| Grade | A* | A | B | C | D | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mark (of 80) | 64+ | 56+ | 48+ | 40+ | 32+ | 24+ |
My grandfather did not believe in explaining things. He believed in showing them to you at half past four in the morning, when you were too cold to argue. The tea would already be standing on the windowsill of my room, going cold in the dark, which was his way of saying that the tide would not be waiting either.
I was eleven the first summer he let me come out on the Kestrel. She was a nine-metre crabber the colour of a wasp — yellow wheelhouse, black hull — and she smelled of diesel, bait and wet rope. There were three rules, delivered once and never repeated: never step over a coil of rope, never whistle on board, and keep my hands inside the gunwale when the hauler was running. I broke the second twice before I understood that the other two could cost me a finger.
He worked two hundred pots along four miles of coast, and found every one without instruments. The harbourmaster’s son fitted a chart plotter to the wheelhouse one winter as a gift; my grandfather thanked him warmly and never once switched it on. He used transits instead — pairs of landmarks lined up along an invisible thread. Bring the chapel spire onto the left edge of the quarry, hold it there until the white cottage sits on the shoulder of the headland, and the pots would rise out of forty feet of green water as though he had ordered them up.
On the third morning I was sick over the side. He said nothing at all. He simply reached into his pocket, handed me a heel of bread, and turned the boat a few degrees so that we took the swell on the bow instead of on the beam. I ate the bread. I stopped being sick. It did not occur to me for another ten years that both of those things had been deliberate.
What nobody tells you about the sea is how much of it is waiting. Between the hauls there were long flat hours in which nothing happened, and my grandfather filled them by saying nothing, his eyes on a piece of water that looked exactly like all the other water. In June I found this unbearable. By August I found it restful, and I have never got the habit out of my system: I still go quiet in the middle of a conversation and have to be asked twice.
He died the winter I turned twenty-three. In the drawer under the wheelhouse I found a notebook, gone soft as cloth from thirty years of wet hands, filled with transits in a handwriting so small it had to be held at arm’s length. Chapel on quarry edge. Cottage on shoulder. Two hundred pots, every one of them written down for somebody who might one day need to find them. He had explained everything after all. He had simply done it in a language you had to get up at half past four to learn.
Nearly four out of five fishing boats registered in this country are under ten metres, yet between them they hold less than six per cent of the national quota. Quota was shared out in the 1990s according to what each vessel had landed in the preceding three years, and small boats kept poor records. That arithmetic has since hardened into law.
The economics have narrowed since. Marine diesel has almost doubled in ten years, and on a poor day a skipper can burn more fuel than the catch is worth. Insurance on hulls over twenty-five years old has risen by a third; the average inshore boat is now thirty-four, and banks will not lend against a vessel older than the borrower, so the fleet is not replaced. Harbour dues have risen in most ports, where a berth that once held a crabber is worth more to a leisure yacht.
Ashore, the support has thinned. Ice plants have closed in eleven ports since 2016, so boats steam further to land a catch still fit to sell. Chandlers and net lofts have followed. In some villages the nearest marine engineer is ninety minutes away.
Export is the other pressure. Two-thirds of the shellfish landed by small boats is sold abroad, and live crab and lobster do not survive administrative delay. A consignment held at a border for a day is downgraded on arrival, and merchants pay for the grade, not the effort.
Then there is the weather. The fleet averaged one hundred and eighteen days at sea last year, against one hundred and sixty a decade ago, as weather windows grow shorter and less predictable. A boat under ten metres cannot follow the fish, and several inshore stocks have shifted north into water the small fleet cannot safely reach.
Crew is scarce. The average age of an inshore skipper is fifty-four, and coastal housing costs mean deckhands often live an hour inland. Paperwork has grown too: catch reporting is done through a smartphone application in harbours with no reliable signal. Towed nets from larger vessels flatten pots on grounds these families have worked for generations.
Ellen Traherne, fifty-eight, has skippered the Providence out of Pentrellis for thirty-one years. “I have watched eleven boats leave this harbour and not come back,” she says. “I am tired in a way that sleep does not fix, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. But I will not be the one who ties her up for good. I would rather be poor here than comfortable anywhere else, and if that is stubbornness, I have earned it.”
Dr Rafael Okonjo, who studies fisheries economics, takes a cooler view. “Nobody is owed a living by the sea, and sentiment has never landed a box of fish,” he says. “The honest position is that this fleet will get smaller. What I would argue is different. A country that loses its small boats loses the only fishing fleet its citizens can actually see, and therefore the only one they will ever care about. That is a political cost, not an economic one, and it is being paid without anybody having voted for it.”
