Ambition as a force
Text 1: The Butcher’s Bike, by Keith Arnside
An original short story extract.
The butcher’s bike weighed more than Dennis did, or felt as if it did, with its iron frame and its great square basket on the front and the brass plate that said CARVER: QUALITY MEATS rattling under the crossbar. Mr Carver had ridden it himself before the war. It had one gear.
Dennis rode it as if it were made of air.
Every Saturday he took the orders round Hollins Brow, and every Saturday he timed himself up the long hill from the canal bridge to the chapel with his uncle’s stopwatch, his feet hard on the pedals, the basket of chops and mince swinging, his breath tearing in and out of him. On his bedroom wall was a picture cut from a magazine: a cyclist in a yellow jersey on a mountain road somewhere in France, his face twisted with pain or joy, it was hard to say which. Dennis thought it was both. He thought that was the point.
Last week he had done the hill in four minutes and eight seconds. This week he did it in three fifty-nine, and he stood on the pedals at the chapel gate and shouted, and a woman with a pram stared at him, and he did not care.
Mrs Walsh’s sausages, when he delivered them, had shifted in the basket. She complained to Mr Carver. Mr Carver told Dennis, in a voice that could be heard in the street, that he was paid to deliver meat and not to win races in France.
Then, when the shop was empty, he took a pencil from behind his ear and asked, gruffly, without looking up from the block, “What was it, then? Up the Brow?”
“Three fifty-nine,” said Dennis.
Mr Carver nodded slowly, and wrote it on the wall by the till, under the price of brisket, where it stayed for years.
Text 2: Copy Girl, by Sandra Pellow
An original twentieth-century memoir.
I joined the Evening Post in 1963 as a copy girl, which meant that I made the tea. I made it forty times a day, in a brown enamel pot the size of a bucket, for a newsroom of twenty-three men who took it in twenty-three different ways and expected me to remember. I did remember. I remembered everything. That was my secret.
Because what I really wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything, was to be one of them: to sit at one of those scarred desks with a typewriter and a telephone and a deadline, and to write the words that people would read on the bus home. Every time I carried the tray through the newsroom I listened. I learned how a story began, and what a splash was, and why you never, ever, put the most interesting fact in the third paragraph.
At night, at the kitchen table, I wrote stories of my own. A fire at the bus depot. A woman of ninety who still swam in the lido. I typed them on my brother’s old portable with the sticking e and left them, every Friday, in the news editor’s tray.
For eleven weeks nothing happened. Then, one Monday, Mr Fairbrother called me over. He had my lido story in his hand and a red pencil behind his ear, and he had crossed out almost all of it.
“Too long,” he said. “Too many adjectives. And you buried the best bit.” He tapped a line near the bottom. “She swims every day because her husband proposed to her in that pool. That’s your first sentence.”
It ran the next day on page eleven, two paragraphs, no name, between an advert for corsets and the tide tables. I bought six copies. I have one still, yellow as a tea stain, in a frame above my desk.
‘Both texts present ambition as a positive force.’
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.