Accepting kindness
Text 1: Fares, by Harold Quennell
An original short story extract.
Every Wednesday and Saturday Eddie Hollis caught the number 14 from the end of Mafeking Road to the sanatorium on the hill, and every Wednesday and Saturday the conductor, a big slow man with a ticket machine strapped across his chest like a drum, walked straight past him.
The first time it happened Eddie thought he had been forgotten. He held out his threepence, and the conductor looked at it, and at Eddie’s coat, which had been his brother’s, and at the brown paper parcel on his knee with the clean nightdress inside it, and said, “Keep that, son. Buy your mam some grapes.”
Eddie had not bought grapes. He had put the threepence in a cocoa tin under his bed, and every journey added another, and by October the tin was heavy. He did not know why it made him feel so bad. His mam, when he told her, had turned her face to the window of the long white ward and said that there was no shame in it, in the voice she used when there was.
On the first Saturday in November, he stood up as the bus came over the hill and walked down the swaying aisle to the platform, where the conductor stood holding the pole, and held out the cocoa tin with both hands.
The conductor looked at it for a long time. Then he took it, and weighed it in his palm, and gave it a little shake so that the coins inside chinked. He wound a ticket out of his machine, a single, and tore it off with great ceremony and gave it to Eddie, and handed back the tin.
“Paid in full,” he said. “Mind the step.”
Eddie got off with the tin in one hand and the ticket in the other, and walked up the drive to the sanatorium as if he owned it.
Text 2: Service Wash, by Marcus Heathcote
An original contemporary memoir.
The launderette on Cowley Road had eight machines, three of which worked, and one Tuesday I had all three of them going and both twins out of the buggy. It was the winter my wife was in hospital. I was thirty-one, and I had never before understood how much washing two small children could produce in a week, or how fast they could move in opposite directions.
Isla was eating a sock. Ben was posting coins into the soap dispenser. And the dryer I had been feeding with twenty-pences for forty minutes had just stopped, and I was hauling armfuls of hot, tangled clothes into a plastic basket while trying to keep one foot across the door.
That was when the woman with the tartan shopping trolley stood up from the bench, put down her magazine, and began to fold my washing.
I said, “Oh, no, honestly, it’s fine.” I said it two or three times. I could feel my face burning. She took no notice at all. She shook out each tiny vest with a little snap and folded it into a square as neat as an envelope, and stacked them, pinks and blues, on the table. She even folded my underpants, without a flicker.
I stood there holding Ben upside down by one ankle and wanted, absurdly, to cry. I think it was the way she did not ask me anything. She did not say poor you, or where’s their mother, or you look tired, love. She just folded, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing for one stranger to do for another on a Tuesday afternoon.
When she had finished she patted the pile once, picked up her magazine and went back to her bench. I never knew her name. I have folded a great many small vests since, and I fold them all her way.
‘In both texts, kindness is presented as difficult to accept.’
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.