There is an hour at Pentrellis, somewhere between the last of the pub doors and the first of the gulls, when the harbour belongs to nobody. The water lies flat as poured metal. The masts of the moored boats tick against themselves in a wind too small to feel, a sound like a clock that has given up on the idea of hours.
I have walked down to the fish quay at three in the morning perhaps two hundred times, and I have never once found it empty. There is always a light on somewhere: the ice plant humming to itself, a wheelhouse glowing like a lit aquarium, a man in a woollen hat doing something patient and unhurried to a rope. The cranes stoop over the water like herons that have forgotten what they were waiting for. The whole place smells of salt, diesel and coffee, in roughly that order, and it hums at a pitch you feel in your teeth rather than hear.
Not all of it has survived. The chandlery has been shut for four years and stands derelict, its windows furred with salt, a gull nesting in the guttering where the sign used to be. The net loft is a holiday let. The ice plant runs at half capacity. Nobody decided any of this; it simply arrived, the way weather arrives.
There is a plan. It is in its third consultation, and proposes to replace the working quay with one hundred and forty berths for leisure craft, a café with a glass front, and a car park with a machine that takes cards. The drawings are lovely. In the drawings the sun is always out, the water is always the colour of a swimming pool, and there is always a couple in the middle distance holding an ice cream and looking at nothing in particular.
I do not think the people who drew them are villains. I think they have made a category error. A marina is a place where boats rest; a quay is a place where boats work, and work is noisy, and it starts at four, and it smells. You cannot buy the second by building the first. Once the ice plant and the chandlery and the engineer have gone, no amount of consultation brings them back, because the thing that has been lost is not a building but a habit, and habits do not appear on a plan.
The sea, meanwhile, is implacable about all of it. It has never once been persuaded, by prayer or by planning committee, to be anything other than itself. At ten past four the Providence goes out past the breakwater, low in the water, taking the swell the way she has taken it for thirty years, and the harbour makes the sound it has always made at that hour, which is the sound of somebody going to work. I would like my grandchildren to hear it. That is my entire argument, and I know it will not fit on a form.
Read Text A: The Long Watch in the insert, and then answer the questions below. Answer in your own words unless the question tells you otherwise. The number of marks tells you how many separate points to make.
She was a nine-metre crab boat, and she was painted yellow and black, with a yellow wheelhouse and a black hull.
He thanked the man warmly for it but never switched it on.
He navigated by sight rather than by instrument. He would line up two features on the land — the chapel spire against the edge of the quarry, for example — and steer along that invisible line until a second pair of landmarks, the cottage and the headland, also came together. Where the two lines crossed was the pot. He carried all of it in his memory, and later in a small notebook, so he needed no machine at all.
It shows that he gave instructions through actions rather than words: the cooling tea is a message telling her to get up now. It also shows that his day was ruled by the tide rather than by anybody’s comfort — the sea would not wait for her, so neither would he.
The incident shows a man who helps by doing rather than by talking. He does not comment on her being sick at all, which spares her any embarrassment, and instead he deals with the two causes of it: he hands her bread to settle her stomach and alters course so that the boat meets the swell head-on rather than rolling across it. That the bread was already in his pocket suggests he had expected this and come prepared. Their relationship is affectionate but wordless — she says it took her ten years to realise that “both of those things had been deliberate”, which tells us his kindness was disguised as ordinary seamanship.
At the start of the summer she could not stand the long, empty hours, partly because her grandfather filled them with silence. By the end of the same summer she had come to find that silence calming rather than frustrating. The habit stayed with her permanently: she says she still drifts into silence in the middle of conversations and has to be asked things twice.
She comes to understand that her grandfather had been explaining things all along, but in a form she had to earn rather than be given. The notebook is the proof: he had written down every one of the two hundred sets of marks “for somebody who might one day need to find them”, which shows he always meant the knowledge to outlive him. The paragraph makes this clear by turning the opening claim inside out — the memoir begins with a man who “did not believe in explaining things” and ends with the sentence “He had explained everything after all”, so the whole piece closes as a circle. The detail of the notebook gone “soft as cloth from thirty years of wet hands” makes his working life physically present on the page, and the tiny handwriting suggests a patient, private man who never wanted an audience. Because the discovery happens after his death, the recognition is quietly painful: she has finally learned the language, and there is no longer anyone to speak it to.
Read Text B: Small boats, narrow water in the insert, and then answer both parts of this question.
One mark for each valid point, to a maximum of 10. There are fourteen available; you cannot fit all of them into 120 words, so choosing well is part of the skill.
