Fragile friendships
Text 1: The Raft, by Leonard Sykes
An original short story extract.
The raft was four oil drums and a door. Kenny had found the door on the tip behind the gasworks, and Pete had found the drums, or said he had, and neither of them asked the other too many questions. They lashed it all together with washing line on the towpath below Lock Nine, working through the long June evenings until the light went brown and the midges came off the water in clouds.
“She’ll float,” Pete said every night. “She’ll float like a swan.”
On the Thursday they carried her down the bank between them, staggering, and pushed her out. She floated. She floated so well that both boys stood up on her at once, arms out, whooping, and the whole canal seemed to tilt and steady under them, and a man on a narrowboat raised his mug as he went past.
They drifted as far as the iron bridge. Pete sat down with his trainers in the water and said, not looking at Kenny, “We’re going to Australia. Dad’s got a job in Adelaide. September.”
Kenny looked at the washing line. One of the knots he had tied was working loose, the end flicking in the current. He thought about retying it. He thought about how far Adelaide was, which was as far as anywhere could be, the bottom of the globe in the classroom, where the countries were coloured pink.
“You can have the raft,” said Pete.
“It’s half mine anyway.”
“You can have my half.”
Kenny did not answer. He knelt and pulled the loose knot tight, hard, until the rope burned his fingers, and they sat side by side on the door while the canal carried them slowly back the way they had come.
Text 2: Window Talk, by Gwen Tallis
An original twentieth-century memoir.
Moira Kane lived in the end house of our terrace, and she was the first person who ever taught me a language. She had been deaf since she was born, and by the time we were eight she could sign faster than I could think. She taught me the alphabet on our back step, folding my clumsy fingers into shapes with her own small cold hands, and slapping my wrist, laughing, when I got the letter R wrong.
For two years we spoke mostly with our hands. We had signs that belonged to nobody else: a tap on the chin for our teacher, a flat palm drawn across the chest that meant, roughly, I will tell you later.
Then, in the last year of primary school, a girl called Stacey Booth started copying Moira’s signs in the playground, flapping her arms and pulling faces, and the other girls laughed, and I laughed too. I can still feel the shape of that laugh in my throat. Moira saw. She did not sign anything. She simply turned and walked to the far end of the yard, and for six weeks she would not look at my hands.
I tried writing notes. She tore them up.
In the end I stood in our back bedroom, which faced her back bedroom across the yards, and I waited until her light went on. When she came to the window I put my flat palm across my chest. I will tell you later. Then I spelled SORRY, letter by letter, getting the R right.
She watched me for a long time through the two panes of glass. Then she raised her hand, tapped her chin, and pulled a face exactly like our teacher’s, and I laughed until I had to sit down.
‘Both texts present friendship as fragile.’
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.