Leave Taking: Overview (AQA GCSE English Literature): Revision Note
Exam code: 8702
Leave Taking: Overview
The Leave Taking question is part of Paper 2, Section A of your GCSE examination. You are expected to write one essay-length answer to one set question and, unlike with the Shakespeare and 19th-century novel questions, you will not be given an extract from the text. This can seem daunting at first, but this page contains some helpful information, and links to more detailed revision note pages, that will enable you to feel confident answering any question on Leave Taking. This page includes:
Who is Winsome Pinnock?
A summary of Leave Taking
A brief overview of what is required in the exam
Leave Taking characters
Leave Taking context
Leave Taking themes
Leave Taking quotes
Top tips for the highest grade
Who is Winsome Pinnock?
Winsome Pinnock is a British playwright, born in London to Jamaican parents who came to Britain as part of the Windrush generation. She is often described as the godmother of Black British playwriting. When the National Theatre staged Leave Taking in 1994, she became the first Black British woman to have a play produced there.
Leave Taking was her first full-length play. It opened at the Liverpool Playhouse in November 1987 and won the George Devine Award in 1991. Like Enid’s daughters, Pinnock grew up in London with parents whose home was somewhere else, and the play’s central tension comes out of that: a mother holds on to her Jamaican values while her British-born daughters work out who they are.
Pinnock also shaped the writers who came after her, and is named as one of the playwrights behind the in-yer-face generation of British drama. Her own choices are deliberate ones. She uses a realist form, a single domestic setting and Jamaican patois to insist that this family’s life belongs on a British stage. For more on how she does it, see the Leave Taking: Writer’s Methods and Techniques page.
Leave Taking summary
Leave Taking is a play by Winsome Pinnock, first performed in 1987 and set in 1980s Britain. It follows a Jamaican immigrant family in London and the widening gap between a mother and the daughters she has raised in a country that marginalises them.
Enid, the matriarch, takes her daughters Del and Viv to Mai, an Obeah woman, for a reading. Enid fears that Del is pregnant, and suspects that her sister Cynthia in Jamaica is stealing the money she sends home for their mother. Del is scornful of the whole business; Viv tries to keep the peace.
The family fractures. Enid learns by telephone that her mother has died. Grieving, and drinking, she opens up to Viv about her childhood in Jamaica, her pride, her homesickness, and the money she has quietly saved for Viv’s university education — and admits that she wants to go home.
Del, pregnant as Enid feared, moves in with Mai. Viv, meanwhile, walks out of her English Literature exam, frustrated by studying a literature that has nothing to do with her life. Brod, Enid’s old friend, tells Del the truth about her father: a hard-working, loving man broken by the way Britain treated him, who became violent, and whom Enid left when Del was a baby.
Under Mai’s teaching, Del discovers she has the gift of Obeah herself. Mai, whose heart is failing, hands over her book of spells. Del’s first client is Enid. The play ends with Del reading her mother’s palm as the two women, at last, begin to understand each other.
For a more detailed summary, please see the Leave Taking: Plot Summary page.
How is Leave Taking assessed in the exam?
Paper 2 requires you to answer four questions (three on poetry) in 2hrs 15min. That means you have approximately 45 minutes to plan, write and check your Leave Taking essay
Paper 2 is worth 96 marks and accounts for 60% of your overall GCSE grade
The Leave Taking essay is worth 34 marks in total, because it also includes 4 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar
Section A of Paper 2 contains the Leave Taking question and you are required to answer only one of the two printed questions on the play
Unlike the Shakespeare and 19th-century novel questions, you will not receive an extract of the play in your exam
It is also a closed-book exam, which means you will not have access to a copy of the text in your exam either
You will be asked a question that asks you to analyse and write in detail about an aspect of Leave Taking
For a much more detailed guide on answering the Leave Taking question, please see our revision notes on How to Answer the Modern Prose and Drama Essay Question.
Leave Taking characters
The characters you should focus on when revising Leave Taking are:
Enid
Del Matthews
Viv Matthews
Mai
Brod
Cynthia
It is always vital to remember — when considering Leave Taking, or any text — that characters are deliberate constructions created by a playwright for a purpose. These characters often represent ideas, or belief systems, and a writer like Pinnock uses them to explore those ideas. For more details, please see the Leave Taking: Characters revision notes page.
Leave Taking context
Understanding how to include context in a GCSE essay is challenging, so it is first necessary to figure out what examiners really mean when they talk about context. They define context not as historical information, or biographical facts about a writer, but as the ideas and perspectives explored by a writer through their text. Therefore, the Leave Taking context you should explore in your essay response is not a history of the Windrush generation, or facts about Winsome Pinnock’s own life, but ideas about:
Belonging and the immigrant experience
Attitudes to single mothers
Jamaican culture and language
Lots of these ideas and perspectives are still relevant today, so your own opinions on them are valid, and examiners welcome them in an essay. For a detailed breakdown of the contextual topics listed above, see the Leave Taking: Context page.
Leave Taking themes
Understanding the themes that are prevalent in Leave Taking will enable you to reach the highest levels of the GCSE mark scheme. This is because to be rewarded top marks on your essay, you need to take what examiners call a “conceptualised approach”: a detailed and perceptive exploration of Pinnock’s ideas and intentions. The main themes explored by Pinnock in Leave Taking are:
Unbelonging and identity
Hope and aspiration
Family
Education
You are encouraged to explore other themes that Pinnock examines in her play, because bringing original ideas when interpreting a text is always rewarded highly at GCSE. However, the above list makes a great place to start, and detailed breakdowns of each of these themes can be found on our Leave Taking: Themes page.
Leave Taking quotes
It is of course important to learn quotations for your Leave Taking exam question, especially since it is a closed-book exam and you will not have a printed extract on your paper. However, it is worth stating here that examiners value “references” to the play just as highly as direct quotations: this is when students pinpoint individual moments in the play, rather than quoting what the characters say. In order to select references really successfully, it is extremely important that you know Leave Taking itself very well, including the order of the events that take place. This detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of the plot will help you to revise the chronology of Leave Taking.
Of course, it is also useful to revise a few — very well selected — quotations from the play that can be used in a variety of essays on different themes and characters. Luckily, we have made that selection for you! For a detailed analysis of each of these quotations, see our Leave Taking: Key Theme Quotations page, and for quotations grouped by character see the Leave Taking: Character Quotations page.
Top tips for the highest grade
Please see our revision pages on the Modern Prose and Drama exam for guides on:
Sources
Pinnock, W. (2018). Leave Taking. NHB Modern Plays.
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