Courage in front of others
Text 1: The Rec, by Tamsin Ollerenshaw
An original short story extract.
Sam was on the roundabout when the dog came across the rec, and Leah, on the bench with her phone, heard it before she saw it: not a bark but a low, steady sound, like an engine left running.
It was a big dog, grey and heavy in the shoulders, with no lead and no collar that she could see, and it was making for the roundabout in a straight line, the way water runs downhill. Sam was six. He had stopped pushing with his foot and sat very still on the painted metal, turning slowly, and every time he came round his face was whiter.
She did not think. Afterwards people would ask what had been going through her head, and she could not tell them, because there had been nothing in it at all except a kind of white noise. She was simply there, between the dog and the roundabout, with her school bag held out in front of her like a shield, shouting a word that was not really a word.
The dog took the bag. Then it took her forearm, through her blazer, and the pain was not sharp, as she had expected, but huge and dull, like a door slammed on it. She gripped the roundabout rail with her other hand and did not fall down. She would remember that afterwards: that she did not fall down.
Then a man was running across the grass, shouting, “Bruno! Leave!” and the dog let go and trotted to him as if nothing had happened.
He was red-faced and out of breath and bigger than her dad. “He’s never done that,” he said. “Never. What did you do to him?”
Leah opened her mouth. There were a hundred things she could have said. Her blood was soaking into her sleeve and Sam was crying behind her and the man was waiting, and what came out, small and polite, was “Sorry.”
She hated herself for it all the way home.
Text 2: Twenty-Two Steps, by Kwame Ashdown
An original short story extract.
The video was forty-one seconds long. I knew, because I had watched it more times than anyone the way you keep picking at a scab. In it I am singing alone in a practice room, eyes shut, giving everything to a song I believed nobody would ever hear. Someone had filmed it through the door. By teatime it had gone round the whole of Year 10, with a row of crying-laughing faces underneath.
I stayed off for three days. Mum let me, which was how I knew it was bad. On the fourth morning she stood in my bedroom doorway and said nothing at all, and that was worse than anything she could have said, so I got up.
Nobody looks at you on the bus. Nobody looks at you in registration. It is in the canteen, with three hundred people facing each other across long tables, that you find out what you have become.
I queued. I paid for a cheese roll I knew I would not eat. Then I turned round with my tray and the noise did a strange thing: it did not stop, exactly, but it dipped, the way a crowd dips when the ball goes near the goal. Somewhere to my left a boy hummed the first line of the song, badly, and a whole table laughed.
My usual table was at the far end, by the window. It was twenty-two steps away. I walked them now with my eyes on the window and my tray held very level, as though it were full to the brim with something that would spill.
Zara and Chloe were there. They looked up. For a moment nobody moved.
I put the tray down. I sat. Then, because my hands were shaking, I picked up the cheese roll and took a bite, and chewed, and swallowed, in front of all of them.
“You’ve got a good voice, actually,” said Chloe, not quietly.
Behind me, the humming stopped.
‘In both texts, facing other people takes more courage than facing danger.’
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.