A late arrival
Text 1: Pump Two, by Joan Pelling
An original novel extract.
Rita had already turned the sign to CLOSED when the headlights came over the hill. Nobody came over the hill after ten. The road went nowhere much: past the quarry, past the two farms, and on into the dark of the moor until it gave up and became a track.
The car was long and pale and very dirty, as if it had been driven through every puddle between here and the coast. It drew up beside pump two and sat there with its engine running. Nobody got out.
She stood behind the counter with her hand on the till drawer, which held forty-one pounds and the spare key to her father’s van, and she waited. The strip light buzzed above her like a trapped fly. Outside, the exhaust rose and curled in the red glow of the sign, and still nobody got out.
When the door finally opened, the man who unfolded himself was older than she had expected, and taller, and he wore a suit that had once been expensive. He did not look at the pump. He looked at the shop, at the window, at her. Then he walked across the forecourt slowly, carefully, like a man walking into a cold sea.
The bell above the door rang. Rita had heard that bell ten thousand times. It had never sounded so loud.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. His voice was soft and he kept his hands where she could see them, flat on the counter, as though he understood exactly how he looked. “I know you’re shut. I wondered whether you might have a map.”
She had maps. They were on the rack by the door, faded at the folds, the moor a brown smudge in the middle of each one. She fetched one and laid it in front of him, and he spread it out with great tenderness, smoothing the creases with the side of his hand.
“There,” he said, and his finger came to rest on a tiny square beside the old railway line. “That was our house. I was born in it.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were wet. “They tell me it’s been knocked down.”
Explore how Joan Pelling uses language and structure to show how Rita’s feelings about the stranger change.
Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.
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.