Text 1: Carving a future in stone, by Megan Thursby

An original contemporary newspaper feature (interview).

Nineteen-year-old Oren Marden spends his days in a dusty workshop beside Easterby Minster, learning a trade that has hardly changed in eight hundred years. He is one of three apprentice stonemasons employed to repair the medieval building, and he is halfway through a three-year apprenticeship.

‘The first month, I didn’t carve anything,’ he says. ‘I just sharpened chisels and swept up. I learned that a blunt chisel is how you get hurt.’

After that came the basics: how to read the grain of a block, how to square up a stone so every face is true, and how to use a zinc template cut to the exact shape of a damaged piece. Oren spends one week in every six at college, studying technical drawing and the geology of building stone.

The hardest lesson, he says, has been patience. His current job is a replacement gargoyle, a grinning dog to copy one worn smooth by seven centuries of rain, and it will take him six weeks. One careless blow with the mallet could ruin it. ‘My supervisor makes me check every measurement twice. He says the stone doesn’t forgive you.’

Last month, Oren fitted his first finished piece into the north wall, forty metres up. ‘It will be there long after I’m gone,’ he says. ‘That’s a strange thing to think about at nineteen.’

Text 2: A letter from the clockmaker’s, by Bertram Tilsley

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

In this letter, written in 1854, a fourteen-year-old apprentice in a clockmaker’s workshop writes home to his mother.

Dear Mother,

I have been three weeks now at Mr Gimson’s shop, and I begin to understand why he says a clockmaker needs the patience of Job. My first task each morning is to sweep the floor and the bench, and to sweep them slowly, for anything that falls in this trade is very small.

For a week I did nothing but file. Mr Gimson gave me a piece of brass and told me to make it perfectly flat, and each time I brought it to him he laid a steel rule across it, held it to the window and sent me back. On Friday he said it would do. Now I am filing the teeth of a wheel for a kitchen clock, every tooth the same, and if one is a hair too thin the wheel is thrown away.

I am also learning to clean customers’ watches, every piece in its own little dish under a glass, with a brush of the finest hair. I must breathe through my nose and never sneeze. On Wednesday I let fall a screw no bigger than a grain of sand, and we were all on our knees on the floorboards for half an hour before it was found. A boy is fined a halfpenny for every piece he loses, and I have paid a penny already.

I have six years still to serve.

Your affectionate son,

Bertram

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the apprentices had to learn.

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