Text 1: The silver smear, by Anouk Tremayne

An original contemporary blog post.

Every left-handed person I know has the same mark. It runs along the outside edge of the little finger, from the knuckle to the wrist: a silver smear of pencil, or a blue one of biro, picked up as the hand drags across whatever it has just written. I have had mine since I was five. On exam days it was practically a tattoo.

Nobody ever tried to stop me using my left hand. That battle was fought, and lost, by the schools of my great-grandparents’ day. But nobody warned the rest of the world either. Scissors chewed paper instead of cutting it. Spiral notebooks bit into my wrist. Tin openers, ladles with a pouring lip, the chairs in our science lab with their little writing arm fixed on the right: everything seemed to have been designed by someone who had never met me, and I spent my childhood quietly assuming the problem was me.

The person who changed that was Mrs Hollingbury, who taught Year 4 and wore a cardigan with a hole in one elbow. One morning she called me to her desk and handed me a pair of scissors with green handles. ‘These are yours,’ she said. ‘The blades are the other way round.’ I cut a perfect circle out of sugar paper and nearly cried. It was the first time an object had been made for my hand.

About one person in ten is left-handed, which means that in an ordinary classroom there are two or three of us, tilting our paper, twisting our wrists into hooks and apologising for elbowing the person beside us at lunch. We are not rare. We are just outnumbered.

My son Rafferty is six, and last week he came home from school with a silver smear on his little finger. I showed him mine. He looked at the two of them side by side, very seriously, and said, ‘We match.’ Then I went upstairs, found the green-handled scissors, which I have kept for twenty-nine years, and gave them to him.

Text 2: The bound hand, by Silas Wilmot

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

In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1891, a wood carver remembers being made to write with his right hand at a village school in the 1840s.

I was born, as my mother used to say, with my hands the wrong way about. In the cradle I reached for everything with the left, and by the time I could walk my father had given up correcting me at table, for I would only drop the spoon and pick it up again with the hand I preferred.

At the village school it was a different matter. Mr Quarrie, the master, held that the left was the hand of awkwardness and ill luck, and that a boy who wrote with it would never be fit for a counting-house or any respectable employment. On my first morning he took a strip of linen from his drawer, tied my left wrist to the back of the bench, and put the pen into my right hand. ‘There,’ said he, ‘we shall soon have you mended.’

I was not mended. For two years I sat with my arm bound behind me like a prisoner’s, and my copy-book was a ruin of blots and crooked letters, for which I was rapped across the knuckles with a ruler, sometimes three and four times in a morning. I began, about that time, to stammer, and it was put down to sulkiness. I came to believe myself a dull boy, and the master was of the same opinion.

My comfort was my grandfather, a joiner, who let me sit in his workshop of an evening. He never once asked which hand I used. He put a gouge into my left hand, showed me how to follow the grain, and said only, ‘Let the wood tell you.’ In that workshop I was not awkward. I was quick, and I knew it.

I have earned my living for forty years by carving, and my work stands in three churches and a town hall. Every leaf and every angel of it was cut with my left hand. I bear Mr Quarrie no ill will, for he did as he had been taught; but I have sometimes wished that he could stand beneath the pulpit at Stenbury and tell me which hand was the awkward one.

Both of these texts are about being left-handed.

Compare:

• what the writers say about their experiences of being left-handed
• how the writers present their thoughts and feelings about these experiences

You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to.