Hope in hard times
Text 1: The Stand, by Joseph Callaghan
An original novel extract.
The stand was at six, at the gate of Number Four Dock, and by a quarter to there were three hundred men pressed against the railings in the dark, caps pulled down, breath going up like smoke. Michael Rourke was near the front. He had been near the front for nine days.
His boots were polished. Every night, at the kitchen table, he blacked them and brushed them until they shone, though the soles were thin as paper and Kathleen had put cardboard in them twice. A man who looked ready for work, he said, was a man the foreman would see. Kathleen said nothing.
At six the foreman came out on to the step above the crowd with his list and his bowler hat, and the men surged, and the railings creaked. He did not call names. He pointed. You. You. You, the big lad. Each time his finger moved, the crowd breathed in, and each time it settled on someone else, three hundred men breathed out.
Michael stood very straight. He thought of the rent, and of the two little ones, and of the cardboard in his boots. He thought: me, me, look at me. The finger came round towards him and hung there a moment, so close that the man beside him flinched. Then it moved on.
Twenty-two men went through the gate. The rest of them stood for a minute longer, as if the foreman might come back, and then began to drift away in twos and threes.
Michael walked home along the river with his hands in his pockets. When Kathleen looked up from the stove, he shook his head, and then, before she could speak, he said, “Tomorrow.” He said it as if it were a fact, like the tide.
That night he sat at the table and blacked his boots.
Text 2: Upstairs, by Linnea Bright
An original contemporary memoir.
After the operation I spent eight weeks on the orthopaedic ward, and for the first five of them I could not get out of bed. I could turn my head. That was all. From where I lay I could see a square of grey sky, a drainpipe, and a section of old brick wall where one brick was missing, leaving a small dark gap like a lost tooth.
On the ninth day, a sparrow went into the gap with a piece of straw.
I watched it the way other patients watched the television. There were two of them, I decided, though I could never tell them apart, and they worked from dawn until the light went: straw, feathers, a long white thread that might have come from a nurse’s uniform. The nurses got used to me asking. “Any news from upstairs?” the night sister would say, adjusting my drip, and I would tell her.
There were bad days. There was a week in the middle when a fever came and the window went far away, and I did not care about the sparrows or anything else. When it broke, the first thing I did was look for the gap. They were still going in and out, faster now, and not with straw. With food.
In the sixth week a physiotherapist called Dev got me on to my feet, and every day after that I walked a little further: to the end of the bed, to the chair, to the sink. I did not tell him what I was walking towards.
On the last morning before I went home, I reached the window. I stood with my forehead against the cold glass, shaking, with Dev’s hand under my elbow, and looked down at the gap in the wall just as a small brown bird, round as a pebble, launched itself out of it, dropped alarmingly, and then, at the last moment, flew.
‘Both texts suggest that hope helps people endure hard times.’
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.