2019_english_olevel_mj_paper2IN

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ZIMBABWE SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS COUNCIL
General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level

ENGLISH LANGUAGE 4005/2
PAPER 2
INSERT

JUNE 2019 SESSION
Additional materials:
No additional materials

The insert should not be posted to ZIMSEC with the answer booklet.
Allow candidates 5 minutes to count pages before the examination.
INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES

Check if the insert has all the pages and ask the invigilator for a replacement if there are
duplicate or missing pages.

Read the following passage very carefully before you attempt any questions..

Answer all questions in the spaces provided in the question and answer booklet using
black or blue pens.

INFORMATION FOR CANDIDATES
The number of marks is given in brackets [ ] at the end of each question or part question.
You are advised to spend | hour 30 minutes on Section A and 30 minutes on Section B.

Mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar may be penalised in any part of the paper.

Copyright: Zimbabwe School Examinations Council, J2019.

©ZIMSEC J2019

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Read the following passage very carefully before you attempt any questions.

Answer all the questions in the spaces provided on the question paper.

Mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar may be penalised in any part of the
paper
The Bombing of London

(For eight hellish months, early in World War II, Nazi (German) bombers pounded London,
the capital of Britain, by night. In this story, Cameron Thomas narrates his experiences
during the bombardment of the city.)

1. When the bombs hit, my brother Pete and I were in the coffee-shop adjoining the
Balham Underground Station. The underground is a railway line running under the
city. There was a terrible blast of hot air, and a roaring noise like one of today’s jets
taking off. Then, I was lifted from the stool and hurled to the floor just under the big
window. The glass had shattered; there were bits sticking out of everything. The
lights were out but we could see clearly from the flames just outside. I waited for
another explosion, but it did not come.

2. I was drenched with sweat, more from sheer terror, I think, than from the heat, but I
was alive and miraculously unhurt except for a couple of bruises I had got when I had
hit the wall. Pete was unhurt too. We were worried about our mother.

3. We tried to go up Station Road to our usual shelter in the cellar of the fish-and-chips
shop, but the police turned us back. There was a lot of shouting and screaming and
people running. Rescuers were still trying to get down to the people below in Balham
Underground Station, so we ran up the High Road.

4. Then, the guns on Green Common opened up, and we heard the drone of another
Heinkel. You could always tell a Heinkel because its engines seemed to be misfiring.
We dived for cover behind a mound of debris that I think was a bakery the day before.
The bombs came down about half a kilometre away.

5. When we reached the shelter, everyone was all right. Mother was crying. She said she
thought she had lost us. Lotta was singing. Lotta was the shopkeeper’s daughter, and
though not blessed with the gift of music or voice, she insisted on, ‘keeping up spirits’
of her ‘captive audience' far too often for my liking. Unfortunately, she seemed to
know only two songs all the way through: ‘All the Things You Are’ and ‘We'll Meet
Again.’

6. It was October 14, 1940, the night we lost our second house, the 38th night of the
great air bombardment of London, later to become famous forever as the ‘Blitz.’

7. ‘For fifty-seven nights, the bombing of London was unceasing,’ Winston Churchill
was to write in Their First Hour. Never before was so wide an expanse of houses
subjected to such bombardment or so many families required to face its problems and
terrors.

8. Then, fifty years later, I left my Canadian home to return to Balham, chiefly to find
out who and what still remained among the fragments of my childhood. I also

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returned with mixed emotions. I searched for old friends, looking for fresh faces I
knew then, and I could not find them. However, the streets were the same.

Balham was referred to in those days as lower-middle to working class, according to
which end of the town you lived in. It stretched a little more than a kilometre from
Clapham South Station, at the top of the hill to Balham Station. It was well served for
its size, boasting three cinemas, countless pubs, and at the bottom of the hill, the
Hippodrome Music Hall, known simply as the Balham Hip.

They are gone now. Where the Hip had stood is an ultra-modern apartment block. The
picture house had been replaced by a super-drug store. John Best, the butcher I
worked for each Christmas, plucking turkeys in a cold back room for a few pence a
bird, had gone too.

Yet, I discovered that a few places remained: Woolworths and the old public school in
Oldridge Road and the greengrocer, R. Kelly and Sons. The Kellys have been in
business there since 1938, and Bob, the grandfather still puts in a half day’s work,
helping his nephew Alan run the business. Even the coffee-shop is still there. It is
called Nick’s Quick Snacks now.

