Scenes 1 and 2: the obeah woman and the row at home — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Scenes 1 and 2: the obeah woman and the row at home
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Enid's visit to Mai's flat in Deptford with her daughters, her sister's letter asking for money for their sick mother, Del's scorn for obeah,
the charm she pockets and Mai's offer to listen; then Enid cleaning for the pastor's visit, Brod's anger at paying for citizenship,
Del's lost job and night out, the row about life in England and the slap.
What each scene establishes about character and theme, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'If the woman didn't climb tree, pick coconut give me', 'I don't deal in numbers', 'People does take advantage if you show them you care too much', 'Then she come to the wrong place', 'Anytime you need someone to talk to, I'm always here', 'I can see you need to talk', 'Stick to the rules. England been good to me', 'These girls got Caribbean souls', 'Secure what? Till them change them mind again?', 'Where you been, Del?', 'the police vans hunting us down', 'No wonder Dad left you'.
Structure: Scene 1's reading foreshadows the rest of the play, as Mai's offer to listen and the charm Del pockets prepare for her return, and Scene 2 builds from comic preparations for the pastor to the slap.
Context: Brod's citizenship fee and the Home Office letter, and Del's anger at the jobs and policing young Black Londoners faced.
OCR set Del's homecoming in June 2025, on tension in the family; its examiners praised answers that read the stage directions, such as Enid's gesture as she 'hold up her hand' and Del as she 'looks to Viv'.
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.
