Pride that helps and harms
Text 1: Slates, by Gareth Pryce
An original short story extract.
The leak was over the back bedroom, where the twins slept, and by the third night of rain there were two saucepans and a mixing bowl on the lino catching it, each one ringing a different note. Dad listened to them from the landing with his jaw set. It was six weeks since the pit had shut. He had not missed a single morning of shaving.
On Saturday he went up. He had no proper ladder, only the old wooden one from the shed with a rung held together by wire, and he roped it to the drainpipe and climbed with a bag of slates over his shoulder and a hammer through his belt. Gwyn, who was eleven, was told to hold the bottom and not let go for anything.
Mr Bevan from number four came out to watch, and then to talk, and then to offer. “I’ve got an extension ladder in the garage, Idris. Aluminium. Won’t take a minute.”
“I’m all right,” said Dad from the roof.
“Our Alun could come up with you. He’s done roofs.”
“I said I’m all right.”
Gwyn felt the ladder shiver in his hands. He looked up at his father, a dark shape crouched against the grey sky, one knee on the wet slates, prising out the cracked one with fingers that had dug coal for twenty years and had never, as far as Gwyn knew, been told what to do by anyone in this street. Mr Bevan stood a minute longer, then went back indoors.
It took Dad until dark. When he came down his hands were bleeding at the knuckles and his trousers were soaked to the thigh, and he walked past Gwyn without a word. But that night the saucepans were silent, and in the morning, before anyone else was up, Gwyn heard him go out to number four, and knock, and say something low at the door.
Text 2: Best Coat, by Grace Ellery
An original twentieth-century memoir.
My mother collected her nursing certificate on a Thursday in November, and she walked the three miles to the hospital in her best coat, the navy one with the velvet collar that she kept in a dry-cleaner’s bag on the back of the bedroom door. It was raining. Mr Okafor from downstairs offered her a lift in his taxi, as he did every time it rained, and she thanked him and said she preferred to walk.
I was nine, and I walked with her, and I could not understand it. My shoes were letting in water. Her good shoes, the black patent ones, were darkening at the toes. “Why didn’t we go with Mr Okafor?” I asked, and she said, “Because I want to remember walking there,” and held my hand tighter.
She had come from Kingston in 1958 to train, and for the first two years she had been given the jobs nobody else wanted: the bedpans, the sluice room, the night shifts on the long-stay ward. A ward sister had once told her, in front of the patients, that she would never be more than an auxiliary. My mother had not argued. She had written the woman’s words down that evening in the back of her Bible, and every night for five years she had read them before she went to sleep.
At the hospital, they called the names in alphabetical order. When they reached hers she walked to the front with her wet hem and her ruined shoes, and she took the certificate in both hands, and she did not smile. She looked at it for a long moment, as if checking the spelling. Then she turned and looked out across the hall, and found the ward sister in the third row, and nodded to her once, very politely.
‘Both texts show pride as something that both strengthens and harms the characters.’
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.