Scenes 3 and 4: the pastor's visit and Mooma's death — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Scenes 3 and 4: the pastor's visit and Mooma's death
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Enid and Brod after the pastor's visit, her worry that the girls stayed away, their memories of church in Jamaica and their dance,
Viv's wish to visit Jamaica and the phone call with news of Mooma's death; then Enid drinking in the dark, her childhood poverty,
her mother's refusal to say goodbye, the ticket her husband saved for, and the money she presses on Viv for university.
Key quotations: 'Then who kill her them? Me?', 'I am used to sitting in the dark', 'We shower in waterfall', 'that roar in your belly day and night', 'One day Mooma take me on a long walk', 'I come from the dirt', 'People laugh at me, but they never laugh at you', 'Oh yes, I did escape didn't I', 'She never turn around, jus' carry on working, chop chop chop, play deaf', 'It wasn't easy to leave', 'We sit by we self and plan through the night', 'Hope I find someone to love me like that'.
Structure: the dance and memories of church in Scene 3 cut short by the phone call from Jamaica, and Scene 4 as a quiet scene for two in the dark, where Enid's stories of Jamaica come out at last.
Context: rural poverty in Jamaica, the pull of England and America, and the money migrants were expected to send home.
OCR's 2025 mark scheme suggests the tense talk between Brod, Enid and Viv about visiting Jamaica in Scene 3 as a moment of tension.
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.
