AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 1 Q4: Evaluation

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Cora Welland, titled The Salt Road. A boy named Will has gone out onto the mudflats to dig for bait and has stayed too long.

Will straightened up, and his back ached, and only then did he look out to sea. The line of the water was not where he had left it. It had crossed half the flats already, a flat bright blade of it sliding in over the mud far faster than a man could walk, and behind him the safe shingle was a thin grey strip a very long way off.

He did not run at first. He told himself there was time, that the tide always looked quicker than it was, that he had done this a hundred times. He picked up his bucket. Then a channel he had stepped over on the way out, which had been dry, was suddenly a brown rope of water as wide as a road, and his stomach dropped, and he understood, all at once, in his whole body, that he had been wrong.

Now he ran. The mud, which had held him all morning, turned traitor. It sucked at his boots, pulled them off, held his bare feet and would not let go, so that each step was a fight, and the running was the slow, screaming running of a nightmare, where the harder you try the less you move. Water was around his ankles. Then his knees. The shingle was no closer. He could see, on the far shore, tiny and useless, a man walking a dog, and he opened his mouth to shout and found that the wind tore the word away and gave him nothing back but the hiss of the rising sea and, somewhere very near, the small particular sound of his own breath, going much too fast.

Focus this part of your answer on the second half of the source, from "Now he ran." A student said: "This part of the story makes the danger feel terrifyingly real, and the reader genuinely fears for Will's life." To what extent do you agree? In your response you could: write about your own impressions of the danger Will is in; evaluate how the writer has created these impressions; support your opinion with references to the text. (20 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Priya Nandakumar, titled The Lock-Keeper's Daughter. A girl named Esme is meeting her grandmother, who has dementia, in a care home.

The room smelled of lavender polish and lunch. Her grandmother sat by the window in the good chair, hands folded, and watched the garden as though it were a television, and when Esme came in she turned and gave the bright, careful smile that people give to strangers they wish to be kind to.

"Hello," Esme said. "It's me. It's Esme."

"Of course it is," said her grandmother warmly, and Esme saw at once that she did not know her, and felt the familiar small landslide somewhere inside her chest. She sat down anyway. She had learned not to argue with the gaps.

For a while they talked about nothing, about the weather and the flowers, and it was easy and pleasant and entirely empty, and Esme answered as if to a kind stranger on a bus. Then, in the middle of it, her grandmother reached out and took Esme's hand and turned it over, palm up, and looked at it for a long moment.

"You have your mother's hands," she said quietly. "She had hands just like these. She used to sit just where you're sitting."

And Esme stopped breathing, because her mother had died when Esme was four, and there were almost no photographs, and here, surfacing out of the fog for one impossible second, was a memory Esme herself had never been allowed to own. She wanted to seize it, to ask a hundred questions, to hold the moment still. But even as she leaned forward her grandmother's eyes had already drifted back to the window, and the small bright smile returned, and the door in her had closed again, gently, as if it had never been open at all. "Are you visiting someone, dear?" she said.

Focus this part of your answer on the second half of the source, from "Then, in the middle of it". A student said: "This part of the story is deeply moving, and the writer makes the reader feel the painful mixture of hope and loss in this moment." To what extent do you agree? In your response you could: write about your own impressions of this moment between Esme and her grandmother; evaluate how the writer has created these impressions; support your opinion with references to the text. (20 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Daniel Oduya, titled The Night Shift. A new soldier, Kofi, is on his first night sentry duty at a remote outpost.

For the first hour Kofi had been afraid of the enemy. Now, in the third hour, he was afraid of the dark itself.

Nothing was happening, and that was the trouble. The radio gave its dull hiss. The wire fence ticked as the cold contracted it. Beyond the floodlit square of the gate, the desert was a wall of absolute black, and the longer he stared into it the more it seemed to stare back, and to shift, and to fill, very slowly, with things that were not there. A rock became a crouching man. A bush became a crawling figure. Each time he raised his rifle and each time, when the floodlight found it, it was only a rock, only a bush, and his heart hammered all the same.

He told himself the facts. He was inside the wire. The others slept thirty metres behind him. The radio worked. He was nineteen years old and entirely safe, and the only danger here was the one he was building for himself, brick by brick, out of shadows.

It did not help. The mind, he was learning, does not believe the facts at three in the morning. A jackal cried somewhere out in the dark, a thin, human, grieving sound, and every hair on his arms stood up, and he gripped the cold rifle until his knuckles ached, and he watched the blackness with wide dry eyes, and he counted the slow minutes down towards a dawn that felt as though it would never, ever come. And the dark watched back, patient, enormous, and said nothing at all.

Focus this part of your answer on the second half of the source, from "He told himself the facts." A student said: "The writer shows that the fear in your own mind can be more powerful than any real danger, and this makes Kofi's ordeal gripping." To what extent do you agree? In your response you could: write about your own impressions of Kofi's state of mind; evaluate how the writer has created these impressions; support your opinion with references to the text. (20 marks)