Revenge and its cost
Text 1: Valve Caps, by Ewan Macleish
An original short story extract.
Robbie did it at two in the morning, in his pyjamas and his school shoes, pocketing each valve cap so that he would not drop it in the dark. The air came out of the first tyre with a long, outraged hiss that he was sure would wake the whole of Laburnum Close, and he crouched behind the van with his heart slamming, but no lights came on.
The van belonged to Darren Shaw’s dad. Darren Shaw had spent the whole of Year Eight making Robbie’s life a misery: the bag tipped into the canal, the name, the photo passed round on everyone’s phones. Robbie had imagined revenge in a hundred forms. This was the one he could actually do.
He went back to bed grinning.
It was raining when he looked out. Mr Shaw was kneeling on the wet pavement beside the van in his work boots, working a foot pump, his face red, his breath coming in grunts. The van said SHAW & SON BUILDERS on the side. It was ten to seven. Robbie had heard that Mr Shaw had a job on in Hexham that started at seven.
And Darren was there. Darren, with his hood up, holding the torch, while his dad swore at the pump, and then at Darren, a stream of it, loud enough to carry through Robbie’s window. Darren did not answer back. He stood very still with the torch and took it. He looked as if he were used to it.
Robbie let the curtain fall. The four little valve caps were on his bedside table, in a neat row, where he had put them so that he could look at them in the morning and feel good.
He did not feel good. He sat on the edge of the bed and found that he could not stop seeing Darren’s face under the hood, and that he would have given anything to be able to put the air back.
Text 2: Prentice’s, by Margery Felton
An original short story extract.
Lily Prentice opened her bakery on the first of March, directly opposite Brack’s, which had been the only bakery on Mill Street for thirty years and where, until the previous summer, she had worked.
She had started there at sixteen, sweeping floors. By twenty-two she was making all the bread, rising at three, her forearms scarred from the ovens, while Mr Brack took the credit and the compliments and paid her as if she were still sweeping. When she asked, once, for her name to go on the sign, he had laughed. When she asked again, he had sacked her, in front of the Saturday queue, for insolence.
She had saved for eleven months. She had painted the shop herself, a clean pale blue, and written her name across the window in gold: PRENTICE’S. She made her sourdough, the one she had perfected at Brack’s and he had sold as his own, and by the end of the first week the queue stretched out of her door and halfway down the street, and Brack’s window across the road was full of loaves that nobody bought.
It was everything she had imagined, on all those early mornings. She waited to feel it.
By April, Brack had let his girl go. Lily could see him through the glass, serving alone in his white coat, his shoulders bent. In May he stopped making bread altogether and sold only the cakes that came in on a lorry. One evening, locking up, she saw him sitting at his counter in the empty shop with the lights off, not moving, a big man made small.
Lily went home and could not eat. The next morning she made the sourdough as usual, and tasted it, and it tasted of nothing at all.
‘Both texts suggest that revenge harms the avenger more than the victim.’
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.