Source A: The screwdriver in my hand

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

I arrived at the repair café at nine o’clock on Saturday morning, carrying the expression of someone whose weekend had been stolen. My college expected every student to complete a day of community volunteering. While my friends had chosen a fun run and a food festival, I had been sent to a chilly hall full of broken household objects.

Inside, kettles, lamps and radios covered six long tables. Wires curled across the surfaces like weeds. A toaster stood open, exposing its dark metal insides, and a row of silent clocks stared down from a shelf. To me, the place looked less like a café and more like a graveyard for appliances.

‘You must be our new expert,’ said a woman in green overalls.

I checked behind me. There was nobody else at the door.

‘Definitely not,’ I replied.

She laughed and introduced herself as Farah. Before I could explain that I had never repaired anything more complicated than a loose shoelace, she placed a screwdriver in my hand and led me to table six.

An elderly man was waiting there with a small blue desk lamp. Its paint was scratched and its shade leaned sideways. He explained that it had belonged to his wife and had stopped working several months earlier. I expected Farah to take over, but she pushed a box of tools towards me.

‘First,’ she said, ‘we find out what the problem is.’

The word ‘we’ made the task sound possible.

For the next twenty minutes, I followed her instructions. I removed two screws, dropped one on the floor, found it under somebody’s chair and nearly fitted the plug back together the wrong way. Around us, the hall grew louder. People called for spanners, offered advice and celebrated whenever an iron warmed or a radio crackled into life. The noise no longer sounded like confusion. It sounded like a team at work.

At last, Farah told me to test the lamp. I pressed the switch.

Nothing.

The old man looked at the table. I felt as if I had broken the lamp all over again.

Then Farah reached past me and tightened the bulb. A pool of yellow light appeared between us.

It worked.

The old man did not cheer. He simply placed both hands around the base of the lamp and smiled. In that moment, the scratches stopped looking like damage. They were evidence of all the rooms in which the lamp had stood and all the evenings it had illuminated.

By lunchtime, I was searching through the boxes before anyone asked me to. I still could not repair much without help, but I had learned to listen, test and try again. When another volunteer handed me a silent clock, I pulled out a chair for its owner.

‘First,’ I said, placing the screwdriver beside us, ‘we find out what the problem is.’

I had entered the hall believing that Saturday had been taken from me. When I left, carrying the smell of dust and warm metal on my clothes, it felt as though the day had been given back.