On the far table at Lou & Jack’s a spirited coven of women, the P&C club, discussed playground cleanliness and a range of other topics not necessarily PG. Yet the majority of my attention was on the objects and Tree of Lost and Found workshop plans I had devised with Gareth and Camilla for the Year 6 kids at Newtown Public School. We unlatched the playground gate and impish hands ate impish snacks from impish lunch boxes in impish school uniforms. We made our way to the classroom where that familiar smell of crayons and salty wetness permeated the atmosphere. Bright plastic tables, wooden chairs and a sink littered with paint brushes and dirt had this memory lost in a London classroom, age about 4, painting the petals of a pink flower blue.
Gareth and I had fifty minutes to excite the kids to write poems for their Lost and Found tree and for these poems to be inspired by special, talismanic objects they were asked to bring in. One by one the children presented us with their treasures – photographs of dogs with floppy ears, stitched together, falling apart dolls and a eucalyptus leaf were some of the many objects they wrote their poems about.
The children were adventurous and gentle, willing to write tales of their families, their wishes and their own questions. These words, poetic in their lyricism, flow and honesty were hand written onto tags and in a few weeks will wave from the limbs of a tree in the urban jungle of King Street, Newtown.
(I miss the concrete under-croft, the tuck-shop queue and being asked to wait outside in the empty playground until I was ready to apologies to Lynda for throwing orange pips at her hair.)
