Text 1: Sixty-four boxes, by Joel Hartigan

An original contemporary memoir extract.

We counted the boxes on the last night in the flat: sixty-four, every one labelled in my wife’s neat capitals, KITCHEN or BOOKS or DO NOT OPEN UNTIL WE ARE CALM. We had been packing for three weeks and had eaten off paper plates for the last four days.

The removal firm arrived at eight with a van, two men and a great deal of bubble wrap. By eleven the flat was empty and echoing, and we drove across Sheffield to the terraced house we had wanted for two years, only to sit outside it in the car for five hours. The money had not yet moved between the solicitors, so the keys stayed in the estate agent’s drawer. The van waited too, at forty pounds an hour.

The call came at ten past four. The men had everything inside by seven, though the sofa had to come in through the back window. Our cat, who had been shut in the bathroom for safety, was later found asleep inside the washing machine.

That first night we ate chips on the floor of an empty front room, surrounded by boxes, and our daughter announced that it was the best house in the world. For weeks afterwards we were still opening boxes to find the kettle.

Text 2: Our removal to Calderford, by Samuel Ashworth

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

Text 2 is from the autobiography of a man who grew up in a Lancashire mill district in the 1850s.

When I was nine years old my father was made overseer at the new dye works, and we removed from our cottage at Hollins Edge to a house in Calderford, some fourteen miles distant. For a week beforehand my mother and sisters did nothing but scour, pack and tie, and every pot and plate we owned was wrapped in straw and old newspaper and laid in the wash tub and the clothes basket.

My father hired the carrier’s waggon and two horses for the day, at a cost of nine shillings, which he thought monstrous. The bedsteads, the dresser and the clock were roped upon it, and the rest of us walked behind or rode upon the tailboard. Halfway, rain came on, and we arrived soaked, with the feather beds sodden and the looking glass cracked across, which my grandmother declared an evil omen.

The new house had four rooms and a yard with its own pump, and we thought it a palace. Our neighbours, whom we had never seen before, came out in the rain to help us carry in the furniture, and one good woman brought a can of hot tea. The chimney smoked abominably for a month, but I do not remember that any of us minded.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what moving home involved for these families.

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