Boredom and fear in hospital
Text 1: Ward Six, by George Penhallow
An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
Infirmary, Ward Six. Third week. My leg lies in its box of splints like a parcel nobody has called for, and I lie behind it. There are twenty beds in this ward and I have counted everything in it that may be counted: the panes in the windows (ninety-six), the cracks in the ceiling over my head (eleven, or twelve if one is generous), and the number of times in an hour the old sailor in the corner bed calls for his mother (as many as thirty). The days are all the same length, which is to say, too long.
Thursday is visiting day, and from noon the whole ward watches the door as dogs watch a kitchen. My sister came with oranges and a newspaper eight days old, which I have now read so often that I could recite the shipping intelligence. The rest of the week I have only the chaplain, who is kind and deaf, and the house surgeon, who looks at my leg and not at me.
Yet I would not have anyone think it is only tedium here. On Monday the great surgeon came round with his students, and stood at the foot of my bed a long while, pressing the swollen flesh above the splint, and said to them in a low voice something I could not hear, with the word ‘amputation’ in it. I did not sleep that night. Nor the next. The man in the bed beside mine, a bricklayer with a crushed hand, was taken away to the operating theatre on Tuesday morning, whistling, and has not come back, and nobody will tell me why. I find that I would give a great deal to be bored again.
Text 2: Forty-Eight Tiles, by Ellie Brannigan
An original contemporary memoir.
I spent seven weeks of Year 10 in a hospital bed after an operation to straighten my spine, and if you had asked me at the time what the worst thing was, I would have said the ceiling. I knew every one of its forty-eight tiles. One had a brown stain shaped like Wales. The hospital wifi dropped out every evening at exactly the time my friends came online, and the television above my bed cost more per day than my mum could justify, so mostly I lay there and watched the stain and listened to the drip machine count to itself.
The nurses were brilliant and also, inevitably, busy. They came in, checked numbers, wrote things down, smiled and left. I started to look forward to having my blood taken, just for the conversation.
But I think now that the boredom was covering something else. At first my friends visited every few days, crowding round the bed with sweets and gossip. Then it was once a week. Then it was messages. By week five a girl I had been close to since primary school sent me a photo of a party, with everyone there except me, and the caption ‘wish u were here!!’ I did not cry about the operation, or the pain, or the needles. I cried about that photo, for a long time, with the curtain pulled round. What frightened me in hospital was not anything the doctors did. It was the idea that life was carrying on perfectly well without me, and that when I got out there might be no space left for me to fit back into.
‘Both writers find that being a patient is more boring than frightening.’
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.