Part One: Hailsham (Chapters 1 to 9) — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Part One: Hailsham (Chapters 1 to 9)
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Kathy as a carer at thirty-one; life at Hailsham: Tommy's tantrums and his art, the Exchanges, the Sales and the Gallery, Madame,
Ruth and the secret guard, the Judy Bridgewater tape, Miss Lucy's warning, Ruth and Tommy as a couple, and Miss Lucy's departure.
What the part establishes about character and theme, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'I've been a carer now for over eleven years', 'My donors have always tended to do much better than expected', 'There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods', 'sneers and giggles', 'deliberately childish pictures', 'A couple of months back I had this talk with Miss Lucy', 'in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders', 'a peaceful corner of England, rather nice', 'Your lives are set out for you', 'told and not told', 'We'd spend precious tokens on an exercise book'.
Structure: Part One is told as memories framed by Kathy's present as a carer, and the truth about the students is hinted at in the woods, the medical checks and Madame's fear long before Miss Lucy states it in Chapter 7.
OCR's 2024 extract: Tommy's art and the bullying that spreads beyond the art lessons, set against an unseen extract about a boy struggling at school; Tommy facing the problem alone, and short sentences after long ones that make it feel inescapable.
Moments from Part One that OCR's mark schemes suggest for part (b): Kathy calming Tommy after his tantrum, Miss Lucy's words about Madame taking their work, the pencil case, Madame's reaction to the students, and Miss Lucy's warning and sudden departure.
Context: Hailsham as an English boarding school with guardians in place of parents, and the stress on art and health whose purpose is explained only later.
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.
