The swarm
Text 1: Don’t Flap, by Martha Quist
An original short story extract.
Nobody had told Josie what a swarm sounded like, and so at first she thought it was a motorbike, a long way off, revving somewhere beyond the orchard. She was kneeling at the strawberry bed with a colander full of fruit, and she sat back on her heels and listened. The noise did not come closer and it did not go away. It simply grew, from all directions at once, until it seemed to be coming out of the air itself.
Then the sky over the hedge darkened.
It came over the hawthorn like smoke, a brown, boiling cloud that twisted and folded in on itself and never kept the same shape for a second. Thousands of bees. Tens of thousands. The hum became a roar, deep and electric, and she felt it in her teeth and in the bones of her chest, the way you feel a lorry going past before you see it.
Her grandfather’s voice came from the shed, very calm. “Josie. Keep still, love. Don’t flap.”
She kept still. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.
The cloud drifted lower. It passed over the strawberry bed, and suddenly she was inside it, and the air was full of small golden bodies, bumping softly against her cheeks and her bare arms and catching in her hair. She shut her eyes. She could hear them crawling in her hair, a dry, ticking rustle right next to her ear. One landed on her lip and she pressed her mouth shut so hard it hurt.
Don’t flap. Don’t flap. Don’t flap.
She counted her breaths. Seven. Eight. Something crawled across her eyelid, light as an eyelash, and walked off again.
And then, as suddenly as it had come, the roar began to move away. She opened her eyes. The cloud had gathered itself and was pouring towards the old pear tree at the bottom of the garden, where it hung for a moment and then poured itself onto a single branch, layer on layer, until the branch sagged under a great brown beard of bees, humming quietly to itself, the way a kettle hums when it has finished boiling.
Her grandfather came down the path in his veil, grinning. “Well done,” he said. “Now then. Shall we go and catch them?”
Explore how Martha Quist uses language and structure to create tension as the swarm arrives.
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.