Grief without words
Text 1: Release, by Callum Brodie
An original short story extract.
Grandad’s pigeons did not know he was dead. That was the first thing Sam noticed when he unbolted the loft on the Saturday after the funeral. They came down off their perches in a soft grey rush, bobbing and muttering, pushing their heads against the wire as if it were any other morning and the old man would be in with the corn tin, rattling it and calling them his beauties.
Sam rattled the tin. It did not sound the same. He did not know how to make it sound the same.
His mum wanted them sold. A man from Barnsley had rung about the blue cock bird, the one with the white flight feather, and offered more money than Sam had ever heard spoken about a bird. “It’s what he’d want,” Mum said, though she was looking out of the window when she said it, and Sam knew that she had no idea what Grandad would want, because nobody did now.
He filled the drinkers and scraped the shelves, the way he had been shown, the scraper making the same long sound it always made. On the wall by the door Grandad had pinned his race results, years of them, in pencil gone shiny with handling. Sam did not read them. He put his palm flat against the paper, and the paper was cold.
Then, because he could not think what else to do, he opened the trap. The birds hesitated, then went up all together, wheeling over the allotments and the railway cutting, a loose ring that tightened and turned silver when it caught the sun. Sam stood in the doorway with the empty tin and counted them, round and round, until his neck ached. Every one of them came back.
Text 2: Seed Packets, by Ruth Okonedo
An original contemporary memoir.
It took me until April to open my mother’s shed. All winter I had driven past the end of her garden on the way to the station and seen the green door with its rusted hasp, and all winter I had told myself that there was nothing in there but tools and spiders, and that tools and spiders could wait.
There were tools, and there were spiders. There was also a biscuit tin on the potting bench, the kind with a Scottish loch on the lid, and inside it, in rows as neat as a card index, were her seeds.
She had saved them herself, in envelopes from the bank and the electricity board, and labelled each one in the slanting capitals she used for birthday cards. RUNNER BEANS, PAINTED LADY, 2019, GOOD YEAR. SWEET PEAS FROM JEAN’S, SOW EARLY, DON’T FUSS. NASTURTIUMS, THE ORANGE ONES, FOR THE STEP.
I read every label. I had not cried at the funeral, or at the solicitor’s office, or when the estate agent called the house a project. I cried in the shed at DON’T FUSS, because it was so exactly her voice, half order and half joke, and because she had written it to herself without ever imagining that someone else would need to hear it.
I did not know how to grow anything. I bought compost and a bag of plastic pots and sat on her back step with the instructions open on my phone, feeling foolish. The nasturtium seeds were wrinkled and pale, like tiny brains. I pushed them into the soil one by one, with my thumb, the way I imagined she would have done, and I did not fuss.
‘Both texts suggest that grief is expressed more through objects and actions than through words.’
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.