Farewells on the platform

Text 1: The Liverpool Train, by Hannah Sowerby

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

April 9th. Robert is gone. We were at the station by eight, though the train did not leave until a quarter past nine, and for an hour we walked up and down the platform with his box between us, saying nothing of any consequence. He spoke of the weather at sea and I spoke of his woollen stockings, and all the while the great clock above the booking office went on and on as if it were in a hurry to be rid of him.

There were other mothers there, and wives, and one old man who held a boy’s face in both his hands and did not speak at all. Nobody wept, or not that I saw. It does not do, upon a platform, with porters shouting and strangers looking on.

Then the guard blew his whistle and Robert was in the carriage, and the train was moving before I had said any of the things I had lain awake composing. I walked beside the window until I could not keep up. Australia is sixteen thousand miles. I came home and laid the table for three before I remembered.

Text 2: Platform Five, by Desmond Achterberg

An original contemporary memoir.

For eleven years I worked as a platform dispatcher at one of the big London termini, and if you want to understand people, watch them say goodbye. Most of them arrive far too early. They stand by the departures board with a suitcase between them, talking about whether there will be a trolley on the train or whether the hotel has decent wifi, glancing every few seconds at the clock as though it were an enemy.

Very few people cry on a platform. They save it. I have seen a soldier in uniform and his father shake hands like business partners, and a grandmother hold a girl’s face in both hands without a word. A station is a very public place to have the worst moment of your week.

Then I blow the whistle, and it is my whistle that does it. The doors close, and suddenly everyone remembers the thing they actually wanted to say. I have seen people mouthing through the glass, and running along the platform until they run out of platform. Then they stand there for a long moment, and they go home, and I turn round to dispatch the next one.

Both writers describe farewells at a railway station.

What are the similarities between the writers’ accounts of how people say goodbye?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.