Returning to a hometown

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

On my first visit home in five years, I complained that the café had changed, the bus route had moved and the cinema had become flats. My sister listened, then asked whether I expected the town to spend its time preserving the version I happened to remember. People had continued living there while I was away. They needed homes and different services, not a carefully maintained background for my return.

Some changes still saddened me. I missed places where particular friendships had taken shape. But I began asking why a building had changed before declaring the change a loss. The new café employed someone I had been at school with; the flats housed families who had previously travelled far to work. Memory gave me a connection to the town, not a permanent vote against its future. I could mourn a vanished room without insisting that everyone else should keep paying to leave it empty.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Friend, returning after so many years, I found the town altered in ways both necessary and careless. New houses stand where fields once lay, and I do not begrudge their residents a roof. What troubles me is the removal of the old meeting hall without any attempt to record the uses it served. A town may change its buildings without pretending that its former life is of no account.

You warn me against nostalgia, and I accept the warning. The past was not uniformly pleasant, nor were old walls made sound by affection. Yet remembrance need not be an obstacle placed across the road of improvement. A drawing, an account of the meetings held there, even a carefully kept sign might have preserved a connection without preventing the new work. I ask not that the town remain still for my comfort, but that it learn to move without continually mislaying its own history.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on changes to a familiar hometown and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.