How Pinnock presents Del, and how the character develops across the text: Enid's elder daughter, eighteen, sacked, pregnant and scornful of obeah, who leaves home after the slap, finds a gift and a home with Mai, and ends reading her mother's palm.
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: 'she thinks we're seven years old', 'A greasy job in a greasy café', 'treat me like a dum dum', 'All right, Mummy. Anything you say', 'I'm not some kid', 'I hate it here', 'Let me get on with my life, can't you?', 'He begged me, actually, but I weren't having none of it', 'I'll never be a victim', 'ever since I was a little kid. She thinks I'm bad'.
Del's anger and her hidden care: her dyslexia and the school that called her slow, her pride, her fury at Viv for walking out of an exam, and the gift Mai finds in her.
How Del changes: from rude scorn for obeah in Scene 1 to learning Mai's craft, taking her place, and reading her mother's palm.
OCR's 2024 examiners praised answers that saw Del's reaction to Viv's walked-out exam as protective, even motherly.
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.
