Guilt and wrongdoing
Text 1: Stoney Lane, by Rosalind Kerrigan
An original short story extract.
The fox came out of the hedge at the bottom of Stoney Lane, low and quick, a russet streak in the headlights, and Clare felt the thump through the steering wheel before she had even had time to brake.
She stopped. In the mirror, in the red glow of her brake lights, she saw it get up. It stood for a moment on three legs, holding the fourth off the ground, and looked back at the car, and then it limped into the hedge on the other side and was gone.
The clock on the dashboard said 7.12. Ellie’s concert started at half past. Ellie had a solo, eight bars on the recorder in the middle of the second song, and had practised it until the whole family could hum it, and had made Clare promise, twice, that she would be in the front row.
Clare sat with her hands on the wheel and the engine running. There was nothing she could do. It had walked away. It was a wild animal; she had no blanket, no box, no idea. She told herself all of this very firmly, and then she put the car into gear and drove on.
She was in the front row. Ellie played her eight bars without a single wrong note and looked straight at her at the end, glowing, and Clare smiled and clapped and could not afterwards have hummed one note of it. All through the second half she was looking at the dark hedge, and the raised paw, and the long look back.
At seven the next morning, before anyone else was up, she drove back to Stoney Lane in her dressing gown and walked up and down the verge in the rain for half an hour, parting the nettles with a stick. She found nothing. Not a trace.
She told herself that was good news. She went on telling herself that for a long time.
Text 2: Sixpence, by Desmond Faraday
An original twentieth-century memoir.
I was eight when I stole from God. It was a sixpence, a small silver one, worn almost smooth, and it was lying on top of the pile in the collection plate at St Brendan’s when the plate came down our pew. I was supposed to pass it to my father. Instead, under cover of the organ, I took the sixpence and passed the plate along with the other coins chinking, and nobody saw, and my heart nearly came out through my Sunday jumper.
I spent it on sherbet lemons at Mrs Gilligan’s on the way home. They were the best sweets I have ever eaten and I could not enjoy a single one.
For the next three weeks I knew, with complete certainty, that I was going to be struck down. I lay awake listening for it. When thunder rolled over the town one night in March I hid under the bed with my rosary and promised God, in a whisper, that I would give him back a hundred sixpences. I could not look at the statue of the Virgin in the side chapel, because her painted eyes followed me, and they were sad.
In the end I went to confession. I knelt in the dark box and told Father Doyle everything, the sixpence, the plate, the sherbet lemons, the thunder, in one long breath, and then waited for the grille to burst into flames.
There was a silence. Then a sound that I did not recognise at first, a sort of wheeze, and I realised that Father Doyle was laughing, very quietly, behind his hand.
He gave me three Hail Marys and told me to put a sixpence back when I could. I put one in every Sunday for a year. I suspect, if I am honest, that I am still paying.
‘In both texts, the characters’ guilt is greater than their wrongdoing.’
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.