Historic A Levels: would you cope?
Going up into the loft, unless this is an everyday occurrence, can be a chastening experience: all those memories and relics of the past gathering dust.
Routing through the accumulated detritus recently I came across my old French A level papers. They were scary.
Paper I on June 11 1964 lasted from 2 – 5 and consisted of two questions. The first was a prose translation. (At my school translation into the language was called “prose”, translation out of the language (into English) was called “unseen.” I never really understood why.)
Here’s a sample: “She lingered for a moment by the library door but did not dare open it, thinking that Charles would be furious at such an interruption. The dining-room was empty. She went through it and found a dark passage which she followed, until she came to a heavy oak door. Hoping this led to the kitchen, she opened it timidly.”
The second question was an essay in French, of around 250 words, on one of 5 topics, three of which were as follows:
Le monde mécanisé – enfer ou paradis?
Le racisme.
Les supermarchés.
Paper II consisted of 2 unseens, for which 1½ hours was allowed.
Paper III was the set books paper. In the 6th form we studied 4 books: Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière, and the first question was: “Explain why this play still interests the modern audience or reader.” The question setter obviously had a higher opinion of Molière’s modern reputation than the vast majority of English students trying to answer the question.
Our second set book was Jacques de Lacretelle’s Silbermann, a study of anti-semitism in 20s France. Lauded in its time as one of the 50 great French novels of the half century, it still has a powerful message today, with an increase in anti-semitism in France, a phenomenon that no-one has been able to explain.
Then came a play by an author perhaps more celebrated during the 20s and 30s, Jules Romains: Knock ou le triomphe de la médecine. It contains a celebrated one-liner which goes something like this: Healthy people are just people who don’t realise they are ill.
The final book was, and remains, an undisputed masterpiece, although I do wonder whether we considered it so as we laboriously ploughed through it: Les trois contes, by Gustave Flaubert, where, in the final story, Un coeur simple, the simple, unaffected Félicité sees the image of her pet parrot hovering over her deathbed. It was to inspire Julian Barnes’ 1984 novel Flaubert’s parrot.
Some years ago I gave a talk to one of our local schools and innocently asked the A level French teacher what the set books were that year. She looked at me blankly for a moment before admitting that these days, they don’t do set books.
I’ll see if I can dig up my old German papers next.
