Sample exam question - CCEAQuestion

Q: With reference to the ways that Johnston presents Alec’s childhood, show how far you agree that he has an unhappy childhood.

You could make a variety of the following points if you are writing an essay in response to this question.

This list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive - you may not have time to mention all these points in an hour and there are many more points that you could make.

Just make sure you know the novel well enough to come up with a selection of good points quickly no matter what question you are asked.

• The first person narrative voice is used to allow the speaker to reveal his true feelings of unhappiness as a child.
• Alec spends a lot of his time alone, “isolated from the surrounding children of my own age by the traditional barriers of class and education”. Johnston uses vocabulary such as “alone” and “isolated” to show that Alec was a lonely child. His experience of relationships is limited to his parents' unhappy marriage.
• Johnston uses the past tense in flashback to show that it is really only when he becomes an adult that Alec realises he was lonely as a child, “I suppose now that I come to think of it I had never known anything else.”
• Johnston uses the first person narration to reveal Alec’s internal thoughts about his parents’ relationship - “I had developed the technique of listening to a fine art” - and how it makes him feel as “invisible as a chair or a bowl of flowers”. She uses this simile to show how their arguments and cold interactions make him feel more like an object than a person.
• The writer uses dialogue to show the distance - because of the generation gap - between Alec and most of the people he interacts with. He is called “young fellamelad” and described as “the…um…little fellow”. This again highlights how he had little experience of friendship with people his own age.
• The descriptions of his house emphasise how little comfort Alec has in his life. Adjectives such as “unwelcoming” and lines like “that cold light lay on the walls and furniture without kindness” convey this. The phrase “without kindness” shows that even his surroundings reinforce the lack of love in the family home.
• Alec’s mother often makes decisions about her child’s welfare based on what will be most beneficial to her, as opposed to him. She doesn’t want Alec to go to school because she has “no intention of remaining alone in this house” with her husband, Frederick. But she fails to acknowledge that this might make Alec feel lonely and ostracised.
• As Alec gets older his father suggests that “Perhaps the time has come for us to get to know each other a little”, showing that their relationship has been distant when Alec was a small child. This situation was not uncommon however - especially among upper class fathers and their children - in the early 20th century.