Edexcel GCSE English Language: Paper 1 Q4: Evaluation

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Beatrix Holloway, titled The New Boy. It is Samuel's first day at a school where he knows nobody.

The bell went, and the corridor emptied around Samuel like water down a drain, and within seconds he was the only one left, standing alone in the wide grey space with a timetable he could not read and a bag too heavy on one shoulder. Doors had closed all along the corridor. Behind each one, he knew, was a room full of people who already knew each other, who had spent years learning each other's names and jokes and seats, and into one of those rooms, in a moment, he would have to walk.

He looked at the timetable again. Room 14. He had no idea where Room 14 was. The numbers on the doors near him ran 7, 8, 9, and then, maddeningly, jumped to 21, as though the building had been designed to defeat him. His heart was going much too fast. Somewhere a teacher's voice rose and fell behind a wall, muffled, beginning a lesson he was already late for.

He started to walk. His new shoes, bought too big "to grow into", slipped at the heel with every step and squeaked on the polished floor, and the sound seemed enormous in the silence, announcing him, a stranger, an intruder. He passed a window and saw himself reflected: the stiff new blazer, the bag, the face that did not belong here. At the end of the corridor he stopped. There were stairs going up and stairs going down and a sign with an arrow that had been turned, by some earlier hand, to point directly at the ceiling. He stood there, entirely alone, a small figure in a vast and unfamiliar building, and for one moment he wanted, more than anything in the world, simply to go home.

In this extract, the writer attempts to make the reader feel Samuel's isolation and anxiety on his first day. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Solomon Reyes, titled The Last House. An elderly man named Walter is leaving, for the final time, the house he has lived in for fifty years.

The removal van had gone, and the rooms it left behind were not rooms any more. They were boxes of light and dust, echoing, scuffed where the furniture had stood for half a century, each pale rectangle on the carpet a ghost of something carried away. Walter walked through them slowly, one last time, his footsteps loud now that there was nothing left to soften them.

In the front room he stopped. Here was the mark on the wall, painted over a dozen times but never quite gone, where the children had been measured against the door frame every birthday, a ladder of pencil lines climbing the years. He put his thumb on the highest of them and could not, for a moment, breathe. His daughter, who lived in Canada now, had stood there once and barely come up to his waist. His son, who did not speak to him, had stood there too.

The kitchen still smelled, faintly, of fifty years of meals. He had carried his wife in through that door on the day they bought the house, both of them laughing, neither of them able to imagine being old. She had died in the upstairs bedroom four winters ago, in the early morning, while the frost was still on the glass, and he had held her hand and watched the light come up over a garden she had planted and would not see again.

He went, finally, to the front door. The key felt strange in his hand, suddenly the key to nowhere. He looked back once down the empty hall, at the squares of sun on the bare floor, at the silence where a whole life had been, and then he stepped out, and pulled the door to behind him, and heard the latch click shut on fifty years, and did not let himself look up at the windows as he walked away.

In this extract, the writer attempts to make the reader feel the weight of memory and loss as Walter leaves his home. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Anneke Vos, titled Deep Water. A young woman named Priya is caught in a storm while sailing a small boat alone.

The wind had been rising for an hour, and Priya had told herself, for an hour, that it would pass. It did not pass. It built, steadily, patiently, until the friendly little breeze that had carried her out of the harbour had become a thing with teeth, tearing the tops off the waves and flinging them in stinging sheets across the deck.

She was not laughing now. The sail, which had filled so prettily that morning, cracked and bucked above her like a living thing trying to break free, and the boom swung across with a force that would have taken her head off had she not flung herself flat. Water came over the side in cold green slabs. The little boat, which had felt so solid at the quay, now seemed no more than a leaf, lifted and dropped and lifted again by waves that rose around her higher than houses, grey-black and marbled with foam, each one rolling towards her with a slow, terrible patience, as though the sea had all the time in the world and she had almost none.

She fought the tiller. Her hands were white and numb on the wood, her hair plastered across her face, and salt stung her eyes so that the world blurred and ran. She could no longer see the shore. She could no longer see anything but the next wave, and the next, walls of water sliding up out of the murk, and somewhere under the howl of the wind she could hear herself, very small, saying please, please, please, to no one, to the storm, to the boat, to whatever might be listening, while the bow climbed another grey mountain and hung, for one sickening instant, at the top, before the whole world dropped away beneath her and she fell.

In this extract, the writer attempts to make the reader feel the overwhelming power of the storm and Priya's helplessness against it. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)