she was asleep upstairs. They took her late husband’s medals and her sense that her home was hers. She is eighty-one and she has not slept in her bedroom since; she sleeps in a chair downstairs with the lights on. For most of us, the fear did more damage than any burglar. For Margaret, the crime was every bit as bad as the fear, and then it became the fear.
‘Both writers show that fear of crime is worse than crime itself.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
40 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.