How Pinnock presents Enid, and how the character develops across the text: a Jamaican-born hospital cleaner and single mother, proud of England and of her daughters' chances, who hides her past and her grief until Mooma's death breaks her, and ends asking her daughter for a reading.
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: 'Me husban' long gone, yes. But I don't want him back', 'I proud a my English girls', 'My daughter going to university', 'English people don't wear hat inside the house', 'I come from the poorest family in the whole a Jamaica', 'Here, you poor an' you by you'self. Nobody cares', 'What doctor know about our illness?', 'They can't take you education away from you', 'I worry she go destroy herself', 'I see it and it make me want to tear the place down'.
Pinnock's heroine: a hospital cleaner at the centre of the play, whose pride, silence and hard work hide shame about her poverty and guilt about her mother; Pinnock wrote that 'I wanted to make Enid the heroine of the play'.
Why Enid is strict with Del and proud of Viv: her fear of how Black young people were treated, and her belief that education is the way out.
Context: the jobs open to women who migrated in the 1950s and 1960s, shift work, and the church as a place to belong.
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.
