Change and fear
Text 1: Opening Day, by Raj Bhattal
An original short story extract.
The Kwiksave opened at nine o’clock on a Monday, with balloons tied to the trolleys and a man from the radio handing out free tins of beans. By ten past nine Mr Bhalla had sold one newspaper, to Mrs Corrigan, who bought the Mirror from him every day and who apologised as she paid, as if the balloons were somehow her fault.
His son Amrit, who was twelve and should have been at school, sat on the crate of lemonade behind the counter and watched his father watching the door. Mr Bhalla had dusted the shelves twice already. He had straightened the tins of peas so that every label faced the same way, like soldiers. Every time the bell above the door gave its small electric shiver, which was not often, he stood up a little straighter.
At eleven Amrit’s mother came down from the flat upstairs with two cups of tea and a notebook. She did not look at the door. She looked at the shelves, and then at the notebook, and then at her husband.
“They close at six,” she said.
“So?”
“So we stay open until ten. Milk, bread, cigarettes, nappies. Everything people forget.” She tapped the notebook with her pen. “Nobody remembers nappies at nine in the morning.”
Mr Bhalla looked at her for a long moment, and Amrit saw something happen to his face, a loosening, as though he had been holding it very tightly in place all morning and had only now noticed. He picked up a tin of peas and turned it round, so the label faced the wrong way. Then he laughed.
Outside, across the road, a balloon had come loose from the Kwiksave trolleys and was rising slowly over the rooftops, getting smaller, and none of them watched it go.
Text 2: Mirror, Signal, by Tessa Fairclough
An original short story extract.
My mother learned to drive the year she turned forty-five, the year my father moved into a flat above a carpet showroom in Leek and took the car with him. For nineteen years she had sat in the passenger seat holding the map upside down while he sighed. Now she had an instructor called Gary, an L-plate held on with magnets, and a look on her face I had never seen before, which was something like hunger.
I was fifteen, and I was embarrassed by all of it. I hated the magnets. I hated Gary’s little red Fiesta pulling up outside our house on Tuesday evenings and the neighbours twitching their nets. Most of all I hated the way she came back from each lesson pink and talkative, telling me about roundabouts as if they were countries she had discovered.
The week before her test, she asked me to sit in the back while she practised with Gary. I said no. Then I said yes, because she looked at me in a way that made no seem impossible.
We went out on the ring road at dusk. I sat behind her and watched her hands, ten to two on the wheel, the knuckles pale. At the big roundabout by the bypass she indicated, checked her mirror, and went, and I heard her breathe out through her teeth, a long hiss, as if she had been holding that breath since I was born.
“That,” said Gary, “was perfect.”
She did not say anything. In the mirror I could see her eyes, and she was smiling, and she was a stranger, and I found to my surprise that I did not mind.
‘In both texts, change is presented as something to be feared.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
120 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3 Section A: Reading meaning and effects – skills, covering 3.3.2 Analyse and compare use of language, 3.3.3 Draw inferences and justify with evidence, 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts, and 3.3.7 Evaluate form and structure. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.