Responsibility and growing up
Text 1: Power Cut, by Lesley Ormond
An original short story extract.
The lights went at half past seven, all down the street at once, with a soft clunk like a door closing in another room. Mam had said they might. It was on the list taped to the fridge, in Dad’s capitals: TUESDAY, 7 TO 10. But Dad was on the rigs and Mam was on nights at the infirmary, and so it was Kirsty, who was twelve, who stood in the black kitchen with the baby on her hip and her brother Stephen holding the back of her jumper in his fist.
“I don’t like it,” Stephen said.
“It’s just dark,” said Kirsty. “Dark’s nothing.” She said it in Mam’s voice. She had not known she had Mam’s voice until that moment.
She found the candles in the drawer by feel, and the matches, and lit three and stood them in saucers on the table. The kitchen came back, smaller and yellower, with shadows that leaned and swung whenever anybody moved. The baby stopped grizzling and stared at the flames with his mouth open.
She made toast under the gas grill because the gas still worked. She cut it into soldiers for Stephen, although he was eight and would normally have called that babyish, and he ate every one without a word. She read them the whole of the chapter about the trolls, doing all the voices, while the candles burned down and the wax ran over the saucers and set in white pools.
At ten the lights came back with a buzz, and everything was suddenly too bright and too ordinary. Stephen was asleep on the settee. The baby was asleep on her chest. Kirsty sat very still so as not to wake him, and looked at the clock, and found that she was crying, and could not have said why.
Text 2: The Round, by Neil Fenwick
An original short story extract.
Callum took over Uncle Pete’s paper round the week after the funeral, because nobody else would and because his mother said Pete would have hated the thought of folk going without. It was fourteen miles of lanes on a bike with a basket, six mornings a week, starting at half past five in the dark. In January the puddles had ice on them like the skin on custard.
Most of the houses he never saw anyone at. A letterbox, a dog barking behind a door, a light upstairs. But at the last cottage before the ford, Mrs Ridley was always at the window. She was ninety-one and had not been out of the house since her hip, and she waved to him every morning, a small white hand behind the net curtain, and he waved back, and that was the whole of it.
Pete had written instructions for the round on the back of a calendar page, in pencil, and against Mrs Ridley’s name he had put: PAPER THROUGH DOOR NOT BOX. CHECK SHE WAVES.
Callum had thought it was a joke.
On the second Tuesday in February she did not wave. The curtain was still. Yesterday’s milk was on the step with a crust of frost on the foil.
He stood astride the bike in the lane with his breath smoking. He was fifteen. He could ride on. He was already late, and it was nothing to do with him, and there would be somebody, surely, a daughter or a nurse, whose job it was.
He laid the bike down in the frozen grass. He went up the path and knocked, and then knocked louder, and then he crouched and pushed open the letterbox and called her name into the dark hall, and heard, from somewhere at the back of the house, very faint, an answer.
‘Both texts suggest that responsibility makes the characters grow up too quickly.’
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.