School Certificate

I’ve been staying at Mum’s since Saturday – it’s allowed because we’re ‘bubbled’. She’s having a clear out so I’m helping her to sort out the shed. It’s full of stuff Mum’s kept from our childhoods, mine and my sister Jen’s. Of course, if my Dad was still alive he wouldn’t have filled it with all this junk. He had everything neat and tidy. All his tools lined up on hooks on the wall. The lawnmower with its orange cord coiled neatly around the handle. It’s got bits of grass permanently stuck to the blade now, Dad would never have allowed that. He always cleaned it off, every Sunday afternoon during the summer. Mind you, it kept him out of the house. Nan and Gramps would come for Sunday lunch. Roast beef and yorkshires, or maybe a roast chicken with crisp, brown skin and plenty of crispy roast potatoes, well soaked in proper, homemade gravy. As soon as we’d eaten he’d be saying, well got to get that lawn mowed now. And Nan would spend the next hour telling Mum how she’d married the wrong man, whilst Gramps snored on the sofa. The forks and spades are still here somewhere behind all the boxes of pictures me and my sister drew when we were at primary school. And that weird round tool he used to plant tulip bulbs at the front of the flowerbeds, in regimented rows. They’d be coming up about now. Pointy green leaves poking through the dark March-damp soil. I’d be in proper trouble if my football knocked them over. The crocuses under the tree at the front are out – a mass of purple like a scattering of Cadbury’s wrappers. And Mum’s got some of those miniature daffodils in a pot by the front door. Jen must’ve picked them up when she did Mum’s big shop last week.

I lug a couple of the cardboard boxes out onto the lawn. The first one I open is full of old exercise books, some blotted and smudged where the shed roof leaks a bit. I should try to fix that, I suppose. I pull some stuff out randomly, to remind myself that however bad my life is now, and it has to be said, unemployment plus lockdown isn’t great, I am far happier than I ever was at school. A loose piece of paper drops out from between the yellow books of sums and the green ones I know are full of my reluctant writing, mostly in pencil as I was deemed too messy to use a pen. I pick it up off the grass and wipe away a bit of dirt. It’s printed in colour with a big yellow star in the middle and the name of my primary school at the top. My name is handwritten across the bottom, in neat calligraphy. I remember this. It’s the weekly class star award. I got it for supporting a Pakistani boy who was getting racially bullied. I must’ve been eleven, according to the date on it. I befriended the poor lad and I’ve always been proud of that, standing up to the bullies. I thought it had disappeared. March 3rd was the day Rodney King was mercilessly beaten by LA police, so maybe there is some synchronicity at play?