How Pinnock presents Viv, and how the character develops across the text: Enid's clever younger daughter and the family's peacemaker, who can quote English poetry but knows little of her family's past, walks out of an exam, and leaves to study Black Studies.
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: 'Never heard of her', 'A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware', 'How can we ever live up to that? We don't deserve it, Brod', 'Kick us out? Where would me and Del go?', 'That sounds amazing', 'She means well you know', 'Remember, you're not to make a scene', 'What happened with you and Roy?', 'How you gonna manage?', 'Pat me on the head and they all come tumbling out', 'no matter how hard I search for myself in them books, I'm never there'.
Viv as peacemaker and observer: covering for Del, supporting her mother, wanting to know the family's secrets, and her plan to see Jamaica.
Viv's education: Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke but not Nanny of the Maroons, the exam she walks out of, and her choice of Black Studies.
Context: a school curriculum centred on Europe, and Nanny of the Maroons, Jamaica's national heroine.
OCR's 2024 examiners rewarded answers on the sisters that traced their changing relationship across several moments while staying analytical.
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.
