Chosen loneliness
Text 1: Greensleeves in January, by Terence Holloway
An original short story extract.
Nobody buys ice cream in January. Len Bostock knew that better than anyone, having sold it for thirty-one years, and still, every Sunday afternoon, he drove the van round the Meadowbank estate with the chimes on.
The tune was Greensleeves, slightly out of tune where the tape had stretched. It went ahead of him down the empty crescents, past the boarded-up community centre and the swings with their seats wound up over the bar, and it came back off the walls of the flats thin and strange, as if someone else were playing it in another street.
Pauline had chosen it. She had said that every other van played the same three jingles, and that theirs should be different, something with a bit of sadness in it, so that people would remember. For twenty-eight summers she had sat in the hatch in her white coat, counting change into small sticky hands and calling every child love.
His daughter rang on Sunday mornings to tell him to sell the van. “You’re rattling round in that thing like a pea in a tin, Dad,” she said. “Come and live near us. Get out a bit. Meet people.” Len said he would think about it. He said that every week.
At the top of Cowper Road a curtain moved, and a small face appeared at a downstairs window, pressed to the glass. Len slowed. The child waved. A woman’s arm came and lifted it away, and the curtain fell back, and Len drove on.
He parked by the empty playground as the light went, and turned the engine off but left the chimes running. He sat in Pauline’s seat in the hatch with the cold coming in, and listened to the tune go out across the estate and come back to him, over and over, and he did not want to be anywhere else.
Text 2: One Bar, by Seren Probert
An original short story extract.
There was one bar of signal on the whole farm, and it lived at the top of Bryn Du, beside the cairn, if you held your phone above your head and faced north-east towards Shrewsbury. Mali had found it on the third day. By the third week she had worn a path to it through the bracken.
She climbed every evening after tea, forty minutes up, twenty down, with the sheep watching her from the slope like a row of old women at a funeral. At the top she stood on the cairn with her arm in the air, the wind trying to take the phone out of her hand, and waited for the messages to come in.
In September there had been dozens. Where are u. Miss u. Cardiff is DEAD without u. Photos of chips. In October there were fewer. By November the group chat was mostly about a party she had not been to, and people she did not know, and jokes that needed explaining, and when she asked, nobody explained.
Her mother said she should try the young farmers’ club in Llanidloes. Her father said the Prices at Pant-y-Ffynnon had a daughter about her age. Mali said she was fine. She liked the walk, she said, which was true.
Tonight the phone found its bar and buzzed once. A message from Ffion: a photo of the same party, and a thumbs-up, and nothing else. Mali looked at it for a long time. She began to type, and stopped.
Below her the valley was filling up with darkness like a bowl filling with water. One by one the lights of the scattered farms came on, miles apart, each one alone in its own field. She put the phone in her pocket. She sat down on the cold stones of the cairn with her knees pulled up and watched the lights, and did not climb down until she could no longer see the path.
‘Both writers suggest that loneliness is something the characters partly choose.’
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.