Seeing the sea first

Text 1: The Sunday School Treat, by William Haughton

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

I was nine years of age before I saw the sea, and I saw it by the charity of the chapel, which once each summer carried the children of our street to the coast in three hired wagons. We had been told of it for weeks. My notion of the sea, so far as I had one, was of a very large mill dam, and I could not understand why the older boys laughed when I said so.

We came over the last hill at about eleven o’clock, and there it lay. I remember that the whole wagon went silent. I had no words for it, and I have found none since that please me. It went on and on until it became the sky, and it was moving, all of it, and it was entirely empty of chimneys.

I spent the day on my knees at the water’s edge, filling my pockets with shells and stones, and when we came home that night to the court where we lived, with its one pump and its one narrow strip of sky, the place seemed smaller than I had ever known it. I kept a white stone from that beach upon the window sill for more than twenty years.

Text 2: The Coach Trip, by Marcus Lindo

An original twentieth-century memoir.

I grew up on the eleventh floor of a tower block in the middle of the city, and I was ten in the summer of 1987 when the youth club took thirty of us to the coast for the day. Most of us had never been. I had seen the sea on television, so I thought I knew what it would be like. I was wrong.

When the coach came round the headland, the noise inside it stopped. Thirty kids from our estate, quiet. The sea was just there, filling the windscreen, bigger than anything I had seen from our balcony, and there was nothing on it, no flats, no cranes, no roads. I remember thinking that somebody should have told me properly. Then I realised nobody could have.

We ran about all day, ate chips, got sunburnt. On the coach home I fell asleep with a pebble in my fist. When we pulled up outside the flats that night, the estate looked grey and close, as if it had shrunk while we were away. That pebble went everywhere with me for years, through three house moves. It is on my desk as I write this.

Both writers describe seeing the sea for the first time as children.

What are the similarities between the writers’ experiences and how the day affected them?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.