Building a home
Text 1: A House Raised in One Night, by Dafydd Morgan
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
There was an old custom in our part of the country, which the gentry called a superstition and the poor called the law, that a man who could raise a house upon the common between sunset and sunrise, with a roof on it and smoke going up from the chimney by morning, might keep that house and the land a stone’s throw around it. My father had waited eleven years for the chance. In the April I was eight, with the agent away in London, he took it.
We had gathered the turves and stones and timbers for weeks beforehand and hidden them in the bracken. At dusk every man and woman from the hamlet came up the hill: my uncles with the walls, the women passing stones hand to hand in a line, old Shôn the thatcher, who was seventy, roped to the ridge with a lantern in his teeth. We children carried water and mud for the chinks. Nobody spoke above a whisper. I remember my mother’s hands bleeding from the stone and her laughing at them. Just before dawn my father lit a fire of furze in the hearth, and the smoke went up straight and grey into the cold air, and every soul on that hillside cheered as if a child had been born.
It was a poor house, God knows. The walls let in the wind and the roof let in the rain, and for the first winter we lived on potatoes and stubbornness. But it was ours. My father would stand at the door of an evening with his hands in his pockets and look at it as a lord looks at his park. I have lived since in better houses, built by other men. I have never been proud of any of them.
Text 2: Three Years of Weekends, by Rachel Dunne
An original contemporary article.
For three years, every Saturday and Sunday and most bank holidays, I helped to build the house I now live in. Our self-build group was twelve households who could not afford to buy anywhere in the city, and who had persuaded the council to give us a patch of derelict land in return for building affordable homes on it ourselves. None of us were builders. Between us we had a nurse, a bus driver, two teachers, a retired engineer and a man who had once built a shed.
Nobody tells you how hard it is. Not the dramatic parts, which are fun, but the endless, repetitive, aching middle: carrying blocks in the rain, fixing a hundred identical brackets, discovering that a wall is two centimetres out and taking it down again. Every week someone was injured, exhausted or close to tears. Two households dropped out. My partner and I argued more in those three years than in the ten before. There was one February when I sat in the half-built kitchen, with no roof over me and sleet coming in, and genuinely could not remember why we were doing it.
Then we moved in. Everyone asks me if I am proud, and I am, but that is not quite the word. What I feel when I walk in is that I know this house the way you know a person: which board creaks, which window sticks, which wall Dev from number six and I put up on the hottest day of the summer. And I know my neighbours the same way, because I have seen them all at their worst and their best. Pride is something you feel on your own. This is something we feel together, and I do not think there is a word for it yet.
‘Both writers present making a home as hard work that brings pride.’
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.