Just before five-o'clock on the afternoon of September 7, 1940, the first wave of
German bombers, some 300 of them, escorted by twice as many fighters, followed
the River Thames to London, dropping their bombs on the Royal Arsenal, power
stations, gasworks, and the kilometres of docks that lined the river. Many port records
of the time were destroyed in the bombing, but Bob Aspinall of the Museum in
Docklands, told me that there were possibly as many as 500 ships, carrying half a
million tons of food and other vital supplies moored that night. By late evening, many
of them were on fire or sinking, or very often both.

On that first night, the twins, Lily and Ethel Wilkins, were preparing to sit down to tea
with their family in East Ham when the siren wailed. Like hundreds of thousands of
other school children, including my two younger sisters, they had been evacuated
from London the previous summer as war threatened and, like countless others, they
had returned to the city as months passed without danger. “We were eleven years old
and had no idea of what was going on,” Lily told me. “The air raid warden came and
told us to go to the school, where there was a bomb shelter. There was no time to pack
anything; we just got up from the table and left.”

“We sat in the school all night and heard the bombs. In the moming, we were told we
had to find our own way to a safer place. My father had a brother in Walthamstow,
about five kilometres away. The streets were just piles of rubble, and fire engines and
hosepipes were everywhere, blocking the roadway. We had to walk. Ethel’s feet were
bleeding because she had no shoes or socks, so my father wrapped them in a scarf and
a handkerchief. As we walked down Crownfield Road, a lady saw Ethel’s feet and
gave her a pair of shoes. Crownfield Road was hit the following night. The lady’s
house was demolished.

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In nearby Stepney, Len Webb, who was twelve, and his family, huddled in the
prefabricated Anderson Shelter in their backyard. “I remember that we’d been in the
shelter for a long time. It was very hot and stuffy,” he recalled as we sat in the garden
last year.” “Then the bomb hit the house. First, we heard the swish as it came down.
You knew it was near if you heard the swish. We heard an explosion and at the same
time the shelter heaved up and down and filled with dust and smoke. We could see
flames. Then the house must have collapsed because we got covered in bricks and
dust.”

“We tried to get out,” he went on, “but the entrance was blocked with bricks and
rubble. We started to dig our way out with our hands. A lot of the rubble was too
heavy to move and I thought we were going to die there. After a little while, we heard
a rescue squad and we yelled to tell them we were still inside. There was just an
empty space where the house was earlier on that day, and a lot of the other houses had
gone too.”

“My father decided to take us to my uncle’s. It took us a long time to walk there. A lot
of times we had to find shelter again because the bombs kept coming all night. When
we got there, they were all in a street shelter, so we went in too. At about four in the
morning, a bomb hit really close. After it had cleared, we went to my uncle’s house,
but it wasn’t there anymore. We had been bombed out twice in the same night.”

Len looked up with a rueful smile. “It’s a pity we weren’t in the rubble business
then,” he said in his gentle way. “We'd have made a fortune”.

There was no end. Night after night they came. We watched from the rooftops as the
bombs kept edging closer. They hit around the Elephant and Castle area, then at
Kennington, just a few underground stops from Balham. The East End was still
burning. Grace Dalton who was eleven, lived near the Royal Docks in Silvertown,
one of the first and hardest hit areas.

She said, “I was blowing out the candles on my birthday cake when the first bombs
hit. Another lot hit the dock just behind our street. We did not have an air-raid shelter,
so my father decided to take us anywhere the buses were going. However, there were
no buses. I remember being mad that my party was spoiled, so on the way out, I
crammed my pockets full of cake.”

“It looked as if the river was on fire,” Grace continued, “and I didn’t think we would
get away. There was a street shelter, so we went in there. I was hungry and ate my
cake. It was all squashed up from being in my pocket. I didn’t care. When we looked
out in the morning, most of the houses were gone. All that was left were broken
pieces still on fire,” she lamented.

“The Council relocated us to a big house in Hendon, kilometres away from the docks,
but my grandfather refused to go. He said he was born in Silvertown and nobody was
going to make him leave. He was killed a few days later when a direct hit demolished
the house.”

Adapted from: National Geographic, Volume 180, no I July 1991 National
Geographic Society, Washington

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