Change, old and young
Text 1: The Chimney, by Albert Greenhalgh
An original short story extract.
They had put the crowd behind a metal barrier at the far end of the car park, three hundred people with flasks and cameras. Herbert Lund stood at the front, his hands on the cold rail. His grandson Kyle stood beside him with the video camera his parents had got him for Christmas, filming everything, the crowd, the sky, his own trainers.
The chimney of Brookfield Mill rose out of the rubble of the weaving sheds like the last tooth in an old mouth. Two hundred and twenty feet of soot-black brick, with the name BROOKFIELD in white letters down its side, and a single crow sitting on the very top, as if it had not been told.
“This is going to be mint,” said Kyle.
Herbert had started in the sheds at fourteen, in 1937, sweeping fluff from under the looms. He had been a tackler for thirty years, keeping two hundred looms running, and for forty-four years he had walked to work with that chimney in front of him, and walked home with it behind him, and on the day the mill closed he had stood exactly here and watched the last smoke go up and thin out and stop.
A man with a loudhailer began to count. The crowd counted with him. Kyle was counting too, loudly, his camera steady.
On zero there was a flat bang, much smaller than anyone expected, and for a moment nothing happened at all. Then the chimney sat down. That was the only way Herbert could describe it afterwards. It sat down into itself, quite slowly, almost politely, and a great brown cloud rolled out across the car park and over the barrier, and the crowd cheered.
Kyle lowered the camera. He looked at his grandad’s face and stopped grinning. “You all right, Grandad?”
Herbert wiped the dust from his eyes. “It went down straight,” he said. “Good brickwork, that.”
Text 2: Only What Fits, by Naomi Fleetwood
An original short story extract.
Gran had decided to throw everything away. That was the shock. I had come round with a roll of bubble wrap and a box of tissues, expecting to spend the weekend holding her hand while she wept over every teaspoon, and instead she met me at the door in rubber gloves with a roll of black bin bags and said, “Right. Kitchen first. Be ruthless.”
She was moving into Fernlea on Monday. One room, with a window onto the garden and a button by the bed to press if she fell. She had chosen it herself, after the second fall, before anyone could choose it for her.
She went through the cupboards like a customs officer. The fondue set: bin. The egg cups shaped like chickens: charity. Thirty years of margarine tubs, washed and stacked inside each other: bin, bin, bin. I kept opening drawers and finding things I remembered, the cake tin with the Highland cattle, the tea towel from Whitby, and she kept taking them out of my hands.
“You can’t take a house with you, pet,” she said. “Only what fits in a room.”
Then I found the teapot. It was brown and round, with a chip out of the spout, and when I was small she had made me milky tea in it every Saturday and let me pour, and when I spilled it, which was always, she said that was how you knew it was a good pot. I had not thought about it for years. I stood in the kitchen holding it and found that I could not see properly.
Gran stopped. She peeled off her gloves and looked at me for a long moment, and then at the teapot.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. “Wrap it up. You’ll be wanting to pour from it yourself, one day.”
She went back to the cupboards. But I heard her, a minute later, humming.
‘Both texts suggest that change is harder for the old than for the young.’
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.