RCF Model Paper 1: GCSE English Language

This extract is from the opening of a novel. It is an original passage written by RCF English for this practice paper. The narrator, Ines, has returned to the island where she grew up to close up her grandmother's house.

From The Quiet Season (original RCF source)

1 The ferry came in past the breakwater at ten past four, an hour late, and by then the light had already begun to go. Ines stood at the rail with her bag between her feet and watched the harbour arrange itself: the same two cranes, the same yellow chandlery with its shutters down, the same three boats hauled out on the slipway with weed drying on their keels. Nothing had been repainted. Nothing had been taken away. She had expected to feel something at the sight of it and she felt, instead, a kind of administrative relief, as though she had checked a list.

8 The road up from the harbour was steeper than she remembered, which she knew was not the road's doing. Halfway along it she stopped, ostensibly to change hands on the bag, and stood breathing in the smell of the place - salt, diesel, and underneath both of them something green and rotting that she had never been able to name and had never smelled anywhere else in her life. Twenty-two years, and her body had recognised it before she had. She found she was angry about that, in a small way, the way you are angry at a door that sticks.

15 The house was at the top, behind the church, with its back to the weather. The key was where it had always been kept, under the third stone, and the stone came up as easily as if someone had lifted it that morning. Inside, the hall was cold in the particular way of a house that has been empty rather than merely unheated - cold all the way through, cold in the walls. Ines put down her bag. In the kitchen the clock had stopped at twenty past nine and she did not know, standing there, whether that was morning or evening, or how many months ago, and it seemed to her suddenly a serious question, one she ought to be able to answer.

23 She went from room to room turning on lights. Most of them worked. In the back bedroom the bulb had gone, and she stood in the doorway looking at the shape of the bed in the last of the daylight and decided she would deal with it tomorrow, and then went on standing there. Outside, the wind had got up and was working at the shutters, and the sound was so exactly the sound of her childhood that she had to remind herself she was not expected anywhere, that nobody downstairs was waiting to hear her come down, that the house was hers now in the flat legal sense that meant nothing at all.

31 She slept that night in the front room with her coat over the blanket, and woke twice, and the second time lay listening to the sea and thinking, quite clearly and without any distress: I have made a mistake, and I am going to stay.

Answer all questions in this section. You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section. [40 marks]

Question 1

Read again the first part of the source, lines 1 to 7.

List four things from this part of the text about the harbour. [4 marks]

Question 2

Look in detail at lines 8 to 14 of the source.

How does the writer use language here to describe Ines's return to the island? [8 marks]

You could include the writer's choice of:

• words and phrases
• language features and techniques
• sentence forms

Question 3

You now need to think about the whole of the source.

This text is from the opening of a novel. How has the writer structured the text to interest you as a reader? [8 marks]

You could write about:

• what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning
• how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops
• any other structural features that interest you

Question 4

Focus this part of your answer on the second part of the source, from line 15 to the end.

A student said: "In this part of the extract the writer makes Ines seem detached from her own feelings, and that detachment is more affecting than open emotion would have been."

To what extent do you agree? [20 marks]

In your response, you could:

• write about your own impressions of Ines
• evaluate how the writer has created these impressions
• support your opinions with references to the text

You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section. Write in full sentences. You are reminded of the need to plan your answer. You should leave enough time to check your work at the end.

Question 5

Your school or college is producing an anthology of new writing.

Either: Write a description of a building that has been left empty.

Or: Write the opening part of a story about someone returning to a place they left long ago.

(24 marks for content and organisation, 16 marks for technical accuracy) [40 marks]