Text 1: Flour without words, by Ellen Mercer

An original contemporary magazine article.

I arrived at the village bakery at twenty to five in the morning, armed with six words of Croatian and a phrasebook. The words were mostly greetings; the phrasebook had a section on booking hotel rooms. Nevertheless, I carried it with the confidence of someone wearing armour made of paper.

Marina, the baker, looked at the phrasebook, then at the clock. She pointed to an apron, the sink and finally a pair of scales. This seemed clear enough. I washed my hands, tied the apron around my waist and stood beside the scales, smiling with what I hoped was intelligent readiness.

Marina placed an empty bowl on them and tapped a sack of flour. I began pouring. She said something sharp. I stopped. She tapped the sack again, then the glowing numbers on the scales. I poured more cautiously until she swept the bowl away, removed half the flour and showed me the number I had sailed past. Five minutes later, when she pointed to a small white bowl, I confidently tipped its entire contents into the mixture. Marina stared at the mound of salt, closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose.

For the first hour, I thought her silence meant that she had given up on me. In fact, she had begun teaching me. She pressed the dough once with the heel of her hand and stood aside. She folded a loaf into three neat movements, then pushed the next piece towards me. Her instructions were in the angle of a wrist, the speed of a nod and, when I did something particularly foolish, one raised eyebrow.

Gradually, I stopped watching her face for words and watched her hands instead. By seven, customers were gathering outside. Marina divided the dough; I weighed it. She shaped the loaves; I lined them on trays. We moved around the narrow room without colliding, passing bowls and cloths at exactly the right moment. The ovens thudded open, metal trays rang on the tables and neither of us attempted a sentence.

When the last tray came out, Marina tore one hot roll in half and handed a piece to me. Then she pointed to the shelves: eight rows, each crowded with bread. I had arrived believing that conversation was the only way to understand another person. We had not exchanged a sentence. We had made one hundred and sixty loaves.

Text 2: The broken wheel, by Arthur Penrose

An original piece of travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from an account published in 1871, an English traveller describes seeking help at a farm in a Norwegian valley.

Shortly before dusk, one of the wheels of my little carriage struck a stone and turned beneath me with a most discouraging crack. The driver had gone back to the previous town to recover a missing case, so I was alone and several miles from the nearest inn. I saw smoke above a group of trees and, following it, came upon a farm where a broad-shouldered man was splitting logs.

I explained my difficulty in English. He listened gravely. Receiving no answer, I repeated myself more slowly and with greater force, as though he were standing on the opposite bank of a river rather than three feet away. He replied in his own language, of which I understood not one syllable.

I led him to the carriage and pointed at the wheel. Then I made what I considered an excellent imitation of lifting the vehicle while another man repaired it. He watched this performance with interest and began removing my luggage. I confess that I took this for stupidity and seized a trunk from him. He took it back, set it on the road and pointed to the carriage, which leaned heavily towards the damaged side. It was then apparent, even to me, that the weight must be removed before any repair could begin.

The farmer, whose name I later learnt was Lars, examined the wheel and showed me a split in one of the spokes. He fetched a lantern, rope and two pieces of wood from his barn. I attempted several questions, but he placed the lantern in my hand and indicated where its light should fall. This was the first instruction of his that I obeyed without trying to improve it.

For the next half-hour, we worked almost silently. At first I anticipated nothing and stood wherever I was most in his way. Soon, however, I learnt that two taps on the wheel meant I should tighten the rope, while an open hand required me to pass him a tool. The carriage rose, the broken spoke was bound firmly between the pieces of wood, and the wheel stood straight once more.

Afterwards, Lars carried my trunk into his kitchen and shared bread and cheese with me. He pointed to objects and named them in his language. I repeated each word so badly that he laughed, and I found myself laughing too. I had approached his farm convinced that he could not understand me. By the time I left, I had discovered how little effort I had made to understand him.