When the river rose

Text 1: The Flood at Ashbridge, by Samuel Whitlock

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

The inhabitants of Ashbridge retired to rest on Wednesday night with no more than the ordinary anxiety about the swollen river. By two o’clock in the morning the water was pouring through Bridge Street like a mill race, and by daylight it stood five feet deep in the market place. So swiftly did it rise that many families had time only to carry their children upstairs before the ground floors were lost.

The conduct of the townspeople was beyond praise. The landlord of the Swan launched his brewer’s dray as a raft, and young men of every station waded chest deep to carry the old and infirm from their windows. One labourer, whose name we have been unable to learn, brought eleven persons to safety upon his back and then went home without waiting to be thanked.

The water has now fallen, and a melancholy sight remains. Furniture, bedding and the whole stock of the draper’s shop lie heaped in the streets beneath a coat of stinking mud. Mrs Hobday, a widow, showed us the parlour where she had lived for forty years and said only, “The river did not ask my leave.”

Text 2: Six Inches an Hour, by Gemma Fairclough

An original contemporary blog.

There was a flood warning on my phone at ten o’clock, but there had been warnings before and nothing had happened. At half past midnight my husband shook me awake. The water was already over the doorstep and coming up through the floorboards. We had about twenty minutes to carry the kids, the dog and the photo albums upstairs before the kitchen was knee deep. It rose six inches an hour all night.

What I remember most is our street. By dawn, the man from number fourteen, whom I had never spoken to, was paddling up and down in a kayak delivering flasks of tea to upstairs windows. Teenagers we usually complain about waded through cold brown water to help an elderly couple into the rescue boat. Nobody asked anyone for anything. They just turned up.

Two weeks on, the water has gone and our whole downstairs is on the pavement in a skip: the sofa, the fridge, my son’s first school drawings, all covered in a silt that smells of drains. The insurance man asked me what I wanted to claim for. I wanted to tell him that the river had not asked us first.

Both writers describe a flood in their community.

What are the similarities between the writers’ accounts of the flood and its effects?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.