Homes that disappointed
Text 1: The Model Dwellings, by Susan Ellwood
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
When I was eleven we moved from Pump Court into the new Model Dwellings in Victoria Street, which had been built by a society of gentlemen for the improvement of the labouring classes. I remember my mother standing in the doorway of our two rooms on the third floor, with the baby on her hip, and turning the brass tap at the sink on and off, on and off, as if she could not believe that water would come out of it every time. In Pump Court we had shared one privy and one pump with nine families. Here there was a water closet on every landing, and gas, and windows that opened.
It took us perhaps a month to discover the rules. They were printed on a card behind every door, and the superintendent, a former sergeant, enforced them with a sergeant’s pleasure. No washing to be hung from the windows. No animals of any kind, so that my brother’s linnet had to be given away. No visitors after nine. Stairs to be scrubbed by each tenant in turn and inspected. Rent to be paid on Monday morning by ten, and any family a week behind to be given notice, without appeal. My father, who had never in his life been told when he might have a friend to call, said it was like living in a well-run workhouse.
My mother never complained. She said that none of her children had died since we came, which she could not have said of Pump Court, and I suppose that was the whole of the argument. But she missed the court. She missed the women on the doorsteps and the shouting across the yard. In the Dwellings everyone kept their doors shut, as the rules required, and I do not believe she made a single friend there in twenty years.
Text 2: Fourteen Floors Up, by Kevin Dunmore
An original twentieth-century memoir.
We got the keys to number 87, Kestrel House, in the spring of 1967. My mum had been on the council list for six years, and we had been living in two rooms above a chip shop with a toilet in the yard. The flat was on the fourteenth floor, and the first time we went up in the lift she held my hand so tightly it hurt. Then she opened the door and saw the bathroom, with a real bath and hot water from a tap, and she sat down on the edge of it in her coat and cried.
For a year or two it was everything the council had promised. From our window you could see the whole city, the cathedral, the gasworks, the hills beyond. There was central heating. There was a lift. My mum said she felt like the Queen. But the lift broke, first for a day, then for a week, then for most of the winter of 1971, and my mum, who had bad knees, would stop on every landing on the way up with her shopping, fourteen floors, and get her breath. Black mould came up in the corners of the bedrooms. The walkways were dark, and older kids hung about in them, and I stopped being allowed out on my own.
On the old street everybody had known everybody. In Kestrel House we knew the family next door and nobody else in the building, though there were two hundred people in it. My mum was lonely there in a way she never was above the chip shop. When they knocked Kestrel House down in 1998, she went to watch, and I asked her if she was sad. She thought about it for a long time. ‘I was happy in that bath,’ she said. ‘I was never happy anywhere else in the place.’
‘Both writers are disappointed by homes that promised a better life.’
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.