Small boats were left with a tiny share of quota when it was divided according to old landing records, so they cannot legally catch much. Running costs have climbed: fuel has nearly doubled, insurance on ageing hulls has risen, and lenders will not finance replacements. Harbours now favour leisure yachts. Onshore support has vanished — ice plants, chandlers and engineers have gone, so boats travel further simply to sell. Most shellfish is exported live, and border delays reduce its grade and therefore its price. Storms have cut fishing days by a quarter, and stocks are moving beyond the reach of such small vessels. Crew is scarce and ageing, housing near harbours is unaffordable, and larger trawlers destroy inshore gear.
| Band | Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 5 | Consistently the candidate’s own words. Points are grouped logically rather than followed in text order, and linked economically so that the summary reads as connected prose. No quotation, no comment, no wasted words. Concise throughout and within the limit. |
| 4 | 4 | Mainly own words with only isolated lifting of short phrases. Generally concise and well ordered, with some effective grouping. Occasional wordiness but the material is under control. |
| 3 | 3 | A mixture of own words and lifted material. Some organisation, but points largely follow the order of the text. Some repetition or unnecessary detail; the limit may be reached before the best points are used. |
| 2 | 2 | Frequent lifting of whole phrases and sentences. Little grouping; the answer reads as a list. Some irrelevance or comment on the text rather than summary of it. |
| 1 | 1 | Largely copied from the text with minimal reshaping, or so brief and disorganised that little continuous writing is demonstrated. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.
Traherne’s attitude is one of exhausted defiance. Having watched eleven boats disappear from her harbour, she is worn down in a way that she says sleep cannot repair, and she no longer pretends otherwise — yet she is determined that she will not be the person who finally ends it. Her loyalty is to a place rather than to an income, since she would rather be poor at Pentrellis than comfortable somewhere else, and she owns her stubbornness rather than apologising for it. Okonjo is far cooler. He refuses to be moved by sentiment, insists that nobody has a right to a living from the sea, and accepts that the fleet is bound to shrink. What is interesting is that he does not therefore dismiss it: he argues that these boats matter because they are the only ones ordinary people ever see, and that the country is quietly giving up something valuable without ever having chosen to. Both, in the end, defend the fleet for reasons that have nothing to do with profit.
Read Text C: The quay at three in the morning in the insert, and then answer both parts of this question. The paragraphs are numbered from the top: paragraph 1 begins “There is an hour at Pentrellis…”.
It means the building has been abandoned and left to decay: nobody uses it or looks after it, so it is slowly falling apart.
It means the sea cannot be softened or talked round by anybody. No amount of pleading or official planning changes it in the slightest; it simply carries on being what it is.
The chandlery closed four years ago and is now a ruin; the net loft has been converted into holiday accommodation; and the ice plant is working at only half of what it could do.
She argues that the two are opposite kinds of place: a marina exists so that boats can sit still and be enjoyed, whereas a quay exists so that boats can earn money, and earning money at sea is noisy, early and unpleasant — exactly the things a visitor development is designed to remove. Her deeper point is that the fishing does not depend on the buildings but on the ice supplier, the chandler and the engineer, and on the daily routine that keeps them all in business. That is a practice rather than a structure, so it cannot be drawn on a plan and cannot be re-created once it has dispersed.
Paragraph 2 — ideas the examiner would credit:
Paragraph 4 — ideas the examiner would credit:
In paragraph 2 Calloway insists that the deserted hour is in fact inhabited, opening with the flat contradiction “I have never once found it empty”. She personifies the ice plant “humming to itself”, which gives the machinery the private contentment of somebody humming alone and makes the harbour feel companionable even with nobody there to watch it. The simile of a wheelhouse “glowing like a lit aquarium” is her strongest image: the sealed, green-lit box turns the fisherman into a creature entirely at home in his element, while quietly placing the writer outside the glass, looking in at a life she admires but does not share. The affection darkens with the cranes that “stoop over the water like herons that have forgotten what they were waiting for” — “stoop” suggests bowed, elderly shoulders, and the forgetting admits, for the first time, that this working world may have outlived its purpose.
