A park for everyone

Text 1: The People’s Park, by Joseph Allbright

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

Until I was twelve years old I had never walked upon grass that did not belong to somebody else. Our street was a double row of back-to-back houses, and the nearest green thing was a mangy tree in the chapel yard. Then, in the summer of 1857, the town opened the new park upon the old brickfield, and my father, who had worked at the dye works since he was nine, put on his Sunday collar and walked us all there as if we were going to church.

I remember the shock of the space. There were lawns that went on further than our whole street, and a lake with a fountain, and trees planted in avenues, and nobody to tell us to be off. Mill hands and their wives walked arm in arm beside gentlemen and ladies. My father stood for a long while by the lake without speaking.

On the way home he said only, “That is ours, that is.” He meant, I think, that for the first time in his life there was a beautiful thing in the town that he had as much right to as the mill owner. I have walked in that park every Sunday of my life since.

Text 2: Where I Learned to Belong, by Amira Haddadin

An original contemporary memoir.

When my family arrived in this city I was fourteen, we spoke very little English, and the five of us lived in two rooms above a takeaway on a main road. For months I felt that every place I went needed a ticket or a reason or the right words. Shops watched me. The library was friendly but hushed. I did not know where I was allowed to simply be.

Then a neighbour showed my mother the big park ten minutes away. I remember standing at the gate staring. There was so much sky. People were doing everything at once: a cricket match, a family barbecue, an old man doing tai chi, teenagers lying on the grass with music on, and nobody asking any of them what they were doing there. My mother sat on a bench for an hour and did not say a word. It was the first time in months I had seen her face relax.

Walking home, she said in our language, “Nobody owns this.” It took me years to understand that she meant the opposite: that it was hers too. I still go there whenever I need to remember that I belong.

Both writers describe visiting a city park for the first time.

What are the similarities between what the park means to the writers and their families?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.