Part Three: Kathy the carer (Chapters 18 to 21) — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Part Three: Kathy the carer (Chapters 18 to 21)
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Kathy's work as a carer, Laura and the news that Hailsham has closed, Kathy becoming Ruth's carer, the trip to the stranded boat
with Tommy, Ruth's confession and Madame's address, Ruth's completion, and Kathy becoming Tommy's carer.
Key quotations: 'it means a lot to me', 'Some carers, though, their whole attitude lets them down', 'I started seeking out for my donors people from the past', 'all our differences', 'the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did', 'she wasn't accessible to me', 'in a room by herself', 'I knew what her look meant', 'one of those little islands of lucidity', 'It should have been you two', 'But I kept you apart', 'I wouldn't mind at all if that's where I ended up'.
Structure: Part Three returns to the present that Kathy described on the first page, so the story of her friends catches up with her life as a carer.
OCR's 2025 extract: Kathy visiting Ruth after her second donation, set against an unseen hospital visit; Kathy as both friend and carer, Ruth's eyes and her pain, and a brief moment of contact amid it.
Moments from these chapters that OCR's mark schemes suggest for part (b): Kathy's meeting with Laura, the trip to the stranded boat, Ruth's confession, and Kathy becoming Tommy's carer.
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.
