Kindness to giver and receiver
Text 1: The Tally Book, by Nell Ashurst
An original short story extract.
The Duffys came in on Fridays, the two eldest, Mary and Joe, with their mother’s list written on the back of a rent card in pencil. It was always the same list. Half a pound of margarine. A small loaf. Two ounces of tea. A quarter of the cheapest bacon, the ends. Mrs Lamb could have filled it with her eyes shut.
She did not fill it with her eyes shut. She filled it with great care, behind the high counter where the children could not see her hands, and every week the margarine weighed a little over the half pound, and the bacon ends were somehow not ends at all, and an orange appeared at the bottom of the bag, or a twist of sugar.
The cost went into the tally book under the Duffys’ name, in her neat brown hand, and at the end of every month, when Mr Duffy had still not found work at the yard, she drew a line through it with a ruler and turned the page.
Her husband, before he died, had called it bad business. “You’ll ruin us, Edith,” he used to say. “Soft as butter.” She had never argued. She had simply gone on doing it.
This Friday, when she handed the bag across, Mary looked inside and saw the orange and looked up at her. Mary was nine. She did not say anything. But she put one hand flat on the counter for a moment, the way you might touch a friend’s arm, and then she and Joe went out with the bag held between them.
Mrs Lamb stood in the empty shop with the bell still ringing over the door. Her knees ached and the till was nearly empty and the rent was due. And she found, as she found every Friday, that she was smiling, and that the shop seemed warmer, and that there was nowhere in the world she would rather be.
Text 2: Unexpected Item, by Ryan Pemberton
An original short story extract.
The old man at the self-service till had been fighting the machine for some time before Ryan noticed him. Unexpected item in bagging area, the machine said, in its bright, unbothered voice. Please remove item. Unexpected item in bagging area.
The man was perhaps eighty, in a tweed cap and a coat that was too big for him, and he had a basket with four things in it: a tin of soup, a packet of custard creams, a pint of milk and a single bread roll. He kept picking up the milk and putting it down again, as if the machine might change its mind. Behind him the queue was growing. Someone sighed, loudly.
Ryan was meant to be meeting Kai and the others at the skate park at four. It was ten to. He could have been through the next till in thirty seconds.
Instead he heard himself say, “Do you want a hand?”
The man looked at him with real relief. “My wife did all this,” he said. “I’ve never got the hang of it.” Ryan scanned the soup and the biscuits and the milk, and found the roll on the screen under Bakery, and showed him where to put his card. It took about a minute.
“She’s been gone a year in June,” the man said, while the receipt printed. “Forty-nine years, and I never once did the shopping. You don’t think about it, do you? Who does the shopping.” He folded the receipt very carefully and put it in his wallet, as if it were important.
Ryan walked to the skate park late. Kai asked where he had been and he said nowhere. He did not know how to explain the feeling, which was odd and light and slightly embarrassing, as if he had been given something rather than given it away. He thought about the single bread roll for the rest of the afternoon, and every time he did, he felt it again.
‘Both texts suggest that kindness benefits the giver as much as the receiver.’
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.