Responsibility as burden
Text 1: Caring for Biscuit, by Amelia Tranter
An original short story extract.
Biscuit came home for the Easter holidays in his cage on the back seat of Mum’s car, with a bag of sawdust, a bag of food and a laminated sheet from Mrs Pollard headed CARING FOR BISCUIT, which Noah read four times before they reached the end of the road. He had been chosen out of the whole of Class 5.
For four days it was easy. Noah changed the water every morning and checked the food every night and let Biscuit run round the bathroom floor while he sat with his back against the door. He wrote everything down in the notebook Mrs Pollard had provided, in his best handwriting: Monday: ate well, ran on wheel 40 mins. Tuesday: very lively.
On the fifth morning Biscuit did not come out of his nest.
Noah lifted the bedding. The hamster was curled in a tight ball, breathing fast, and the food in his bowl had not been touched. When Noah held a sunflower seed in front of his nose, Biscuit turned his head away.
Noah felt his stomach drop through the floor. He thought of Mrs Pollard’s face. He thought of the whole of Class 5 on the first day back, gathered round the empty cage. He thought, worst of all, of Biscuit, small and warm and frightened, and of the fact that there was nobody else in the world, at that moment, who was responsible for him.
He went downstairs and found the vet’s number himself, and when Mum came in from the garden he was already on the phone, holding his money box, explaining in a high, careful voice that it was an emergency.
It was his teeth. They had grown too long, the vet said, and it was not anybody’s fault, and it was a good thing someone had noticed so quickly. She trimmed them while Noah held Biscuit wrapped in a towel. That evening Noah wrote in the notebook, in his best handwriting: Friday: teeth. Saved.
Text 2: The Buttons, by Siobhan Mackie
An original contemporary memoir.
My father had his stroke in the October of my first year of sixth form, and by Christmas I knew how to do things that most sixteen-year-olds never have to think about. I knew how to help a grown man out of a chair without hurting his bad arm. I knew the names of seven different tablets. I knew how to cut up his food so that it looked as though I had not, so that he would not have to see it.
My mother worked nights at the sorting office. So the mornings were mine. I got up at six, made his tea, filled the plastic pill box with its little doors marked M T W T F S S, and then I went to school and sat in English and tried to care about the Brontës.
My friends were kind for a while, and then they were busy. They went to parties I could not go to and talked about them on Mondays in a language I no longer spoke. I did not blame them. Some days I did.
What I have never told anyone is that there were good mornings too. There was the morning he managed the buttons on his own shirt for the first time, all six, and held his arms out like a magician at the end. There was the morning I burned the toast and he said, slowly, because his words still came slowly then, “Your mother… does it… better,” and we laughed until he had to hold on to the table.
I was tired for two years. I was angry for some of them. I did my exams on four hours’ sleep and got grades that were fine and not what they might have been. But when people say young carers have their childhoods taken away, I want to tell them about the buttons. I want to tell them that I was there.
‘In both texts, responsibility is presented as a burden.’
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.