Source A: An address, not a symbol

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

We marked the houses with letters after the earthquake. A meant that an engineer had found no immediate structural danger. C meant that no one should enter. On the map, the letters were clean and evenly spaced. In the street, a C might stand beside a pram, a bucket catching water or a front door which still opened perfectly well. I was an architect helping with the assessments, and I had learned to say the category before I said anything else.

At number twenty-three, a woman asked if I could look at a shelf. I explained that we were inspecting structural damage, not furniture. She said she knew. The shelf was fixed inside a narrow cupboard beneath the stairs. On its underside, her husband had pencilled the children’s heights each birthday because the landlord would not let them mark the wall. She wanted to know whether anyone would be allowed to retrieve it.

I could see the line of a crack through the stair enclosure. I could not authorise entry, and I told her so. She looked past me at the door. I began to say that the memories would remain even if the timber did not. Before I finished, she said, “I know what I remember. I’m asking about the shelf.” I stopped. My sentence had offered her a tidy consolation in place of an answer. It also made her seem confused about an object whose meaning she understood far better than I did.

We recorded the shelf’s position for the retrieval team and photographed the cupboard from a safe point outside. I asked which details she wanted included. She described the pencil marks, then the screw heads, because she thought those might help someone remove it without splitting the wood. Her precision changed the conversation. The house was still unsafe. It was also a place known in small, exact ways by someone who had not stopped knowing it when we wrote a letter beside its address.

At the briefing, I kept the structural assessment and the retrieval request on separate lines. Neither cancelled the other. I resisted describing the shelf as a symbol of resilience; that word had begun to appear in every account of the street. Perhaps she was resilient. Perhaps she was simply tired and wanted something from her own cupboard. The next morning I checked that the request had reached the right team. I had no photograph of a recovery to attach to the file. I had an address, a clear warning and a description of four screw heads. For that stage of the work, those were the things I could honestly give.

Source B: From A Passage to Africa — George Alagiah

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 4–5).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about recognising the individuality of people experiencing hardship.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.