The weight of freedom
Text 1: Monday, by Joan Ravensworth
An original short story extract.
On her first Monday of freedom Edna Shaw woke at twenty to six, as she had woken every working morning for forty-one years, and lay in the dark waiting for the alarm before she remembered that she had given the alarm clock to her niece.
There was no bus to catch. There was no clocking-on card with her name typed on it in purple, no Mr Haworth on the gate saying good morning, no smell of warm sugar rolling out of the ovens of Crosby’s Biscuits and settling over the whole of the east side like a blanket. On Friday they had given her a carriage clock and a card signed by eighty people, and she had walked out through the gate with the girls cheering, and she had felt, for the length of the street, like a bird let out of a box.
Now the day stood in front of her, enormous and empty, and she did not know where to put her hands.
She made tea. She drank it standing at the window. She washed the cup and dried it and put it away and took it out again. At nine o’clock, which was when she would have had her first break, she found that she had put her coat on without deciding to.
She walked to the park. There was nobody there but a man with a terrier and two pigeons arguing over a crust. Edna sat on a bench. After a while, feeling foolish and then not caring, she unlaced her shoes, peeled off her stockings, and put her bare feet on the wet grass. It was very cold. It was the first time in forty-one years that she had felt grass at nine o’clock on a Monday, and she sat there, frightened and laughing, until her toes went numb.
Text 2: Dawn Ride, by Kezia Amankwah
An original short story extract.
I left a note on the kitchen table saying GONE FOR A RIDE BACK LATER and wheeled my bike out of the garage at ten past four, while the whole street was asleep. Nobody knew where I was. That was the point. For sixteen years somebody had always known where I was, and I wanted, just once, to be a dot on no one’s map.
The roads were empty and grey. I rode down the middle of them, because I could, past the shut garage and the dark school and out between the hedges, where the fields were breathing mist. The air was so cold it tasted metallic. By the time the sky began to go pink behind me I was singing, loudly and badly, with nobody to hear.
It was thirty-one miles to the coast. My legs burned after twenty, and after twenty-five I stopped singing. After thirty I came over the last hill and there it was, the sea, flat and silver and so much larger than I remembered from car windows that I had to get off and stand by the bike, holding the handlebars as if it might bolt.
I sat on the shingle and ate the squashed sandwich I had made in the dark. A gull watched me. The tide was going out, and the beach went on getting bigger, and I realised that I did not know the time of the next train, or whether I had enough money for it, or whether my legs would carry me home.
My phone had nine missed calls. I looked at them for a long time. Then I turned it face down on the stones, just for ten more minutes, and watched the sea go on doing what it liked.
‘In both texts, freedom turns out to be less comfortable than the characters expected.’
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.