Food stalls in darkness

Text 1: The Coffee Stall at Dawn, by Reuben Ashcombe

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

At the corner where the market road meets the bridge, from three o’clock until seven each morning, stands the coffee stall of Mr Joseph Hand. It is a wooden barrow with a canvas roof and a great tin urn, and in the black hours before dawn its lamp may be seen a quarter of a mile away, like a lighthouse to the weary. A cup of coffee costs a penny, a thick slice of bread and butter a halfpenny more.

His customers are of every sort. We saw carters bound for the market, a policeman going off his beat, two printers with ink upon their hands, a flower girl, and a young gentleman in evening dress who had plainly not yet been to bed. They stand shoulder to shoulder about the urn, warming their hands upon the cups, and talk to one another with a freedom they would never use by daylight.

Mr Hand knows the troubles of half the parish. He lends a penny to the man who is short and asks after the carter’s sick child. “I sell coffee,” he told us, “but mostly what they come for is the light.”

Text 2: The Burger Van at the End of the World, by Danielle Okoro

An original contemporary article.

In a lay-by next to the industrial estate, from ten at night until six in the morning, you will find Lorraine’s burger van. You can see its strip lights from the roundabout, glowing in the dark like a little spaceship that has landed on the wrong planet. A tea is a pound. A bacon roll is two fifty.

Lorraine’s customers are a cross-section of everybody who is awake when they should not be. In one hour I counted lorry drivers, two paramedics on a break, warehouse workers in high-visibility vests, a minicab driver, and three teenagers in party clothes who had clearly missed the last bus. They stood around the hatch blowing on their tea and chatting to each other as if they had known each other for years.

Lorraine knows them all by name. She keeps a tab for the regulars when money is tight and asked one of the drivers how his daughter’s exam had gone. When I asked why she works such awful hours, she shrugged. “It’s not really about the burgers,” she said. “People just need somewhere bright to stand for ten minutes.”

Both writers describe a food stall that serves people at night.

What are the similarities between the stalls, their owners and their customers?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.