Markets before dawn

Text 1: Five O’Clock at the Fish Market, by Walter Brisbane

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

I had been warned that if I wished to see the great fish market in its glory I must be there before five, and so I set out through streets still black as midnight. Long before I reached the river I could smell it. The odour of the market lies upon that quarter of the city like a fog, compounded of tar, wet baskets, and a quantity of fish which the mind declines to calculate.

Within, all was roaring confusion. Porters in hats of hard leather, upon which they carry boxes stacked as high as a man, bore down upon me from every side crying out words I could not understand, and I was twice nearly knocked into a tub of whelks. The salesmen stood upon boxes and sold whole boatloads of herring in less time than it takes me to choose a pair of gloves.

I confess that I was very much in everybody’s way. These men had their own language, their own laws and their own day, which had begun while I was asleep and would be finished before my breakfast. By seven o’clock the floor was being sluiced down, and I crept away feeling that I had glimpsed a nation within the nation.

Text 2: Nights on the Ring Road, by Ayesha Kendrick

An original contemporary memoir.

For one week last winter, between jobs, I signed up with an agency to work nights at the wholesale fruit and vegetable market on the ring road. My shift began at midnight. The market lives in a hangar the size of four football pitches, and long before I reached the doors I could smell it: diesel, wet cardboard and the sweet, slightly rotten breath of a hundred thousand oranges.

By two o’clock the aisles were a stampede. Forklifts carrying towers of crates swung round corners without slowing down, and the drivers shouted things at me that I took to be warnings. Everybody had their own words. Melons were “footballs”, a full pallet was “a tower”, and when the foreman told me to fetch “the Spanish” it took me ten minutes to work out that he meant the satsumas. Greengrocers and restaurant buyers came and went at speed, paying in cash and haggling in half-sentences and first names. I dropped a box of tomatoes on the first night, and spent most of the week being told, quite kindly, to move.

By six it was over. The hoses came out, the floor ran with water and squashed grapes, and the traders sat on upturned crates drinking tea as if they had reached the end of a long day, which they had. I drove home past people queuing for the first bus to work, feeling like someone just back from abroad.

Both writers describe the early-morning world of a wholesale food market.

What are the similarities between the writers’ experiences of the market?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.