Migration and home

How Pinnock explores migration, leaving and the search for home, from the Windrush journeys to everything lost in leave-taking across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'It mash up you life', 'When I was a girl you kill a cow, you share it up', 'People back home think Caledonian Road paved with gold', 'dress like those children who have fathers', 'I gone now', 'In a way, we poorer than them', 'You ever wonder if it was worth it?'.
Leave-taking: what the title means, the goodbye Enid never had with Mooma, and every departure in the play, from Del leaving home to Viv leaving for university.
Home as a feeling rather than a place: Enid's England, Brod's Jamaica, and Mai's idea of being at peace with yourself.
Context: the Windrush journeys, the money sent back to families in the Caribbean, and the slave trade behind Mai's sense of a people who cannot find rest.
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.

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