Home after leaving
Text 1: The Crossing, by Morag Keillor
An original novel extract.
The new jetty was concrete, with a steel ramp that rose and fell on hydraulic arms, and a sign in two languages welcoming visitors to Eilean Fada. Catriona stood at the rail of the ferry and looked for the old wooden pier, the one with the missing plank where her brother had once put his foot through and lost a shoe to the sea. It was gone. Where it had been there was a car park, and a hut selling coffee, and a minibus marked ISLAND TOURS.
Twenty-two years. She had told herself on the train from Glasgow, and again on the boat, that things would have changed, and she had believed it in the way one believes in weather in another country. She had not expected the coffee hut. She had not expected to mind.
Her aunt was waiting at the top of the ramp in the same blue anorak, or one exactly like it, smaller than Catriona remembered, as if the wind had been wearing her down. They held each other awkwardly, their bags in the way.
“The school’s a holiday cottage now,” her aunt said, in the car. “Germans, mostly. Very tidy.” She said it the way she might have reported a death.
They drove up the single-track road with the window down, and halfway up the hill the wind changed and brought in the smell of peat smoke from somebody’s chimney, sweet and bitter and brown. Catriona closed her eyes. She was nine years old, and her hands were cold, and her mother was calling her in for tea across a field that was still there, and would always be there, though the woman calling had been dead for eleven years.
She did not open her eyes until the car stopped.
Text 2: Fresh Paint, by Peter Ansell
An original short story extract.
They had painted his room while he was in hospital. Mum told him in the car, glancing at him in the mirror, her voice bright and careful as if she were carrying something full to the brim. “It’s called Coastal Mist,” she said. “It’s a sort of grey-green. Your dad did the ceiling.”
Jamie said that was nice. He had been away for five months. For the first six weeks he had not been able to turn his head, and he had lain looking at a ceiling tile with a brown water stain shaped like Africa, and he had thought about the wall above his own bed, with its football tickets, dozens of them, curling at the corners, which he had pinned up since he was seven and never taken down.
His dad carried him up the stairs because the wheelchair would not fit round the bend. The door was open. The room smelled of new carpet. The walls were smooth and pale and calm, like a room in a hotel, like a room in which nothing had ever happened. His posters were gone. The tickets were gone. The wall above the bed was white and perfect.
“We thought a fresh start,” Mum said.
Jamie nodded. He did not trust himself to do anything else. They left him to rest, and he lay on the new duvet and looked up at the blank white ceiling and felt the five months pressing down on him like a hand.
When it was dark, the door opened a crack and his sister came in without knocking, the way she always had. She was holding a shoebox. Inside, held together with an elastic band, were the tickets, every single one, unpinned and kept, a little torn at the corners where the pins had been.
“I didn’t let them throw them away,” she said.
‘Both texts show that home can never be the same once you have left.’
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.