Ageing with grace
Text 1: The Halfway Bench, by Duncan Rennie
An original short story extract.
Every year on his birthday, since he was thirty, Reg Ormerod had climbed Hawk Pike. He had done it in snow, in fog, and once with a broken wrist. There was a cairn at the top, and on every birthday he added a stone to it from the beck at the bottom, carried up in his coat pocket. Fifty stones.
This year was the fifty-first. He was eighty-one. The stone was in his pocket, a flat grey one with a white vein through it, and he could feel its weight against his hip with every step, much heavier than it had any right to be.
They reached the bench at the halfway gate at eleven o’clock. Usually he did not even look at it. Today he sat down. His heart was hammering, and the path above, which he had walked fifty times, went up and up into the cloud as if someone had stretched it in the night.
Janet sat beside him. She did not say anything for a while, which he was grateful for. Then she said, carefully, “We could come back tomorrow.”
Reg looked at the path. He thought about tomorrow, and the day after, and next year. He thought about the cairn up there in the cloud, fifty stones, every one of them a year he had been strong enough. He took the stone out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers.
“No,” he said. He put the stone in her hand and closed her fingers round it. “You take it. Go on. Put it on for me. I’ll watch from here.”
She went. He sat on the bench with his flask and watched her small red jacket go up the zigzags, getting smaller, until the cloud lifted for a moment and he saw her at the top, by the cairn, both arms raised. He raised his own. It was, he decided, the best view he had ever had of that hill.
Text 2: The Keys, by Anthony Brightwell
An original contemporary memoir.
My mother gave up driving at eighty-seven, on a Tuesday, after she reversed the Micra into the bollard outside the chemist’s for the third time that month. Nobody was hurt. The bollard was not even dented. But she sat in the driver’s seat afterwards with both hands on the wheel for a long time, not moving, and when I got there, twenty minutes later, she was still sitting there.
She had driven for sixty-eight years. She had driven ambulances in the war, or so she said, and she had driven me to school, and once, when I was fourteen and had been sent home ill, at a speed that made a policeman in Cheadle drop his sandwich. Driving was not something she did. It was something she was.
“I’m not handing them over,” she said, when I asked. “Don’t you dare look at me like that. I’m perfectly capable.” And then, in a different voice, quieter, looking at the bollard: “I didn’t see it, love. It was right there and I didn’t see it.”
We sat in the car outside the chemist’s while the light went. People came and went with their prescriptions. After a while she unclipped the keys from her ring, slowly, one by one, the car key, the spare, the little brass one for the petrol cap, and put them in my hand without looking at me.
“One condition,” she said. “You drive me home the long way. Round by the reservoir.”
So I did. She sat in the passenger seat with her handbag on her knee and told me when to change gear, and that I was too close to the verge, and that I always had been, and I said yes, Mum, and no, Mum, and at the top of the reservoir road, where the water opens out below, she wound down her window and let the wind into the car and closed her eyes.
‘Both texts present ageing as something to be accepted with grace.’
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.