Valuing what is threatened

Text 1: What Passed on Fallow Common, by Nathaniel Ashby

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

Sir, I write to give your readers a true account of what passed on Fallow Common last week, since the report in your columns described it as a riot, which it was not. For as long as anyone in Brindle can remember, the common has been a ragged place of gorse and thistle and puddles, where the geese wander and the boys fight and the old women gather sticks. Nobody admired it. The vicar called it an eyesore and the schoolmaster called it a swamp. I confess I scarcely looked at it myself, though I crossed it twice a day for thirty years.

Then on Monday morning Mr Crane’s men came with posts and rails and began to fence it in, under an order nobody in the village had seen. By noon the whole parish was standing at the edge of the gorse. I heard men who had cursed the common all their lives speak of it as though it were their mother’s grave. Widow Hollis, who is past eighty, said that she had gathered her winter fuel there since she was a child and her mother before her, and that without it she must go to the workhouse. A shepherd stood weeping openly. It was as if each of us discovered in a single morning that the eyesore was the one piece of the earth we owned in common.

That night the fences came down. I will not say by whose hands, but I will say that no one was hurt, that the rails were stacked neatly by the road for Mr Crane to collect, and that the geese were back on the common by breakfast. I do not know whether the law is with us. I know that we shall never call it an eyesore again.

Text 2: Saving Westcroft Library, by Gemma Royle

An original contemporary article.

When the council announced that the Westcroft branch library would close in the spring, I signed the petition within the hour, shared it with everyone I knew, and wrote an indignant post about how libraries are the beating heart of a community. Then I realised I could not remember the last time I had been inside one. I had to look up its opening hours.

I was not alone. At the first campaign meeting, held in the library itself, the room was packed with people who confessed, a little sheepishly, that they had not borrowed a book in years. The only regulars were a handful of pensioners, two mothers who came to the toddler rhyme time, and a man called Gerald who used the computers every day because he had no internet at home and was applying for jobs. When Gerald stood up and explained what the closure would mean for him, the room went very quiet. Most of us had been fighting for an idea of a library. He was fighting for the actual one.

We won, in the end, after a six-month campaign of marches, letters and a sponsored read-a-thon. The library stayed open. And here is the uncomfortable part. A year later I went back, and it was almost exactly as empty as before: the pensioners, the rhyme time, Gerald at his computer. The crowds who had marched had gone back to their e-readers. I have started going on Saturday mornings, partly out of guilt. If we only love something when it is about to disappear, I am not sure we deserve to keep it.

‘Both writers suggest that communities only value things once they are threatened.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each community and the place it tries to save
• explain how far you agree that both communities only valued these places once they were threatened
• compare the ways the writers present the community’s response to the threat.

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