Chapter 11 to the end: the fall, hospital and the eleven-plus — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapter 11 to the end: the fall, hospital and the eleven-plus
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Sam's outburst in front of the television cameras, Anita's boast about an attack on an Indian man, Meena's reckless ride and fall, months in hospital with Robert, and Nanima's return to India,
the night before the eleven-plus when Tracey fetches Meena, Tracey's fall into the pond, Meena's confrontation with Sam and her choice to tell the truth, her exam success and the move from Tollington.
Key quotations: 'retching quietly into the open drain outside the stable', 'ashen face', 'An Exam Tomorrow', 'warty chin and a broomstick', 'a red sun was rising', 'a stained glass panel', 'I realised I had abandoned every promise', 'I am the others, Sam', 'You did mean me'.
Structure: the fall as the turning point of Meena's growing up, the months in hospital as a pause for reflection, and a last night that tests everything she has learned before she leaves.
OCR's 2024 comparison: Meena's desperate run to the Big House for help, her fear of meeting a witch there, and her surprise at the tiny, dainty woman who answers.
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.
