GCSE English Language writing, with model answers

At ten to six, Platform 4 is full and getting fuller. The departure board flickers and settles on one word: Delayed. Nobody groans. They have been waiting too long to waste the breath.

Above the tracks, the sky is fading from grey to a thin, dirty gold, and the station lamps are coming on one by one, humming as they warm. Under them, the crowd edges towards the yellow line: commuters in damp coats, students with headphones clamped over their ears, a man in a fluorescent jacket whose boots are still white with plaster dust. Umbrellas drip onto other people’s shoes. Somewhere a phone plays the same three bright notes, over and over, until at last somebody answers it.

Away from the push, at the far end where the roof gives out, an old man stands beside an empty bench. He is holding a bunch of daffodils wrapped in newspaper, and he holds them upright and very still, the way you might shelter a candle in a draught. Every few seconds he looks at the clock. Then at the flowers. Then at the clock again. The newspaper has gone soft at the corners, and one stem has bent over; he straightens it with his thumb, and slowly, stubbornly, it bends again.

Then the rails begin to tick, a dry metallic sound that runs along the platform faster than any announcement. Heads turn. Bags are hitched onto shoulders. The crowd, which a moment ago was a hundred separate people, becomes a single thing leaning forward.

The train arrives.

It slides in more slowly than seems possible, a long wall of lit windows, each one a small picture: a woman asleep against the glass, a child pressing a toy dinosaur to it, a man eating crisps one at a time as if he is counting them. The doors open. For a moment the two crowds meet in the doorways, the ones getting off and the ones getting on, and there is a polite, furious shuffle of elbows and apologies. A glove drops. No one stops for it.

Through all of it, the old man does not move. He studies every face that steps down: a nurse in a navy tunic, two boys sharing a paper cone of chips, a businessman already talking into his phone. None of them is the one. I realise I am watching too, searching the faces for someone I have never met.

The whistle goes. The doors close. The train pulls away, its red tail lights shrinking into the dark until they are two full stops at the end of a long sentence. The platform empties almost as quickly as it filled, and the noise goes with it, leaving only the hum of the lamps and the swish of a cleaner’s broom as she gathers paper cups and one forgotten glove.

The board flickers again: 18:40, on time. The old man sits down at last. He lays the daffodils across his knees, smooths the newspaper flat, and waits for the next one.

The forecast said “sunny spells”. I remember that because, later that morning, as the cloud finally lifted off the ridge and water was still running down the inside of my sleeves, I said it out loud to my brother, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down in a puddle.

It was the August I was thirteen. Our family had rented a cottage in the Lake District, and Joe, who was seventeen and had recently decided he was an expert in everything, announced that he and I would climb the fell behind it before breakfast. No map. Two cereal bars. My trainers, which were white and which I loved.

For the first hour the morning was perfect. The grass was silver with dew, the sheep watched us with polite boredom, and the lake below turned from grey to a clear, hard blue as the sun rose over the hills. Joe walked ahead with his hands in his pockets, describing our route as though he had invented it. I was too out of breath to argue.

Then the light changed.

It happened so quickly that I noticed the silence before I noticed the sky. The birds had stopped. When I turned round, the valley we had climbed was disappearing, swallowed from the bottom by a wall of cloud that moved faster than seemed fair. The lake went first, then the cottage, then the dry-stone wall we had scrambled over twenty minutes before. Joe stopped talking.

The rain, when it came, was not like rain at home. It did not fall; it arrived sideways, in sheets, and it was so cold that it made my teeth ache. Within a minute my white trainers were brown. Within five, I could not see the path, or Joe, who was three metres in front of me and had become a dark shape with a voice.

“Stay close!” he shouted, and for the first time that summer he did not sound like an expert. He sounded seventeen.

We did the only sensible thing either of us could think of: we crouched behind a boulder, pressed together, and waited. I remember the smell of wet wool from his jumper and the way the cloud tore past us in ragged pieces, so that for a second at a time we could see a sheep, a gate, a patch of hillside, before it closed again. Joe gave me both cereal bars. Neither of us mentioned the map.

It lasted perhaps forty minutes. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the cloud lifted, and there was the lake, blue again, and the cottage with smoke rising from its chimney. When we reached the gate, our mother was standing there with her arms folded.

My trainers never recovered. I threw them away at the end of the holiday, still faintly brown. But I kept something else from that morning: the memory of my brother, soaked and silent, handing me his breakfast behind a rock. These days, whenever he tells me he knows exactly what he is doing, I just say “sunny spells”, and he goes quiet.

Dear Councillor Okafor,

I am writing about the council’s plan to close the Riverside Community Centre in April. I understand why you are looking for savings, and I do not pretend the money will be easy to find. However, I believe that closing the centre would cost this town far more than it saves, and I am asking you to think again before the vote next month.

Let me tell you what happens there in a single week. On Monday evenings, forty members of the Riverside Choir rehearse in the main hall; the youngest is fourteen and the oldest, Mrs Lewis, is ninety-one. On Wednesdays the brass band takes over, filling the car park with the sound of tuning trombones. On Thursday mornings, a group of parents sit on the floor with their babies and sing nursery rhymes in a circle. My mum went to that group when my little brother was born. She has told me more than once that, for months, it was the only hour of the week when she spoke to another adult.

That is the point I most want you to hear. Singing together is not a hobby for a few enthusiasts. It is one of the oldest ways people have of belonging to each other. When forty voices hold the same note, nobody is clever or slow, rich or struggling: they are simply part of the sound. Families who have just moved here, people who live alone, teenagers who would never otherwise talk to a pensioner, all of them meet in that hall. Close it, and those meetings will not move somewhere else. They will stop. Ask Mrs Lewis, who joined the choir the year her husband died, and she will tell you the same.

Some people will say that the groups could easily rent a church hall or a classroom. I have asked. The nearest church hall charges three times what the choir pays now, and the school is locked at six o’clock. The baby group, which charges nothing at all, would simply end, because no landlord lets a room for free. A building can be replaced; a habit of turning up every week, once broken, is very hard to rebuild.

I would also ask you to look at what the centre gives back. Every December the choir sings carols outside the hospital and raises money for the children’s ward. The band plays at the Remembrance service without charging a penny, and last year its members taught free lessons to twelve children whose families could not afford them. These groups are not a cost to the council. They are a gift to the town, and they depend on a warm room with a piano in it.

There are other ways forward, and I would like to suggest two. First, the hall stands empty on most Saturdays and Sundays; it could be hired out for parties and classes, bringing in money without taking anything away. Second, local businesses might sponsor the heating bill in return for their name above the door. Several choir members, including a retired accountant, would gladly help draw up such a plan, and I would be happy to bring them to meet you.

When you vote, please picture that circle of parents on the floor, singing to babies who cannot yet sing back. Then ask yourself whether the money saved is really worth the silence that would follow.

Yours sincerely,

Amira Hussain