How Syal presents Anita Rutter, and how the character develops across the text: the bold older girl who rules the yard and whom Meena worships, a bully and a victim of a neglectful home, whose cruelty and racism end the friendship and leave her alone.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'What yow got?', 'Yow coming, then?', 'her complete lack of emotion or indeed, social graces', 'stifled a yawn', 'pliant pets', 'my best friend', 'Yow'll catch summat'.
Anita's home: parents who are seldom there, a mother who leaves, and an anxious younger sister, Tracey, and how the novel makes Anita both a bully and a victim.
Turning points: Fat Sally's fight with Anita on Sherrie's farm, when Meena's love for her tips into pity, and Meena's sense of betrayal when Anita takes up with Sam.
OCR's 2024 examiners saw Meena's first impressions of Anita, admiring yet critical, as the most common choice for someone memorably described.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
