Guilt that stays
Text 1: The Greenhouse, by Arthur Pennock
An original short story extract.
The ball went through the third pane from the end of Mr Fairley’s greenhouse with a sound like a dropped tray, and for a moment afterwards everything in the garden held still: the washing on the line, the bees in the lavender, Tom with the bat still raised over his shoulder.
Then Danny, who was six and had been fielding by the shed, ran to the fence to look, because Danny always ran to look at things. He was standing there with his fingers through the wire and his mouth open when Mr Fairley came out of his back door in his slippers.
Tom could have said something then. He knew it at the time and he knew it afterwards, lying awake. There was a gap, a second or two, when Mr Fairley looked from the broken glass to Danny at the fence and Tom could have stepped into it. He did not. He put the bat down carefully in the grass, as if it belonged to somebody else.
Danny was sent to bed without tea. Their father docked his pocket money for a month, to pay for the glass, and Danny did not argue, because Danny was six and believed what grown-ups told him, even about himself.
That night Tom lay in the top bunk and listened to his brother crying underneath him, a small, steady, puzzled sound, like a tap left running. Twice Tom opened his mouth. Twice he closed it. He told himself he would tell them in the morning, and in the morning he told himself he would tell them on Saturday.
He never did. Thirty years later, he still could not hear glass break in a restaurant, or a pub, or his own kitchen, without seeing his brother’s fingers hooked through the wire.
Text 2: Ward Nine, by Celia Marwood
An original contemporary memoir.
Hannah Price had her appendix out in the spring of Year Eleven, and something went wrong afterwards, an infection, and she was in Ward Nine at the General for almost a month. I was her best friend. Everybody knew that. Her mum rang our house on the second day and said that Hannah was asking for me, and I said I would come on Saturday.
I did not go on Saturday. I told myself it was revision. I told myself that she would be tired, that there would be other visitors, that I would only be in the way. The truth, which I did not let myself look at, was that I was frightened: of the smell of the corridors, of the tubes, of seeing Hannah, who was loud and fearless and could do a cartwheel on a wall, lying flat and grey in a bed.
Every day I did not go made the next day harder. By the third week I could not have gone if someone had driven me to the door. I stopped answering the phone in case it was her mum.
Hannah came back to school in May, thinner, with a scar she showed everyone at lunch. She never asked why I had not come. She was kind to me in the careful way people are kind to someone they have decided not to rely on, and by the summer she was sitting with a girl called Ruth from the other form, and I was sitting where I could watch them.
I am forty-four now. I have visited a great many people in hospital since, more than I needed to, sometimes people I hardly knew. And every time I push open the swing doors and smell that particular soap, I am sixteen, and it is Saturday, and I am not going.
‘In both texts, guilt is presented as something the characters cannot escape.’
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.