Text 1: Week one in Kelderbridge, by Owen Nanney

An original contemporary blog.

I have volunteered with our church’s flood response team for six years, and the first week after the water goes down never gets easier. This time it is Kelderbridge, where the river came through 190 homes on Saturday night.

By Wednesday every street has its own skip, piled with sodden carpets, sofas, mattresses and children’s toys. Our job is mucking out. We wear masks and gloves, because floodwater carries sewage, and we rip out plasterboard up to a metre above the floor, then shovel out the silt underneath. In one house we filled forty rubble sacks before lunch.

Then the drying begins. Every front room hums with dehumidifiers and fans hired by the insurance companies, and they will run for weeks. Loss adjusters walk from door to door with tablets, photographing ruined kitchens. Several families are living in caravans on their own driveways so they can keep an eye on the builders.

The small jobs matter most. Yesterday Mr Arbuthnot, who is 88, showed me a biscuit tin of wedding photographs, stuck together with mud. We peeled them apart one by one and pegged them along his washing line, and he stood and watched them dry for an hour.

The community centre is serving free hot meals every evening. Nobody expects to be back to normal before summer.

Text 2: A letter after the flood, by Agnes Nelstrop

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Text 2 is a letter written in the 1860s by a vicar’s wife in a Yorkshire village a week after the river flooded.

My dearest Mother,

The water has gone at last, but it has left behind it such a state of things as I hope you may never see. Every cottage in the lower street is a foot deep in a black mud which smells most horribly, and the men have been shovelling it out of the doors and into carts since Monday.

All the furniture which could be saved has been dragged into the road to dry, so that the street looks like a broker’s yard, with tables, chairs and clocks standing about in the sun, and the bedding hangs out of every upper window. Much is past saving. Old Martha Dyson brought me her Bible, swollen to twice its size, and I have been drying it page by page before our kitchen fire.

Dr Petherbridge fears fever, and has ordered every wall to be scraped and lime-washed, which the men are doing with a will. Edward has formed a relief committee, and we give out blankets, coals and soup every morning from the schoolroom. Three of the Dyson children have bad coughs already, and I fear the houses will be damp the whole winter.

Your loving daughter,

Agnes

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what clearing up after the floods involved.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.