How Syal presents Sam Lowbridge, and how the character develops across the text: the village bad boy who is kind to Meena at first, turns his anger at a changing Tollington into racist hatred and violence, and is left behind when Meena confronts him and leaves.
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: 'Those things you said at the spring fête', 'I never meant you, Meena', 'It was all the others, not you', 'in his wake like midges following a storm', 'gobs of bile', 'I felt as if I had been spat at', 'every time he saw another Meena on a street corner', 'feel totally powerless', 'I'd had my revenge', 'I was leaving them to themselves'.
Different readings: a villain, or a young man with no future in a dying village, jealous that Meena can leave, who is left alone at the end.
OCR's mark schemes suggest Sam at the fete as a memorable description (2024) and a moment of prejudice (2022), and his last meeting with Meena, where she chooses mercy over revenge.
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.
