A bag

A fabric bag, made for me by my mother in the early 1970s.

I was clearing out my workshop last weekend, getting ready to make things again, and there on the floor was the bag, next to my father’s heavy wooden tool-till.  

I would carry my things to nursery in this bag. In the fringed front pocket, three jaffa cakes, carefully wrapped by my mother in a white square of kitchen roll. 

Then the piecemeal dismantling of the chocolate, the unpeeling of the quivering orange jelly, alive in sticky little-boy fingers.