Paragraph 4 changes weapon. After the long lyrical sentences, “There is a plan.” lands as a flat, ominous statement, and the bureaucratic phrase “in its third consultation” makes the outcome sound already settled. She then lets the plan condemn itself: “a machine that takes cards” shrinks the whole vision to petty transaction, and the water in the drawings is “always the colour of a swimming pool” — tame, chlorinated leisure water, the precise opposite of the sea she has described. The final couple, “looking at nothing in particular”, consume where the fisherman worked.
| Band | Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Judicious selection of a range of powerful choices, including imagery, from both paragraphs. Precise explanations of what the language means and of the effect it creates on the reader. Analysis works at the level of the individual word and the wider image, and connects choices to the writer’s overall purpose. The response is a piece of analysis, not a tour of the paragraph. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Good selection from both paragraphs, including imagery. Clear explanation of meaning and some genuine comment on effect, though one or two choices are explained more thinly than others, or the strongest images are handled less confidently than the plainer phrases. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Reasonable choices, but explanation tends towards paraphrase — saying what the phrase describes rather than what it does. Effects are asserted (“this makes it vivid”) more often than they are explained. Coverage of the two paragraphs may be uneven. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Some relevant choices identified, often with a technique labelled but not explored. Largely descriptive of content. Little sense of the reader’s response. |
| 1 | 1–2 | A few words quoted with minimal or repetitive comment, or general remarks about the passage with almost no reference to specific language. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.
Imagine you are Ines Calloway, the writer of Text C. The town council has called a public meeting to decide whether the plan described in your article should go ahead. You have been invited to speak.
Write the speech you would give at that meeting.
In your speech you should:
Base your speech on what you have read in Text C, but be careful to use your own words. Address each of the three bullet points. Begin your speech: Thank you for letting me speak this evening.
Write 250–300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for the content of your answer, and up to 10 marks for the quality of your writing.
Credit is given for using the text intelligently: selecting the right material for each bullet, developing it into an argument, and speaking convincingly as Calloway. A response that simply retells the article in order will not reach the top bands however accurate it is.
Thank you for letting me speak this evening.
Most of you have never seen the fish quay at three in the morning. I have, perhaps two hundred times, and never once found it empty. There is always an engine running, a wheelhouse lit like a tank of water, somebody in the cold doing something slow and skilled to a rope. At ten past four the Providence goes out past the breakwater, low and heavy, as she has for thirty years. The sound the harbour makes at that hour is nothing more romantic than people going to work — and that is precisely what this plan would remove.
Let me be fair. I do not think the people who drew these plans are acting in bad faith. They have simply confused two things that look alike. A marina is where boats rest; a quay is where boats earn. Earning is loud, it begins before dawn and it smells of bait and diesel, and a hundred and forty leisure berths, a glass-fronted café and a card-operated car park are designed to have none of that anywhere near them.
My real fear is not the loss of buildings. The chandlery has stood empty for four years. The net loft is a holiday cottage. The ice plant runs at half capacity. Take away the quay and the last ice, the last engineer and the last supplier will go with it, and none of them will come back, because what you would be dismantling is not a row of sheds but a habit.
So I ask for something modest. Repair the quay; do not replace it. Guarantee the ice. Put your café beside a working harbour rather than on top of one. Nobody travels here to look at a car park.
| Band | Reading | Descriptor — use of the text |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Thorough and well-selected use of Text C across all three bullets. Ideas are developed and evaluated rather than repeated, and are re-expressed convincingly in the persona of the writer. A clear sense of an argument being built for a particular audience, including anticipation of the other side. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Competent, mainly relevant use of the text with some development. All three bullets covered, though one is thinner than the others. The persona is generally sustained; some evaluation is present but not consistent. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Straightforward use of the text with limited development. Points are largely reproduced in the order they appear in the article. One bullet may be treated very briefly. Some lifting of phrasing. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Some relevant material, but coverage is uneven and at least one bullet is undeveloped or missing. Frequent lifting; little sense of the speaker. |
| 1 | 1–2 | Occasional relevant reference to the text; largely general assertion, or narrative unrelated to the task. |
| Band | Writing | Descriptor — quality of writing |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Register is consistently right for a speech to a public meeting: direct address, controlled rhetoric, no slipping into essay voice. Ideas are ordered for persuasive effect, with a strong opening and a deliberate ending. Vocabulary is wide and precise; sentence lengths are varied for emphasis. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are almost faultless. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Clear and generally well-suited to a speech, with some effective rhetorical control. Sound structure and mostly precise vocabulary. Occasional lapses of register or a flat passage; errors are minor and do not impede meaning. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Generally clear, with the form recognisable but inconsistently maintained. Vocabulary adequate rather than chosen. Sentence structures repetitive. Some errors, but the meaning stays clear. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Simple and sometimes disjointed. Little sense of audience; the piece reads as notes or as a general essay. Limited vocabulary and frequent errors, some of which blur the meaning. |
| 1 | 1–2 | Very limited control of expression; frequent errors that obscure meaning; no sense of the required form. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.