My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

“MUM. You have to come and see.”

Our front lawn was covered in lunchboxes.

There must have been fifty of them.

Dinosaurs. Footballs. Superheroes. Two identical unicorn ones. A hard blue one shaped like a truck.

They were in rows. Somebody had put them in rows, from the bottom of the porch steps almost to the pavement, and the colours in the morning light were ridiculous.

Felix stood on the top step in his pyjamas and said, “Are they all for me?”

And I said I had absolutely no idea, and I meant it.

Here’s where they came from, which I found out over the following two days.

The cafeteria manager at Alderman is called Ruthie Okoro and she has been there since 2009.

She had noticed Felix. Around the third week — so about the beginning of April — she clocked that a boy in Year 3 was coming through the line, taking a water, and sitting down with nothing.