Revenge imagined
Text 1: Heron at Dusk, by Nadia Farrant
An original short story extract.
The art room was empty at lunch, which Maya had known it would be, because Mr Okoro ate his sandwiches in his car. The exhibition pieces stood on the long shelf under the window, waiting for Thursday, each one with a little white card in front of it. Chloe Saunders had made a heron.
It was annoyingly good. It stood on one thin clay leg with its neck folded back into its shoulders, and Chloe had scored the feathers in one by one with a pin so that they looked soft enough to stroke. The card said: Heron at Dusk. Chloe Saunders, 10B.
Two weeks ago, in assembly, Maya had stood up to read the notices and got stuck on the word particularly, the way she sometimes did on words beginning with p, and from the back row Chloe had said, “P-p-p-pathetic,” not loudly, but loudly enough.
Maya had imagined this moment every night since. She had imagined it in detail: the heron lifting from the shelf, the slow fall, the sound it would make on the floor tiles, like a cup breaking, and Chloe’s face on Thursday morning. In the imagining it had always felt wonderful, warm, like getting into a bath.
She picked the heron up. It was lighter than she expected, and cool. She could feel each of the little pin-scored feathers under her thumbs. She thought about Chloe bent over it at this table, week after week, holding her breath.
She stood there with it until the bell went. Then she put it back on the shelf, exactly where it had been, and straightened the white card, and walked out into the corridor feeling not wonderful, and not warm, but something else she did not have a word for yet, and it did not start with p.
Text 2: Russian Giants, by Dorothy Kember
An original short story extract.
When Gerald Pike at number six cut down the apple tree, Maureen Tasker did not shout. She had been married for thirty-eight years to a man who shouted, and she knew how little it achieved. The tree had stood on the boundary, and it had been, Gerald said, half his. He had taken his half with a chainsaw on a Sunday morning while she was at the shops, and the other half had fallen into her garden on its own, out of what Maureen could only think of as grief.
The tree had also, as it happened, been the only thing between Gerald’s back bedroom and a clear view of the sea.
In March she bought forty packets of sunflower seeds. Russian Giant, the label said, up to fourteen feet. She planted them in a double row along the fence, and she fed them, and talked to them, and staked them with bamboo canes, and by July they had passed the gutter of Gerald’s extension, and by August they stood like a regiment of yellow-faced sentries, shoulder to shoulder, nodding gravely at his bedroom window.
Maureen had expected to enjoy this. She had imagined Gerald drawing back his curtains each morning, seeing nothing but leaves and stalks, and swearing.
What she had not imagined was Gerald, on a bright evening at the end of August, sitting at that window in his vest with a cup of tea, gazing at the sunflowers. He was not swearing. He looked, if anything, enchanted. As she watched, he raised his cup to them, very slightly, the way a man might toast an old friend.
Maureen stood among her sentries in the warm dusk and did not know what to do with her face.
‘In both texts, revenge is more satisfying in imagination than in reality.’
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.