Text 1: The toastie queen of the food festivals, by Rosa Kendrick

An original contemporary magazine interview.

Bethan Penry sells cheese toasties from a converted horsebox painted the colour of mustard. On Wednesdays she trades at the street market in Llandeilo; from April to October she spends every weekend on the road, following the food festivals from Pembrokeshire to Shropshire.

Her day starts at five, grating twelve kilos of cheddar in her kitchen at home. ‘People think it’s a cute little job,’ she says. ‘It’s a business. I need a street trading licence from the council, a food hygiene rating, insurance, and my gas cooking equipment checked by a qualified engineer. I’ve got a five rating and I’m prouder of that than my degree.’

At a busy festival the queue rarely drops below twenty, and she can serve eighty customers in an hour. ‘The regulars are lovely. Same faces every Wednesday, same orders. One farmer has had the leek and mustard every week for two years.’

The weather decides everything. A cold, dry day is perfect; rain halves her takings, because nobody wants to queue in it. Her hands are red and cracked by February, and in her first winter she nearly gave up.

She posts her location every morning on social media, and when she misses a day the messages start by eleven. ‘That’s what keeps me going,’ she says. ‘You don’t get that in an office.’

Text 2: The gingerbread woman of the fairs, by A Special Correspondent

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

Text 2 is from a newspaper feature written in the 1880s about the people who travelled to sell goods at country fairs.

Among the stalls at Thursday’s hiring fair, none drew a steadier crowd than that of Mrs Hester Gilks, who has sold gingerbread at the fairs of this county for upwards of thirty years, and her mother before her.

Her season, she told me, runs from Easter to Martinmas, and in that time she will stand at forty fairs or more. She bakes at home through the night before each one, sometimes two hundred dozen of her cakes, which are cut into the shapes of horses, cockerels and soldiers and gilded upon the top. At three in the morning she loads them into a covered cart, drawn by an aged pony named Sorrel, and drives as much as twenty miles to be upon the ground by seven, for the best pitches go to those who come first.

Her customers are the farm lads and dairymaids who have come to be hired, and who, with a year’s wages newly in their pockets, will buy a gilded horse for a sweetheart at a penny. Children she knows by the dozen, and she remembers which of them grew up to buy for children of their own.

The trade is a hard one. A wet fair, she said, is a lost fair, for gingerbread spoils with the damp and nobody lingers in the rain. Her pitch has been taken by rival stalls, her cart once overturned in a ditch, and the drunken men of the evening are a trouble to her. Yet she would not keep a shop, she said, for any money. ‘I like to see the world, sir, and the world likes to see me.’

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what selling food on the street was like for the sellers.

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