The speaker remembers her mother, a red-haired heroine, bringing a drowned girl back to life at a lake, and her father taking the girl home to a poor house where she was beaten, then asks whether she was really there.
How Clarke's free verse, images of water and the turn to a question show memory as uncertain and the past as lying beneath the surface, like the lake.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'We once watched a crowd / pull a drowned child from the lake', 'dressed in water's long green silk', 'a heroine, her red head bowed', 'my mother gave a stranger's child her breath', 'drawn by the dread of it', 'bleating / and rosy in my mother's hands', 'watched her thrashed for almost drowning', 'Was I there?', 'Or is that troubled surface something else', 'All lost things lie under closing water', 'in that lake with the poor man's daughter'.
Form: free verse that tells the rescue as a story in the past tense, then turns on the short question Was I there? into uncertainty and the images of the lake, and ends on a rhyming couplet.
Context: Gillian Clarke, born in Cardiff, who lives in Ceredigion, translates from Welsh and won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010; the poem's origin in a real memory from her own childhood; and the wartime cotton frock that dates the scene.
In part (b), a popular choice for sad thoughts in 2025, where OCR points to the harsh alliteration of the rescue and the girl beaten at home for almost drowning; also suggested for how youth and age differ (2024).
Links within the cluster: The Bluebell (a memory of childhood that returns), Out, Out— (a child close to death and adults' harshness), Tea With Our Grandmothers (older family members as heroic figures) and Equilibrium (remembering and forgetting).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about a childhood memory, a parent's courage or how memory changes the past.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
