Overnight by road coach

Text 1: Outside on the Night Coach, by Thomas Ashdown

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

My dear Sister, you will forgive the unsteady hand in which this is written, for I have not yet recovered the use of my fingers after eleven hours upon the roof of the Exeter coach. There was no room within, and so I sat outside between a corn merchant of very great size and a young clergyman who said his prayers aloud at every hill. The frost came down upon us soon after Salisbury, and by midnight my coat was as stiff as a board and my feet had passed beyond all feeling.

Yet I will own that there was a kind of fellowship upon that roof which I have never found in a drawing room. The corn merchant shared his flask with the clergyman, who did not refuse it, and when I began to nod he held me by the collar lest I should tumble into the road. We spoke very little, but each man looked to his neighbour as sailors are said to do in a gale.

When the lamps of the city showed at last through the grey of the morning, I could have wept for gladness. I climbed down like an old man of eighty, and the guard laughed at me, as I suppose he laughs at every traveller who imagines himself a hardy fellow. I am resolved to pay for an inside place on my return, whatever it may cost.

Text 2: The 23:50 to Glasgow, by Priya Mendham

An original contemporary blog.

I booked the overnight coach because it cost less than a takeaway pizza, and I told myself I would sleep the whole way. I did not sleep the whole way. I did not sleep at all. The heating was either off or roaring, the seat reclined about two centimetres, and the man beside me spread his elbows like a bird drying its wings. By Birmingham I had given up on my neck pillow and was simply watching the motorway lights slide across the ceiling.

Somewhere around Carlisle, though, something shifted. The woman across the aisle offered me half a satsuma, the elbow man woke up and apologised so sincerely that I forgave him everything, and the three of us whispered about where we were going and why. Nobody would have spoken to anybody on a daytime train. At three in the morning, in the dark, we were briefly a little crew.

We pulled into the bus station at half past seven, grey and creased. I walked off as stiff as a pensioner and my legs felt borrowed. I will do it again, because I am still broke, but next time I am bringing a blanket.

Both writers describe travelling overnight by coach.

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

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.