Belonging more than believed
Text 1: The Album, by Frances Wyatt
An original short story extract.
The Hargreaves family reunion was held every five years in the village hall at Low Bentham, and every five years somebody brought the album. It was a huge green leather thing with gold corners, and it came out after the buffet and went round the tables, and everybody bent over it and said things like, “There’s Uncle Clifford, look, he’s got the Hargreaves chin,” and, “Our Becky’s the spit of Grandma Nell at that age.”
Kofi had been a Hargreaves for nine years. He had been adopted at four, from a foster home in Leeds, and he did not have the Hargreaves chin, or the Hargreaves ears, which apparently stuck out, or the Hargreaves red hair. He was the only person in the hall who was Black. He was used to that. He was not used to the album.
He sat at the end of the trestle table with a paper plate of sausage rolls and watched it travel towards him, table by table, like weather.
When it reached him, his great-aunt Pat put it in front of him and pulled up a chair. She was eighty-six and smelled of lavender talc. She turned the heavy pages, past christenings and weddings and men in uniform, until she came to the end, where the newest photographs were, and she put her finger on one.
It was him. His school photo from Year Five, the one with the terrible haircut. Someone had pasted it in, carefully, with photo corners, between his cousin Josh in a football kit and the twins on a beach. Underneath, in old-fashioned handwriting, it said: Kofi, aged 9. Clever with his hands, like his grandad.
Kofi looked at it for a long time.
“Your grandad couldn’t sit still either,” said Aunt Pat. “Always fiddling with something. Took the wireless apart when he was six.” She looked at Kofi’s fingers, which were folding a paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares, and laughed. “See?”
Text 2: The Alto Row, by Gillian Marsh
An original short story extract.
Ruth had joined the Thursday choir because her sister said she needed to get out of the house, and because it was free, and because the leaflet said NO AUDITIONS. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. ALL WELCOME.
She had not sung since school, where a music teacher had once told her, kindly, that some people were listeners. For the first month she stood at the very end of the alto row in the church hall, holding her folder up in front of her face, and moved her lips, and let the sound of the others carry her along like a log in a river.
The women either side of her had been coming for years. Bernice, on her left, was a retired midwife with a voice like a cello. Jo, on her right, ran the fish counter at the supermarket. They talked across Ruth about their grandchildren and their knees, and passed her mints, and Ruth thought they were being polite.
At the dress rehearsal for the spring concert, the altos came in late on the second verse, all except one, and the conductor stopped the piano and said, “Thank you, the person who came in on time,” and Ruth realised, slowly, that she had been singing. Out loud. On her own, for a bar and a half.
Her face went scarlet. She lifted the folder.
Bernice reached across and lowered it again, firmly, with one finger. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “We’ve been following you for three weeks. You’re the only one of us who can count.”
Jo nodded. “We need you on the end,” she said. “You’re our anchor.”
Ruth stood there in the church hall with the folder at her side and the radiators clanking, and did not know what to say. So, when the piano started again, she sang.
‘In both texts, the characters belong more than they believe they do.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
40 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.