Anger and compassion

Text 1: The Soup Kitchen in Water Lane, by Margaret Coldwell

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

January 9th. Snow again, and the river frozen at the weir, so that the dock labourers have had no work for three weeks. At the soup kitchen in Water Lane we served four hundred quarts today, and turned away, when the copper ran dry at two o’clock, perhaps a hundred more. I shall not soon forget their faces as the lid went down. They did not complain. That was the worst of it. They simply turned and went back into the snow, as though they had expected nothing else.

A child came at the very end, a girl of perhaps six with a cracked jug, sent by her mother, who was lying in. There was nothing left. I gave her the bread from my own basket and walked her home, and found the mother on a heap of sacks with a new baby and no fire, in a room I would not keep a dog in. I sat with them an hour. I do not think I have ever been so ashamed of my own warm boots.

Tonight the Relief Committee met, and Mr Gaskell proposed that in future soup be given only to those who could show a ticket proving them to be of the deserving poor, lest we encourage idleness. Idleness! When there are four hundred men who would break the ice on the river with their bare hands for a day’s wage. I said so, rather louder than a lady should, and Mr Gaskell said I was overwrought. Perhaps I am. I would rather be overwrought than be Mr Gaskell.

Text 2: Thursdays at the Food Bank, by Kate Murrell

An original contemporary article.

I have volunteered at the food bank in our church hall every Thursday for three years. When I started, I imagined that the people who came would be, in some vague way, different from me. They are not. They are nurses’ assistants and delivery drivers and a former primary school teacher. Last month a man came in wearing a security guard’s uniform, on his way to a twelve-hour shift, and asked very politely whether we had any nappies.

We hand out three days of food at a time: tins, pasta, cereal, long-life milk, a bar of soap if we have it. People thank us as though we had done something extraordinary, and every time it makes me want to apologise. Because we have not done anything extraordinary. We have handed a tired man a bag of tins so that he can feed his child until Monday, in one of the richest countries on earth, and I cannot make that sentence sound reasonable however I arrange it.

I try not to bring anger into the hall. The people who come do not need my feelings; they need the pasta and a cup of tea and someone who does not make them fill in a form twice. So I save the anger for later. I write to my MP. I go to meetings. But on Thursdays I keep it folded up, and I sit down with whoever wants to sit, and we talk about the football or the weather or their kids, and for twenty minutes it is just two people in a cold hall, and that is the part I would not give up.

‘Both writers are more angry than compassionate.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the hunger and poverty each writer witnesses
• explain how far you agree that both writers are more angry than compassionate
• compare the ways the writers present their feelings about the people they help and the systems around them.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.