Joyful freedom
Text 1: Return Ticket, by Peter Halsall
An original short story extract.
Simon’s mother walked him to the platform at Wigan, which was humiliating, and told him again where to change and what time the last train was, and pressed a ten-pence piece into his hand for the phone in case of emergencies, and then, at last, the guard blew his whistle and she was outside the window, getting smaller, waving, and he was alone.
He was thirteen. He had a return ticket, two pound notes folded inside his sock, and a list in his pocket in his own handwriting that said only: RECORD. And under that, after some thought: CHIPS.
The train swayed and clattered through fields and backs of houses and canals, and Simon sat by the window with his forehead against the cold glass and felt as though something inside his chest were unfolding, like a map. Nobody knew him. A woman across the aisle was knitting something enormous and yellow. Not one of them knew where he was going or who he was or that this was the first time, and that was the most wonderful thing he had ever felt.
In Manchester he walked the wrong way out of the station and had to ask a policeman, which was frightening, and then found the shop down a side street exactly where his cousin had said it would be. It smelled of incense and cardboard. He spent forty minutes going through the racks, slowly, the way he had seen older boys do it, before he paid for the record with one of the damp pound notes from his sock.
He ate his chips on the station steps with the record in its paper bag on his knee, and pigeons came, and he fed them, because he could. Then he looked up at the big clock and saw that it was four minutes to his train, and ran, the record clutched to his chest, the chips abandoned, laughing out loud all the way down platform four.
Text 2: Number Four, by Bernadette Quayle
An original contemporary memoir.
The key was on a red plastic fob with the number 4 written on it in marker pen, and the landlord, Mr Demir, gave it to me on the doorstep with a list of rules about bins and noise and said, “Any problem, you ring,” and went away down the stairs. I stood on the landing holding it. I was nineteen. Nobody had ever given me a key to a door that was only mine.
The room was small and smelled of someone else’s cooking. There was a single bed with a bare mattress, a two-ring hob, a sink with a dripping tap, and a window without curtains that looked out over the roofs of the bus garage.
I put my sister’s pot plant on the windowsill. I filled the kettle and put it on and then realised I had no mugs, and laughed, out loud, alone, and the sound bounced round the bare walls and came back sounding like somebody I did not know yet.
That night I ate chips out of the paper sitting cross-legged on the floor, because there was no table, and nobody told me to use a plate. I read until two in the morning because there was nobody to tell me to put the light out. The buses came and went in the garage below, their lights sweeping across the ceiling, and I lay on the bare mattress in my coat and watched them.
At some point, very late, it occurred to me that if I fell ill in the night nobody would know, and that the rent was due on the first of every month for ever. I lay there for a while with this thought. Then I turned it over, like a coin, and found that the other side said the same thing as the first: nobody would know, nobody would know. And I smiled into the dark.
‘Both texts present freedom as joyful.’
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.