Belonging through doing
Text 1: Sunday League, by Martin Coyle
An original short story extract.
For the first three Sundays Tomasz did not understand a single word anyone said to him. He understood the ball. He understood the white lines on the pitch behind the cement works and the cold that came up through his boots, and he understood when the big defender called Kev pointed at him and then at the space on the left wing, because pointing was the same in every language. But the rest of it, the shouting, the jokes, the long arguments about the referee, flowed past him like the traffic on the ring road, loud and fast and going somewhere he could not follow.
He sat at the end of the bench in the changing room and laced his boots and smiled when the others laughed, a half-second late.
On the fourth Sunday, Kev sat down next to him with a biro and the back of a team sheet. He drew a goal. He drew a stick man kicking a ball into it. He pointed at the stick man and said, “Tommy.” Then he wrote underneath, in big capitals, MAN ON, and shouted it, and the whole changing room shouted it back, and Tomasz laughed, on time.
Twenty minutes into the second half, with the score at one each and his breath smoking, he heard it from behind him: “Tommy, man on!” He turned without looking, the way he had turned on the dusty pitch behind his school in Gdańsk, and the defender went sliding past into the mud.
He did not score. He crossed, and Kev scored, with his head, and then Kev was running at him with his arms out, and Tomasz was lifted off his feet into a crush of wet shirts and shouting, and he understood every word.
Text 2: Seven Pleats, by Mei-Lin Cairns
An original contemporary memoir.
On Sunday afternoons the kitchen above my grandmother’s takeaway on Dumbarton Road became the only place in Glasgow where I knew exactly who I was. At school I was the girl with the funny lunch. At my cousins’ in Hong Kong, the one summer we went, I was the girl with the funny accent, too Scottish to be understood in the market and too quiet to argue. But at Por Por’s table, with the steam from the big pot fogging the window and Radio Clyde on low, nobody needed me to be anything except a pair of hands.
We made dumplings. My grandmother, my two aunts, my mother and me, five women in a row along the oilcloth, each with a little bowl of water and a mound of pork and chive and a stack of pale wrappers. Por Por did not say much. She showed me the fold once, seven pleats, pinch and turn, and when mine came out lumpy she did not correct me. She just put it on the tray with the others, among the perfect ones, as if it belonged there.
My aunts argued about everything: politics, cousins, how much ginger. They switched between Cantonese and English in the middle of sentences, and I followed about half, and it did not matter. I knew the rhythm of it.
When Por Por died, the takeaway was sold. A nail bar opened in its place. I walked past it last winter and looked up at the window, and somebody had put up blinds. I stood on the pavement and folded my hands, seven pleats, pinch and turn, though there was nothing in them.
‘Both texts suggest that belonging comes from what people do together rather than where they are.’
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.