Anger or pity
Text 1: A Night in Fleece Court, by Charles Tremlett
An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
At eleven o’clock on Monday night I was admitted, in company with a sanitary inspector, to a common lodging house in Fleece Court, a narrow alley not two hundred yards from the most fashionable street in the town. For fourpence a night, a man may have a bed here; for threepence, a share of one; for twopence, a place on the floor of the kitchen, where some forty persons of both sexes and every age lay packed together like herrings in a barrel, upon sacking, around a fire that gave more smoke than heat.
The smell I will spare my readers. In one corner I found a woman with three small children, the youngest not a year old, who had come into the town that week looking for her husband, who had gone ahead to find work and had not written. She had spent her last shilling. The baby was asleep upon her shawl, and she apologised to me, actually apologised, for the state of its face, which she had no water to wash. I gave her what I had in my pocket and could not look at her.
The house is owned, I am told, by a gentleman who sits upon the vestry and who has twice voted against the improvement of the drains in Fleece Court, on the ground of expense. He draws from this single building an income of some two hundred pounds a year. I make no comment. I set the facts before my readers and ask them only to remember, the next time they pass the end of Fleece Court in their carriages, what lies a few yards to their left.
Text 2: Seventy-Eight Weeks, by Joanne Pike
An original contemporary article.
For eighteen months, Leanne and her three children have lived in a single room in a converted hotel on the ring road, placed there by the council as ‘temporary accommodation’. The room is four metres by five. It contains a double bed, two bunk beds, a fridge, a microwave and a television bolted to the wall. There is no table, so the family eat sitting on the beds. The shared kitchen on the floor below has one working hob for eleven families.
I want to be careful how I write about Leanne, because she would hate to be pitied, and she does not deserve to be. She works twenty hours a week as a teaching assistant. She gets three children to two different schools across the city by bus every morning, which takes an hour and forty minutes. Her eldest, Jayden, does his homework in the bathroom because it is the only place with a door. When I visited, the room was spotless. ‘People think you end up here because you’ve done something wrong,’ she told me. ‘I did nothing wrong. My landlord sold the house.’
The word ‘temporary’ is doing a great deal of work in this story. The council’s own guidance says families with children should not stay in this kind of accommodation for more than six weeks. Leanne has been there for seventy-eight. There are, I was told, more than two hundred families in the borough in the same position, because the council has sold off or failed to build the homes that would let them leave. Leanne does not need our sympathy. She needs a front door. The people who could give her one have had eighteen months, and they should be ashamed.
‘Both writers show more anger at the system than pity for the people they describe.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
160 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3 Section A: Reading information and ideas – skills, covering 2.3.1 Identify and interpret key ideas, 2.3.2 Comment on writers’ language choices, 2.3.4 Summarise and synthesise across texts, 2.3.7 Evaluate usefulness, bias and misuse of evidence, 2.3.8 Use context to inform reading, and 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.