How Kelly presents Cathy, and how the character develops across the text: the grinning follower who finds the death exciting, frames a real postman, enjoys being on television, carries out Phil's plan for Adam and ends up running the group through fear.
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: 'better than ordinary life', 'There were quite a few', 'We showed initiative', 'They stare at her', 'He can't come back', 'running things', 'She cut a first year's finger off', 'Cathy doesn't care', 'She's insane', 'Doesn't that bother you'.
Cathy's journey from 'grinning' follower to leader: thrilled by the police and the television cameras, signing autographs, slapping Brian, carrying out Phil's plan for Adam and ending up in charge through fear.
OCR's 2025 comparison extract: Cathy's comic, practical account of how the postman came to be arrested against Leah's outrage at a 'non-existent crime', and Leah's attempt to stop her at the end of Three.
Different readings: a sadist who enjoys violence, or a follower corrupted by the group, and what it suggests that the group's last leader is a girl willing to adopt the boys' behaviour.
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.
