Section A

He turned it over.

Ninety papers turned over at once make a sound like a flock of birds getting up off a field, and then there was no sound at all for perhaps five seconds while ninety people read the first page, and then there was the sound of the first pen, somewhere at the back, and then the second, and then all of them.

HISTORY: THE CROWN AND THE REALMS.

Answer ALL questions in Section A.

Answer TWO questions in Section B.

Section A carries 40 marks. Section B carries 60 marks. You are advised to spend about one hour on Section A.

SECTION A: UNSEEN SOURCES.

He read the last line again.

Mr Ferrante had explained it in March, standing at the board with the chalk, because Felix had asked. An unseen source is a source you have not seen before. That is all it means. The Board finds something in an archive that nobody in this room has ever looked at, a letter, a photograph, a page of a newspaper, and puts it in front of you, and you have to read it as if you’d been there when it was made, with nothing but what’s in your head. It’s the only honest part of the paper. Everything else, you can learn. You can’t learn an unseen. You can only learn how to look.

Felix had said that’s terrifying, sir, and Mr Ferrante had said yes, it’s history.

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Source A was a clause of the Charter of Union.

He knew it. Everybody in the Realm over the age of nine knew it, or knew of it, because it was on the wall of every school hall and every post office, in the old type with the long s’s. But the Board had printed it plain, without the long s’s, in a box, with a line number down the side, and with nothing round it, no title, no seal, no date, and it looked different without them. It looked like something somebody had written, quickly, on a Tuesday, in a room with the windows open.

1. (a) Explain the meaning of the words “in the Crown, and in no other” in lines 4 and 5 of Source A. (3 marks)

He wrote for six minutes. He wrote about the difference between a King who was sovereign over a country and a Crown that the country had agreed to share, and about the room in Boston where the agreement had been made, and who had been in it, and who had not. He wrote it plainly and did not use any word that he would not have used to Theo, because Mr Ferrante said that if you could not explain a thing to the person next to you, you did not understand it, you had only memorised it.

(b) How useful is Source A to a historian studying the relationship between the Crown and the Realm in 1783? (5 marks)

He wrote for nine minutes. When he looked up at the end of it, the clock over the doors said nine twenty, which meant sixteen and a half minutes past.

Beside him, at 4E, Theo was writing very fast with his head down and his left arm curled round the paper as though somebody might try to take it from him. His tongue was between his teeth. He had not looked up once.

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Source B was a cartoon.

It was from a London paper, the caption said, from Punch, of the first week of June 1910, and it showed a very large lion in a top hat at a dining table with a great many chairs round it, and in each chair a smaller animal, a beaver and a kangaroo and a springbok and an eagle with its feathers combed, and a tiger, and at the end of the table, in the newest chair, which was being pushed in for it by a footman in a powdered wig, a very small, very proud, very cross-looking creature in a gaucho’s hat with a poncho over its shoulders and a knife in its belt.

The lion was saying, in a bubble, Do sit down, my dear. You’ll find we all eat with the same knife.

And the small creature in the gaucho’s hat was saying, looking at the knife in its own belt, I brought my own.

Somebody a few desks away laughed, very quietly, and stopped.

2. What is the message of the cartoonist in Source B? Use details from the source and your own knowledge to explain your answer. (6 marks)

He looked at the cartoon for a long time.

He knew what the cartoonist meant, and he knew what the Board wanted him to say the cartoonist meant, which was that in 1910 the Act of the Centenary had made the River Plate a realm of the Crown on equal terms, and that London had thought it was being generous, and that Buenos Aires had thought it had been owed. That was in the cards. That was eleven of Theo’s cards.

What was not in the cards was the creature’s face. The cartoonist had drawn it very well. It was a face that was proud and cross and pleased and suspicious all at once, sitting down at last at a table it had been kept away from for a hundred years, and looking at the lion’s knife, and keeping its hand on its own.

He wrote about the face. He wrote that the cartoonist had meant to be funny about the Plate and had been, without meaning it, rather exact. He wrote that the creature had brought its own knife because it had had to, and that the lion did not understand this, and that the cartoonist did not either, and that in the end, in 1976, it had been the knife that mattered and not the table. Then he crossed out in 1976, because that was Section B, and he did not want to spend it here.

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Mr Lumsden walked the aisles at a quarter past nine.

He came down from the table at the front at the same pace at which he did everything, and walked up the first aisle and down the second, and up the third and down the fourth, with his hands behind his back and the half-moon glasses on their cord against his waistcoat, not looking at anybody’s paper, not looking at anybody, looking at the space just above the desks, the way a man walks through a field of standing corn and looks at the air above it to see if anything moves.

He passed 4D. Frederick felt him pass, the way you feel a cloud go over the sun. He did not look up.

