Text 1: The cupboard of stories, by Nia Hollis

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

Every Saturday morning, the back room of the old railway station smells of cardboard and coffee. I have come to the Memory Box to watch Salma Kaur help people decide what deserves to survive.

Dan brings a shoebox of photographs from the factory where his mother worked. The factory closed years ago, and none of the pictures has a name on the back. He is afraid that the faces will become strangers. Mrs Bowen carries a recipe notebook whose pages have curled after a leak in her roof. She wants her grandchildren to be able to read it.

Salma asks what each owner knows before she records anything. She scans the photographs and writes ‘date uncertain’ rather than making a guess. ‘An uncertain date is better than a confident lie,’ she says. She gives people copies and returns the original objects. When Mr Parry says that he wants his photograph kept but not shown online, Salma offers to store it privately.

By lunchtime, Dan has spread three photographs across the table. Salma enlarges one of them, and he recognises his aunt standing beside a row of workers. He leaves promising to ask her what she remembers. The cupboard is still untidy, but its stories no longer seem entirely lost.

Text 2: Pages from a museum keeper’s diary, by Albert Mowbray

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

8th October, 1891. The council has given me two rooms above its offices for the town museum. Mr Seddon brought a dented tin lunch pail from the closed glassworks. His son has never seen the place where he worked, and he hopes the pail will explain something of it. Mrs Latham brought a packet of letters found when her mother died. She wished them kept as proof that her family lived here before the new road was built.

The committee’s rule is plain: objects of public importance may be accepted, but private keepsakes have no proper place in the collection. I entered the lunch pail in the ledger. I returned the letters.

12th October. Mrs Latham asked whether the names in the letters could at least be written down. I told her that the museum had no room for such things. She took the packet away without complaint, which made my answer harder to bear.

20th October. The chairman says visitors want machinery, not old photographs or family stories. I have been ordered to put the ordinary objects aside. Yet the gallery looks strangely empty, and I cannot help thinking that the workers’ lives are being removed from the story of the town. I have written the names from Mrs Latham’s packet in my own notebook, though they will not appear in the museum catalogue.

Write a comparison of the two texts. In your response, cover:

• why people bring objects or papers to be preserved
• how the people responsible decide what to keep
• how the writers present these experiences

Use references to both texts and make it clear which text you are referring to.