RCF Model Paper: Eduqas Component 2

An original RCF composition. It is presented as a newspaper feature published in 2023, in which a reporter accompanies a fire crew during a large moorland fire. In the examination a text like this would be supplied as separate Resource Material.

Eleven Hours on the Moor

1 By the time Station Manager Ruth Okonjo reached the top of the track, the fire had been burning for six hours and had changed direction twice. What had started at eleven that morning as a thin brown line above the reservoir was now a front nearly two kilometres wide, moving uphill towards a plantation of young conifers, and she had eleven firefighters and four hoses to stop it with.

7 Moorland fires do not behave like house fires. There is no roof to come off and no room to be trapped in, and for that reason people assume they are the safer of the two. Okonjo has been doing this for nineteen years and she does not think so. "In a house you know where the fire is," she says. "Out here it can be under your feet. Peat burns downwards. You can put out everything you can see and come back the next morning to find it has travelled forty metres underground and come up somewhere else."

15 The crew works in pairs, beating and damping, moving along the line in short bursts. Nobody stands still for long. Twice during the afternoon the wind turns and the whole line has to withdraw two hundred metres and start again, and both times nobody says anything about it; they simply pick up the beaters and walk backwards down the hill. The smoke is not black but a pale grey-brown, and it does not rise cleanly. It lies along the ground in sheets and moves when the wind moves, so that a firefighter forty metres away disappears completely and then returns.

24 At about seven in the evening a young firefighter named Dan Whitelaw put his foot through the surface into burning peat. He was out again in under a second, helped by the man beside him, and the boot was undamaged. He laughed about it, in the way people laugh when something has happened very quickly. Okonjo did not laugh. She stopped the whole line for four minutes, made him show her the boot, and then sent two people to walk the ground ahead with poles.

31 "That is the bit nobody films," she said afterwards. "You will see the flames on the news tonight. You will not see me standing in the dark counting eleven people, twice, because I got to nine the first time and my stomach went."

35 They were still there at ten o'clock. The plantation did not burn. Two days later the fire came up again three hundred metres to the west, exactly as she had said it would, and a different crew went out to it.

An original RCF composition written in a nineteenth-century voice. It is presented as three entries from the diary of a young man who served as a volunteer in a town fire brigade in 1867. It is not the diary of any real person.

From the diary of a volunteer fireman, October 1867

1 Tuesday, 8th October. — A quiet week, and I confess I am glad of it, though I would not say so at the station. We exercised the engine for an hour in the yard and I was again put upon the handles, which is the labour of a horse and the dignity of none. Bagshaw says that after two years a man is permitted the branch pipe. I have been eleven months. I do not complain of it in his hearing.

7 Thursday, 10th October. — At a quarter past two this morning the bell went for Harrop's mill, and I write this at nine at night with my hands wrapped, being unable to hold the pen otherwise.

10 I had thought I knew what a fire was. I have seen four, and at every one of them I have stood in the street among the crowd and worked the handles and thought myself in the middle of the business. I was not in the middle of anything. Until last night I had never been inside a building that was burning, and I hope I have made my last mistake in supposing the two to be the same thing.

16 What I chiefly remember is the noise. I had expected it to roar, and it did not roar; it made a sound like a great crowd a long way off, all talking at once, and every now and then something above us would go with a crack like a gun and I would find that I had stopped and that Bagshaw had hold of my collar. Twice he had hold of my collar. He has said nothing about it to-day and I think he will not.

23 We got the two men out of the picking room and I helped to carry the second, who was very heavy and did not speak, and I have since been told he will do well enough. I did not do this bravely. I did it because Bagshaw said take his legs and I have been in the habit these eleven months of doing what Bagshaw says. I set this down honestly because I find that everybody in the town has decided we were heroes, and I have been shaken by the hand eleven times in the street to-day by men who were in their beds, and it has made me low rather than proud.

32 Saturday, 12th October. — Better. My hands are stiff but I have my sleep again, which I did not have on Thursday night or Friday. I do not care to write what I saw when I closed my eyes.

35 Bagshaw came by the shop this afternoon on his way to the yard and said only that I would be wanted at exercise on Monday and that I might take the branch pipe if I liked. He did not look at me when he said it and I did not thank him, and I believe we were both content that it should be done in that way. I find I am not afraid to go back. I had expected to be, and I am not, and I do not entirely understand it.

Answer all the questions in this section. You are advised to spend about 1 hour.

Answer questions A1 and A2 on Text 1 before reading Text 2.

A1 [3 marks]

Read Text 1, Eleven Hours on the Moor.

(a) How long had the fire been burning when Ruth Okonjo reached the top of the track? [1]

(b) Why does Okonjo say that a moorland fire can be under your feet? [1]

(c) What did Okonjo do after Dan Whitelaw put his foot through the surface? [1]

A2 [10 marks]

How does the writer of Text 1 try to show that the work on the moor was dangerous and difficult?

You should comment on:

[10]

• what the writer says;
• the writer's use of language, tone and structure.

A3 [3 marks]

Now read Text 2, the diary of a volunteer fireman.

(a) What task was the writer given when the engine was exercised in the yard? [1]

(b) Why is the writer unable to hold his pen in the usual way on Thursday? [1]

(c) What did Bagshaw offer the writer on Saturday afternoon? [1]

A4 [10 marks]

How well do you think the diary captures the writer's feelings about the fire at Harrop's mill?

You should comment on:

[10]

• what his feelings are, across the three entries;
• how well you think the diary makes those feelings clear.

A5 [4 marks]

To answer the following questions you must use both texts.

Explain what we learn about the equipment the firefighters in the two texts had to work with.

[4]

A6 [10 marks]

Both of these texts are about people fighting a fire.

Compare:

[10]

• the dangers the firefighters in the two texts faced;
• how the two writers get their feelings about those dangers across to the reader.

Answer both questions. Spend about 30 minutes on each: roughly five minutes planning and twenty-five writing.

Twenty per cent of the marks for this section are for spelling, punctuation and the accurate use of grammar. Presentational features such as columns and boxes are not what is being marked, so do not draw them.

B1 [20 marks]

Your local fire service has proposed closing your nearest station at night and covering the area from a station twelve miles away.

Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper giving your views on the proposal.

[20]

B2 [20 marks]

A website for young people is running a series called The first time I was really frightened.

Write an article for the series about a time when you had to do something that frightened you, and what you learned from it.

[20]