Part Two: the Cottages (Chapters 10 to 17) — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Part Two: the Cottages (Chapters 10 to 17)
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The move to the Cottages, the veterans Chrissie and Rodney, Ruth copying the veterans, the magazines Kathy searches,
the trip to Norfolk and Ruth's possible, the talk of deferrals, the tape found again, Tommy's animals, and Kathy's decision to become a carer.
Key quotations: 'poor little Kathy', 'Us Hailsham lot, we have to stay together', 'It looks daft, the way you copy everything they do', 'You leave him stranded, looking like a spare part', 'all wrong for the Cottages', 'It's their lunch break', 'A bit of fun for you maybe, Tommy', 'if it was your possible we'd been looking for', 'her whole posture froze up', 'Kathy here finds your animals a complete hoot', 'a rare butterfly he'd come across on a fence-post', 'none of us are in any particular hurry'.
Structure: the shortest part, a halfway stage between school and adult life, built around the trip to Norfolk, where the students' hopes about possibles and deferrals meet the world outside.
Moments from Part Two that OCR's mark schemes suggest: Chrissie and Rodney's claim to have seen Ruth's possible and the first talk of deferrals (Chapters 12 and 13), and the search in Norfolk, a popular choice when OCR asked for something unexpected (2023).
Context: the students' fascination with ordinary lives glimpsed from outside, such as the office workers, and Ruth's bitter belief about who the clones are modelled on.
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.
