Scenes 7 and 8: Brod's story and the final reading — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Scenes 7 and 8: Brod's story and the final reading
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Brod at Mai's after Enid throws him and Viv out, his questions about the baby's father, and his account of how racism at Smithfield
meat market turned Del's father violent; then Del learning Mai's craft and passing her tests, Mai's failing heart and her notebook,
Enid's visit, Viv leaving to study Black Studies, and Del reading her mother's palm.
Key quotations: 'That must be why you looking so well', 'And what about you, Brod? Do you see your wife and kids?', 'you father change from a smiling boy into a hard man', 'him make sure she treat him like a king in him own house', 'I don't wanna know', 'a lump of dead meat', 'You passed with flying colours. You're a natural', 'I don't have a daughter to pass them on to', 'How you going to teach your children that they don't exist?', 'I would chop off my hand if it would help you', 'takes her mother's hand'.
Structure: Scene 8 mirrors Scene 1, as a reading at Mai's table ends the play, and the closing stage directions show how far Del has come.
Context: the racism Black workers met at Smithfield meat market, and how Brod's story reveals the violence behind Enid's silence about her marriage.
OCR's 2025 mark scheme suggests the end of Brod and Del's talk in Scene 7, where his long speech about her mother breaks through her short replies, and its examiners saw his account of her father used well.
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.
