Text 1: Before the first bus, by Kemi Price

An original contemporary memoir extract.

At four in the morning, Market Square looked as though a storm had selected only human belongings. Paper cups rolled along the kerb. Food trays clung to benches. Silver blankets shivered in the gutters. In the middle of the road stood one abandoned shoe, upright and patient, apparently waiting for its owner to return.

The night festival had finished an hour earlier. Our cleaning crew had three hours to return the square to the commuters, delivery drivers and pigeons who considered it theirs by day. We pulled on reflective jackets and thick gloves while Moira, our supervisor, divided the streets between us over the radio. Then the mechanical sweeper began its slow circuit, brushing the road with a noise like a giant clearing its throat.

People assume the machine does everything. It does not climb steps, reach behind bins or separate a wet poster from a drain. That was our work. We moved along the pavement with brooms and sacks, calling out whenever we found broken glass. Within half an hour, the bags were lined against the collection truck and the dark paving stones had begun to appear beneath the litter.

Most of the remaining festival crowd ignored us. One man carefully dropped his empty cup beside my boots and said, "There you go, another one for you." I told him that he had missed the bin. He laughed and walked away. I picked up the cup because leaving it there would have felt like letting him finish the insult.

The shift was not miserable. We had tea in the cab, told dreadful jokes and competed to find the strangest lost object. That morning, the single shoe defeated a plastic crown and a set of false teeth. More importantly, there was satisfaction in looking back. A dirty street changes slowly while you clean it, but suddenly you turn around and it is a street again.

At seven, office workers crossed the square without looking down. They did not see the thirty-seven bags we had filled, which was exactly the point. Moira switched off the radio and said, "Not bad." From her, this was a speech of celebration. We climbed into the truck and left our square to everyone else.

Text 2: The men who work before morning, by A City Correspondent

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

This newspaper feature was written in 1882 after the writer accompanied a street-cleaning gang through the night.

Until last Saturday, I had scarcely noticed the men who clean our streets. I knew that refuse vanished between evening and breakfast, but gave no more thought to its removal than to the disappearance of darkness at dawn. The labourers responsible seemed to me hardly worth a paragraph.

At midnight I joined six of them beside the covered market. Trading had ended, leaving straw, cabbage leaves, paper and spoiled fruit pressed into the mud. The street appeared a wounded thing. Mr Doran, the foreman, handed out broad brooms, and the men advanced in a line, gathering the rubbish into heaps which were lifted into wooden handcarts.

Rain began soon afterwards. It soaked their coats and turned the mud about their boots to a black paste, but the sweeping continued. There was no shelter except beneath the market arch, where the men were permitted ten minutes for bread and a tin of hot tea. One of them, Hales, held the tin between hands that were cracked and swollen from the cold.

I asked why the work must be done at such an hour. Doran pointed towards the dark houses above the shops. "They like a clean road for breakfast," he said. "They would not like to watch us make it so." He laughed, but there was some bitterness in his voice. If the gang performed its task well, he explained, citizens supposed that the rain had cleaned the street.

Yet the men themselves took pride in the work. Hales straightened after sweeping the final heap and looked along the cleared gutter. "A good street is one nobody notices," he said. By five o'clock, the carts had departed and the market road lay empty. Lamps shone upon the wet stones, and even I could scarcely believe that hours earlier they had been buried.

Morning customers will complain loudly if a scrap of refuse remains, though they offer no thanks when every scrap is gone. I began the night believing these labourers unworthy of notice. I ended it ashamed that their greatest success was to hide both the city's dirt and themselves. Their work may be performed in darkness, but it is our own comfort which rests upon it.

Both of these texts are about people who clean city streets.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the work and lives of street cleaners
• how the writers present this work and these lives

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