Book One, Chapters 7 to 13: the fighting begins — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Book One, Chapters 7 to 13: the fighting begins
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The narrator's flight home and dinner with his wife, Friday night's indifference, the soldiers and the second cylinder, the drive to Leatherhead, the fighting-machines in the storm
and the dead landlord, the artilleryman's story, the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton, the Martian brought down by the guns, and the narrator's meeting with the curate.
Key quotations: 'My terror had fallen from me like a garment', 'that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days', 'like a poisoned dart', 'A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees', 'a walking engine of glittering metal', 'They wiped us out—simply wiped us out', 'In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes', 'It’s bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow', 'Death is coming! Death!', 'The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant', 'like little frogs hurrying through grass from the advance of a man', 'by a miracle I had escaped'.
Setting: the thunderstorm over Maybury Hill, lit by lightning, and the burning Thames valley seen through the steam from the river.
Structure: short chapters that follow the narrator hour by hour, and a turning point when the guns at Shepperton bring a Martian down.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
