Pink lily with white swirl design

It grew in the crack between the bike shed and the old bins, the summer after Dorothy Ashby's father lost the mill. Nobody planted it. It was pink as a boiled sweet, with a throat dark as stewed plums and yellow stamens that dusted your blazer if you brushed past. Caretaker Hollis wanted it pulled. Margaret Fell said no, it was a sign, and she made us stand in a ring and vote on it, which is how I learned that democracy is mostly stubbornness with a clipboard.

The swirls came from the railings. Every Friday the iron gate by the chapel was painted white, and the paint dripped into curls that the dinner ladies scraped off with butter knives. We kept them in a Quality Street tin. Come winter, Dorothy and I laid the curls round the lily like ribbon on a parcel, and the frost made them glitter. Hollis came out with his shears, looked at it for a long time, and went back inside without a word.

The lily's gone now, or so the groundsman tells me, bulldozed for a car park for the new sixth form block. So I'll ask you to raise a cup to a weed that outlasted the mill, the headmaster and most of our childhood. Pass the biscuits down the row, and mind the tin on the way. It's the only thing from that year that still rattles.