When Mr Lumsden had gone back to the front and sat down again on the gym bench behind the table, beside the grey box, and taken out his watch and looked at it and put it away, Frederick turned the page.

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Source C was a photograph.

It was black and white, and grainy, and had been printed across the whole width of the page, and it showed a square. He knew the square before he read the caption. He had seen it in books since he was six, the book with the gold crown on the cover that had the fourteen flags in it, and the book after that, and the films in March in Mr Ferrante’s room with the blinds down. A long open square with palm trees and a white obelisk in the middle, and at the far end of it, filling the far end of the photograph from side to side, a building.

It was not a palace. It was too low for a palace, and too long, and too many-windowed, with too many balconies and an arch in the middle of it like the arch of a railway station, and in the photograph it was grey, because the photograph was. But he knew what colour it was. Everybody knew what colour it was. It was the only government house in the fourteen realms that was pink.

Source C: The Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, on the afternoon of 6 September 1930. Photograph by an unknown photographer.

There were soldiers in the square.

A great many of them, in the long coats and the flat caps of 1930, in front of the building, filling the near half of the square from the obelisk to the edge of the photograph. They had come in columns; you could see the columns, still, at the edges, the lines of them, where they had come in off the streets that ran into the square. And they had stopped.

That was what the photograph was of. Not soldiers marching on a building. Soldiers who had stopped.

Most of them were sitting down. On the paving of the square, in rows, with their rifles stacked in pyramids of three between the rows, the way soldiers stack them when they are going to be somewhere for a long time. Some of them were standing and talking. Two of them, at the front, near the camera, were sharing a cigarette. One of them, at the very edge, had taken his cap off and was fanning himself with it.

And in front of the building, between the soldiers and the arch, there was a line of perhaps forty men in different uniforms, taller caps, standing, in a single rank, with their rifles grounded, not pointed at anybody, facing the square. And behind them, in the arch, in the shadow, too small to see properly, there was one man in a dark suit, standing by himself, with his hands behind his back.

3. (a) Describe what is shown in Source C. (4 marks)

(b) Using Source C and your own knowledge, explain why the events of September 1930 in Buenos Aires ended as they did. (8 marks)

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He described it.

He described the columns, and the stacked rifles, and the forty men in front of the arch, and the man in the arch. He did not say who the man in the arch was, because the caption did not say, and he did not know, and Mr Ferrante said that a source said what it said and not what you wished it said. He wrote a man in civilian dress, alone, in the entrance of the building, apparently watching.

Then he wrote the eight marks.

General Uriburu had marched these troops to the Casa Rosada to remove the government. The photograph is taken after they have arrived. They are not attacking. They have stacked their rifles. The line in front of the building is the Viceroy’s guard, and it is much smaller than the force in the square and could not have stopped it.

The Viceroy had refused to dismiss the government at the army’s demand. The source shows what this meant. The army had to choose between going through the guard, which was the Crown, or sitting down. The soldiers in the photograph have sat down. They would not act against the Crown’s representative. This is why it was over in two days.

The man in the arch may or may not be the Viceroy. But someone is standing there. That is the point of the photograph. If there had been nobody in the arch, I think they would have gone in.

He stopped and read it over.

Then he looked at the photograph again, at the man in the arch, very small, in the shadow, too small to have a face. He had his hands behind his back. You could see that much. He had come out of his study and walked down whatever stairs there were and through whatever rooms and stood in the arch of his own house, in front of everybody, with his hands behind his back, so that the soldiers in the square would have to look at him. That was all he had done. He had stood where he could be seen.

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The clock over the doors said twenty-two minutes to ten, which meant twenty-five and a half to. The sun had moved. It was off his hand now and lying across the middle of the paper, across the photograph, across the soldiers sitting down, so that the square was bright and the building at the far end of it was in the shadow of the window frame.

Twenty-five to eleven in Buenos Aires. He had been doing the sum since October, for every realm, without meaning to, every time he saw a clock, and he did it now, and put his pen down for a moment and put his hand flat on the desk.

At twenty-five to eleven on a Tuesday morning in Buenos Aires the Viceroy would have been at his desk for nearly three hours. Arrieta would be in her office on the Avenida de Mayo. There would be pigeons in the square. Somebody would be selling newspapers by the obelisk. Two ships would be making fourteen knots somewhere off Brazil. No hay nada aquí que no pueda esperar tres horas.

He picked his pen up again.

4. Study Sources A, B and C. “The relationship between the Crown and the realms depended more on individuals than on laws.” How far do these sources support this view? (14 marks)

Fourteen marks. Twenty minutes. He looked at the three sources side by side, the clause and the lion and the square, and at the clock, which was fast.

Then he began.