Source A: The stretch beside the canal

At nine on Saturday morning, the canal looked like a place the town had turned its back on. Weeds pushed through the railings. A shopping trolley lay on its side in the brown water, displaying one wheel above the surface. Along the bank, bottles and food wrappers had collected in the grass as if the wind had been storing them there.

I had volunteered because I needed to complete three hours of community work for school. I imagined ten minutes of actual cleaning stretched to fill a morning: bright jackets, photographs and a few carefully tied rubbish bags. I expected us to look busy rather than be useful.

Instead, twelve people were waiting beneath the bridge when I arrived. Our group leader handed out gloves, litter-pickers and thick bags without making a speech.

‘We’ll work from the bridge to the lock,’ she said. ‘Leave full bags against the wall. Put glass in the red bucket. If you find anything sharp, call me.’

Her instructions were short enough to fit into the cold air. Everyone moved before I had worked out whom I was supposed to follow.

At first, I counted everything I collected. Three bottle tops. A drinks can. Two plastic forks. A wet newspaper that folded around the litter-picker and refused to let go. I announced each discovery silently, as if I were earning points. Soon the numbers became impossible. The grass released one object and revealed another beneath it: a broken comb, a length of fishing line, the handle of an umbrella without the umbrella.

The other volunteers worked at different speeds but somehow formed a system. One person held bags open while another cleared the steep bank. A woman in a woollen hat separated fishing line from the reeds so carefully that she seemed to be unpicking a knot in fabric. Two younger children carried empty bottles to the bucket, taking each journey with the seriousness of messengers. Nobody looked towards a camera. There was no camera.

By eleven, I had stopped counting. My gloves were dark with mud and the muscles in my hand ached from squeezing the litter-picker. When a bag split, three people caught its contents before they rolled back down the slope. We laughed, replaced the bag and continued. The morning no longer felt slow enough to require filling.

A man walking along the towpath paused beside us. He examined the line of black bags against the wall.

‘It’ll all be back by Monday,’ he said.

I waited for someone to disagree. Our leader only tightened the knot on the bag she was holding.

‘Probably not all of it,’ she replied. ‘And we’ll be back next Saturday.’

The man shrugged and walked on. Her answer stayed with me because it contained no promise of victory. She did not pretend that one morning could repair the whole canal. She simply returned to the bank and reached for the next bottle.

During our break, I climbed the steps to the footbridge. From there, I could see the section we had cleared. It had not become beautiful. The water was still brown, the railings still needed paint and the shopping trolley remained beyond our reach. Yet the grass beside the path was visible again. The cleaned bank formed a narrow green line between the bridge and the lock, modest but unmistakable.

Rain began as we packed away the equipment. A gust of wind lifted a paper receipt from the path and carried it onto the stretch we had just cleared. Before I had time to consider whether it was my responsibility, I stepped off the path and picked it up.

The action was too small to appear on any school form. Later, I wrote ‘three hours’ in the box provided. The number looked less like proof that I had finished something and more like a promise that I might return.