RCF Model Paper 2: Edexcel English Language

An original RCF passage. From a memoir published in 1961, in which the writer recalls leaving a Yorkshire village at seventeen to work in a Leeds bakery.

From Nothing but the Ovens (original RCF text, 20th century)

1 My mother packed for me, because I had never packed for anything, and she put in three of everything and a jar of her damson jam that broke somewhere between Skipton and Leeds and made a purple map of the whole case. I remember standing on the platform holding it and understanding, in a way I had not understood at home, that nobody here knew who my father was.

5 The bakery was on a street I could not pronounce for a fortnight. Mr Cowan took me on because his brother had known my uncle, which is how everything worked then, and he said two things to me on the first morning. The first was that I would start at four. The second was that if I was late he would not shout at me, he would simply give the job to somebody else, and he said it so pleasantly that I was never once late in three years.

11 Four o'clock in a bakery is not the middle of the night. It is a different country. The ovens had been banked since eleven and the whole building held its heat like a stone left in the sun, and you came in out of a black wet street into that, and for about ten seconds it was the finest thing in the world. Then you started work and it was merely hot.

16 I was homesick in a way I would not have admitted to anyone, least of all myself. It came at odd hours - never at four in the morning, when there was too much to do, but at about half past nine when the first delivery had gone and there was a pause. I would stand in the yard with a mug of tea and think about the lane at home, and then Mr Cowan would put his head out and say something about the second batch and I would be perfectly all right again.

23 What I could not have told anyone at seventeen, and can say easily enough now, is that the work saved me. Not the money, though the money mattered. It was that at four in the morning nobody has any interest in whether you are lonely. The dough does not care. It rises at its own rate and it must be dealt with at a particular moment and not five minutes later, and there is a great deal of comfort in being needed by something so entirely indifferent to you.

30 I went home at Christmas with a coat I had bought myself and my mother cried, which I had not expected, and my father shook my hand, which I had expected even less. Neither of them asked whether I was happy. I think they knew that at seventeen it was not the question, and that I would have got it wrong if they had asked.

An original RCF passage. From an online column published in 2021, in which the writer describes six months working alone at a remote weather station.

From The Only One Here (original RCF text, 21st century, literary non-fiction)

1 People ask what I did about the loneliness, and the honest answer is that I made a spreadsheet. This is not the reply anyone wants. They are hoping for something about the vastness of the sky. But six months alone on a headland with a rain gauge does not turn you into a poet; it turns you into a person with systems.

6 The systems were about the day having edges. At home the day has edges built into it by other people - somebody arrives, somebody leaves, somebody wants something at half past three. Alone, the day is a long grey corridor and you have to put the doors in yourself. So: readings at six, ten, two, six and ten. Bread on Tuesdays. The long walk on Sundays whatever the weather, which in February was a decision I came to resent bitterly and never once broke.

14 I had assumed the hard part would be the silence. It was not. The hard part was that nothing I did mattered to anyone in the moment I did it. The readings went into a database and were presumably useful to somebody eventually, but nobody was ever waiting for them. For the first six weeks I found this unbearable in a way I could not name, and then one evening I understood: I had never in my life done work that nobody was waiting for.

21 What changed was not the loneliness but my opinion of it. Somewhere around week nine I stopped experiencing solitude as an absence of people and started experiencing it as a presence of time. That sounds like the sky-and-poetry answer I said I would not give, and I apologise, but there is no plainer way to put it. I had eleven hours a day that belonged to nobody. It took me two months to stop wasting them and one more to start looking forward to them.

29 I would not do it again. I want to be clear about that, because these accounts always end in conversion and mine does not. I missed my sister's birthday and a friend's bad year and I cannot get those back, and the person who came off that headland was not wiser, only better at being by himself, which is a smaller and stranger prize than it sounds.

35 But I keep the spreadsheet. It is on my laptop still, six months of readings in five columns, and every so often I open it for no reason at all. Nobody was waiting for those numbers. I put them in anyway. Some evenings that seems to me the most reliable thing I know about myself.

Answer all questions in this section. You should spend about 1 hour 20 minutes on the whole of Section A. [56 marks]

Read Text 1. Then answer Questions 1 to 3.

Question 1

From lines 1 to 4, identify two things that happened on the writer's journey to Leeds. (Total for Question 1 = 2 marks)

Question 2

From lines 5 to 10, give two things Mr Cowan said to the writer on the first morning.

You may use your own words or quotations from the text. (Total for Question 2 = 2 marks)

Question 3

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to interest and engage the reader. (Total for Question 3 = 15 marks)

In your answer you should write about:

• language features and techniques
• structure and organisation
• supporting your views with detailed reference to the text

Text 2

Read Text 2. Then answer Questions 4 to 6.

Question 4

From lines 6 to 13, identify one thing the writer did on the same day each week. (Total for Question 4 = 1 mark)

Question 5

From lines 14 to 20, identify one thing the writer had assumed before going to the headland. (Total for Question 5 = 1 mark)

Question 6

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that solitude changed him in a way he did not expect.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (Total for Question 6 = 15 marks)

Question 7

Question 7 is about Text 1 and Text 2. Answer both parts of the question.

Question 7 (a)

The two texts show people working away from home.

What similarities do these experiences share in these extracts?

Use evidence from both texts to support your answer. (6 marks)

Question 7 (b)

Compare how the writers of Text 1 and Text 2 present ideas and perspectives about what work gave them. Support your answer with detailed references to both texts. (14 marks)

You should write about:

• the ideas and perspectives
• how they are presented
• how they are similar or different

End of Section A

(Total for Question 7 = 20 marks)

TOTAL FOR SECTION A = 56 MARKS

Answer ONE question in this section. You should spend about 45 minutes on this section.

Indicate which question you are answering. [40 marks]

Question 8

"Young people should be encouraged to leave home for work or study, even when there is no need to."

Write an article for a magazine read by parents in which you explain your point of view on this statement. (Total for Question 8 = 40 marks)

Question 9

Your local college has asked former students to write to next year's intake about living away from home for the first time.

Write a letter to those students giving your advice. (Total for Question 9 = 40 marks)

TOTAL FOR SECTION B = 40 MARKS

TOTAL FOR PAPER = 96 MARKS