Mummy's Little Soldier by Casey Watson

Author:Casey Watson [Watson, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, True Crime, Personal Memoirs, Biography
ISBN: 9780007595143
Publisher: Harper Element
Published: 2016-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

It seemed brother Max was as good as his word. He also seemed to be having the desired effect on Leo. The next few days saw him both in school and very focused, as well as on time for absolutely everything – so much so that when I mentioned the possibility of those anger-management sessions happening, he seemed happy enough to shunt them forward to the new year.

‘Going to be pretty busy, after all, miss,’ he said. ‘Busy finishing my sculpture.’ Which was in itself a real sign of progress. He clearly valued free time to be creative in the Unit over giving chunks of it to a counsellor.

And then, of course, there was the run-up to Christmas, which pretty much got prioritised over everything in school once we hit 1 December, and ushered in the most hectic, over-excited and unpredictable month of the entire school year. And that was just the teachers.

For my Unit, however, Christmas often meant more, precisely because the kids under my charge invariably had issues, so I had to factor that into my expectations when trying to manage theirs. In the main school, there tended to be an atmosphere of unalloyed expectation, but I knew better than to expect that from my Unit students. Yes, there would be a degree of it, but past experience had taught me that for children who already had a lot to deal with, one way or another, Christmas could be even more stressful than for their peers, and in some cases even quite traumatic.

Happily, our recycling project had gone from strength to strength, even if, in the end, it had only been Leo who’d been ambitious enough to decide to create a sculpture. Of the others, both Darryl and Carl had opted for paintings – the former’s out of all the dregs of art supplies that had been abandoned: stubs of pastels, stubs of pencils, squeezes of acrylic paint from long-abandoned squeezy bottles, scrapes of poster-paint powder from tins – the discovery and mixing of which he seemed to find strangely calming. The latter, in the shape of Carl, had become a delightfully crazy collage – again, using rubbish, but of a different kind. He’d chosen to use old sweet and chocolate wrappers, mostly, creating a pastoral scene full of light and life and colour, and of which he was clearly very proud.

Ria had chosen to refrain from making her own entry, preferring to assist Cody, who was making a scarecrow, and for whom any assistance was invaluable. When not doing that, Ria was happy, it seemed, using the project to continue to ‘push’ her theme. I was beginning to realise just how passionate and political she was, and was only too happy to give her her head and share her vision with the rest of our little gang.

It was Leo’s engine, however, that had the wow factor, and if one thing made me proud of my little band of refugees, it was the sense of collective achievement I got from them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.