Pride as weakness

Text 1: Bespoke, by Isaac Lehrer

An original short story extract.

The young man from Halcyon Developments came on a Tuesday with a folder under his arm and a smile he had clearly practised. Abel Kaminski was at the cutting table, chalking a pattern on a length of navy worsted, and did not look up.

“Mr Kaminski. I won’t keep you. You’ll have had our letters.”

Abel had had their letters. Four of them, each offering a little more than the last for the narrow shop on Cheetham Hill Road where he had made suits for fifty-one years. Every other shop in the row had sold, and in the spring the whole terrace would come down for flats with balconies. Only Kaminski & Son, Bespoke Tailoring, remained, with a dummy in the window wearing a three-piece suit in a style nobody had asked for in decades. There had been no son for many years.

The young man named a figure. It was a great deal of money. Abel went on chalking.

“May I?” he said at last, and came round the table with his tape measure, and before the young man could answer, he had measured the width of his shoulders, the length of his arm, the drop from the collar to the waist.

“Your jacket,” he said, “is two centimetres too long in the sleeve and it pulls across the back when you reach for your folder. Off the peg. Machine stitched. The lapels are glued.” He rolled up the tape. “You will want something better, when you are rich from building flats. Come to me. I will still be here.”

The young man laughed uncertainly and left the folder on the counter. When the door had shut behind him, Abel sat down on the stool by the cutting table. The shop was very quiet. He had not had a customer since February. He looked at the folder for a long time, and then he moved it, carefully, to one side, and picked up his chalk.

Text 2: Highly Commended, by Holly Brennan

An original contemporary memoir.

I came second in the county schools art prize when I was fifteen, and I did not go to collect it.

The painting was of my grandmother’s hands, peeling potatoes at the sink, and I had worked on it every evening for two months. I knew it was the best thing I had ever done. I also knew, with the complete certainty of fifteen, that it was the best thing anyone in the county had done, and when the letter came saying Highly Commended, Second Prize, I read it twice in the hall and then went upstairs and lay on my bed.

First prize had gone to a boy from the grammar school for a large painting of a lighthouse. I had seen it in the paper. It was competent and blue and completely empty, and I hated it with a pure, burning hatred I have rarely felt for anything since.

The ceremony was on a Saturday at the town hall. My mother said I should go. My art teacher rang and said I should go. I said I had a headache, and then that I had homework, and then, finally, that I did not see the point of standing on a stage to be told I was not good enough.

My grandmother went instead. I did not know she was going. She put on her good coat and her church hat and took two buses into town, and when they called my name and nobody stood up, she stood up, a small woman of seventy-eight with arthritis in both knees, and walked to the front and took my certificate.

She brought it home in a carrier bag and put it on the kitchen table without a word. It was slightly creased at one corner. I have it still, in a frame, beside the painting of her hands, which she never once mentioned seeing, and which I have never, in thirty years, been able to sell.

‘Both texts present pride as a weakness.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters are proud of
• explain how far their pride harms them
• compare how the writers present pride

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.