Objects and places
Text 1: The Sale at Fernleigh, by Clara Wilmot
An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
June 3rd. The auctioneer’s men came this morning and pasted numbered tickets upon everything we own. Lot 1 is the hall clock. Lot 46 is my piano. Lot 112 is Papa’s chair, in which he sat every evening for twenty years and in which he sat this morning, quite silent, while a young man with a pencil behind his ear measured it. Mamma has gone to bed with a headache and will not come down. I walked through every room with the ticket-men and felt as though the house were being undressed in front of strangers.
June 5th. The sale. I did not mean to watch, but I could not keep away. Mrs Hendy from the Grange bought the dining table for eleven pounds and said, within my hearing, that it would do very well for the servants’ hall. The piano went to a publican. I bore it all quite well until they held up Mamma’s rosewood workbox, which has stood by her chair for as long as I can remember, with its little drawers of buttons and silks, and I found I had raised my hand and bid for it with the last of my own money, eighteen shillings. Nobody bid against me. I think the auctioneer took pity.
June 9th. We left Fernleigh today for the rooms in Bath. The cab waited while I went round the garden one last time, to the sundial and the yew walk and the bench where I learned to read. I had thought I should mind leaving the house most of all. But I find I hardly think of it. The workbox is on the table beside me as I write, and when I opened it this evening, and the smell of cedar and lavender came out, I was more nearly at home than I have been all week.
Text 2: Nani’s Tiffin, by Priya Mistry
An original contemporary memoir.
My grandmother lived in the same terraced house in Leicester for fifty-one years, and when she died last spring it took my mother, my aunt and me six weekends to empty it. We had expected sadness. We had not expected the sheer quantity of things. Under the stairs alone there were forty-three carrier bags, folded into triangles, and a biscuit tin full of rubber bands. The spare room held every school report, birthday card and swimming certificate that any of her eleven grandchildren had ever earned.
We were ruthless at first, because we had to be. A house clearance company took the furniture. The charity shop took the clothes. We filled two skips. And then, on the fifth weekend, my aunt opened a cupboard in the kitchen and found Nani’s steel tiffin carrier, the three-tiered lunch box she had brought from Gujarat in 1972 and used every day of her working life at the hosiery factory. My aunt sat down on the floor and cried as she had not cried at the funeral.
The house sold in a fortnight. A young couple bought it, and last month I drove past and saw that they had painted the front door white and taken out the little front wall where Nani used to sit on summer evenings and comment on the neighbours. I had to pull over. The tiffin carrier sits on a shelf in my flat now, and I am glad we kept it. But it is a souvenir, and the house was where she actually was: the dip in the stair carpet, the light through the kitchen window at four o’clock, the sound the back door made. You cannot put a house on a shelf. I would give the tiffin and everything in it to stand in that kitchen for one more afternoon.
‘Both texts show that objects matter more than places.’
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.