Read the text below and answer questions 1 – 3 on the question paper.
TEXT 1
This text is an extract from Malala Yousafzai’s memoir ‘I Am Malala’.
When I close my eyes, I can see my bedroom. The bed is unmade, my fluffy blanket in a heap, because I’ve rushed out for school, late for an exam. My school timetable is open on my desk to a page dated 9 October, 2012. And my school uniform – my white shalwar and blue kamiz – is on a peg on the wall, waiting for me.
I can hear the kids playing cricket in the alley behind our home. I can hear the hum of the bazaar not far away. And if I listen very closely I can hear Safina, my friend next door, tapping on the wall we share so she can tell me a secret.
I smell rice cooking as my mother works in the kitchen. I hear my little brothers fighting over the remote – the TV switching between WWE Smackdown and cartoons. Soon, I’ll hear my father’s deep voice as he calls out my nickname. ‘Jani,’ he’ll say, which is Persian for ‘dear one’, ‘how was the school running today?’ He was asking how things were at the Khushal School for Girls, which he founded and I attended, but I always took the opportunity to answer the question literally.
‘Aha,’ I’d joke, ‘the school is walking not running!’ This was my way of telling him I thought things could be better.
I left that beloved home in Pakistan one morning – planning to dive back under the covers as soon as school was over – and ended up a world away.
Some people say it is too dangerous to go back there now. That I’ll never be able to return. And so, from time to time, I go there in my mind.
But now another family lives in that home, another girl sleeps in that bedroom – while I am thousands of miles away. I don’t care much about the other things in my room but I do worry about the school trophies on my bookcase. I even dream about them sometimes. There’s a runner’s-up award from the first speaking contest I ever entered. And more than forty-five golden cups and medals for being first in my class for exams, debates and competitions. To someone else, they might seem mere trinkets made of plastic. To someone else, they may simply look like prizes for good grades. But to me, they are reminders of the life I loved and the girl I was – before I left home that fateful day.
When I open my eyes, I am in my new bedroom. It is in a sturdy brick house in a damp and chilly place called Birmingham, England. Here there is water running from every tap, hot or cold as you like. No need to carry canisters of gas from the market to heat the water. Here there are large rooms with shiny wood floors, filled with large furniture and a large, large TV.
There is hardly a sound in this calm, leafy suburb. No children laughing and yelling. No women downstairs chopping vegetables and gossiping with my mother. No men smoking cigarettes and debating politics. Sometimes, though, even with these thick walls between us, I can hear someone in my family crying for home. But then my father will burst through the front door, his voice booming. ‘Jani!’ he’ll say. ‘How was school today?’
Now there’s no play on words. He’s not asking about the school he runs and that I attend. But there’s a note of worry in his voice, as if he fears I won’t be there to reply. Because it was not so long ago that I was nearly killed – simply because I was speaking out about my right to go to school.
Read the text below and answer questions 4 – 7 on the question paper.
TEXT 2
This text is an extract from Laurie Lee’s memoir ‘Cider with Rosie’
That was the day we came to the village, in the summer of the last year of the First World War. To a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake; a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa1 and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week.
I don’t know where I lived before then. My life began on the carrier’s cart which brought me up the long slow hills to the village, and dumped me in the high grass, and lost me. I had ridden wrapped up in a Union Jack to protect me from the sun, and when I rolled out of it, and stood piping loud among the buzzing jungle of that summer bank, then, I feel, was I born. And to all the rest of us, the whole family of eight, it was the beginning of a life.
But on that first day we were all lost. Chaos was come in cartloads of furniture, and I crawled the kitchen floor through forests of upturned chair-legs and crystal fields of glass. We were washed up in a new land, and began to spread out searching its springs and treasures. The sisters spent the light of that first day stripping the fruit bushes in the garden. The currants were at their prime, clusters of red, black, and yellow berries all tangled up with wild roses. Here was bounty the girls had never known before, and they darted squawking from bush to bush, clawing the fruit like sparrows.
Our Mother too was distracted from duty, seduced by the rich wilderness of the garden so long abandoned. All day she trotted to and fro, flushed and garrulous, pouring flowers into every pot and jug she could find on the kitchen floor. Flowers from the garden, daisies from the bank, cowparsley, grasses, ferns, and leaves – they flowed in armfuls through the cottage door until its dim interior seemed entirely possessed by the world outside – a still green pool flooding with honeyed tides of summer.
I sat on the floor on a raft of muddles and gazed through the green window which was full of the rising garden. I saw the long black stockings of the girls, gaping with white flesh, kicking among the currant bushes. Every so often one of them would dart into the kitchen, cram my great mouth with handfuls of squashed berries, and run out again. And the more I got, the more I called for more. It was like feeding a fat young cuckoo.
The long day crowed and chirped and rang. Nobody did any work, and there was nothing to eat save berries and bread. I crawled about among the ornaments on the unfamiliar floor – the glass fishes, china dogs, shepherds and shepherdesses, bronze horsemen, stopped clocks, barometers, and photographs of bearded men. I called on them each in turn, for they were the shrines and faces of a half-remembered landscape. But as I watched the sun move around the walls, drawing rainbows from the cut-glass jars in the corner, I longed for a return of order.
Then, suddenly, the day was at an end, and the house was furnished. Each stick and cup and picture was nailed immovably in place; the beds were sheeted, the windows curtained, the straw mats laid, and the house was home. I don’t remember seeing it happen, but suddenly the inexorable2 tradition of the house, with its smell, chaos, and complete logic, occurred as though it had never been otherwise. The furnishing and founding of the house came like the nightfall of that first day. From that uneasy loneliness of objects strewn on the kitchen floor, everything flew to its place and was never again questioned.
And from that day we grew up. The domestic arrangement of the house was shaken many times, like a snow-storm toy, so that beds and chairs and ornaments swirled from room to room, pursued by the gusty energies of Mother and the girls. But always these things resettled within the pattern of the walls, nothing escaped or changed, and so it remained for twenty years.
1syringa = lilac
2inexorable = unstoppable/inescapable
Questions 1 – 3 relate to TEXT 1.
Q1. In lines 5-7, identify two things that Malala (the narrator) can hear from her bedroom. (2 marks)
Q2. Give one example in lines 27-30 of how the writer uses language to paint a picture of her new home in Birmingham. Support your example with a detailed text reference. (2 marks)
Q3. Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to interest and engage readers. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)
Questions 4 – 6 relate to TEXT 2.
Q4. When did Laurie Lee’s family move to their new home? (1 mark)
Q5. Give one example from lines 21 – 25 of how the writer uses language to show the excitement of his sisters. (1 mark)
Q6. Laurie Lee attempts to engage the reader through the description of the experience of arriving at a new home. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)
Question 7 relates to BOTH texts.
Q7. a) The two texts show the points of view of two people with a busy family life. What similarities do you notice in the way the writers describe family life? Use evidence from both texts to support your answer. (6 marks)
b) Compare how the writers of Text 1 and Text 2 present their ideas and perspectives about moving to a new home. Support your answer with detailed reference to both texts. (14 marks)