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AS a child, I loved the smell of furniture polish. It signified early mornings and the novelty of my mother flicking a duster over the heavy furniture in our bungalow. A rackety bungalow of beams, books, and dust. It had windows we could jump from to tunnel through hedges into other gardens where we had midnight feasts with friends.

My mother’s furniture polish mornings were accompanied by wide flung windows, sunlight, and Irish folk songs. Her day to day singing was one of the background sounds to my childhood. But the polishing mornings were a rarity, because any cleaning not deemed absolutely essential was dismissed as a waste of time.“What’s the point?” she would ask cheerfully. “The dust only comes back again.”

My mother’s mind was not on chores but on what she called “higher things”: reading, writing children’s books, her newspaper articles, and the art of conversation. This was so even in her eighties, when she would berate me for first scrubbing their fridge rather than immediately engaging with her and my father about the arts and politics of the day.

Antipathy to cleaning did not, however, extend to neglecting the surrounding world. As a result of my parents’ teachings, the idea of dropping litter or not clearing up after myself, at midnight feasts or anywhere, never occurred to me.

Sometimes my mother had a new book published. Or extra articles in the three national papers she wrote for concurrently. Or was interviewed on the radio. At such times, she treated us to supper at the Chinese restaurant in town.

Allowed to bring a friend each, my sister and I spent most of the evening under the table tying the adults’ shoelaces together in the hope that, Beano-like, they would fall over when they got up. But unruliness aside, at the end we helped stack the dishes and hand them to the waiters. My writer father then got out the rag he called his handkerchief to wipe away any mess. The waiters were not there to clean our residue.

The other day in a Hampstead café, I thought of my father’s handkerchief, the stacked dishes, and my mother’s rare dusting. And about however lackadaisical my parents were at home, this was not the case when they were out in the world. From my table, I watched the crowds of well-heeled mothers and their offspring leave. The staff picked chewed up food from high chairs, swept tissues from under tables, and wiped away puddles of smoothies.

And it’s not only the wealthy leaving their mess for others.

In Chalk Farm a middle-aged woman in a shabby raincoat let a chocolate bar wrapper fall. I ran up, handed it to her, and asked her to put it in the bin.

“What bin? You find me a bin and I’ll use it but I’m not walking around looking for one.”

“There’s one on the other side of the road. Look.”

She walked off, giving me the finger.

In South End Green, a teenage boy chucked a take-away box to the ground.

“Pick that up,” I said in my teacher’s voice, even though it was a Saturday, I was not at work, and the boy not from my school.

He laughed and boarded the bus.

“The world’s my dustbin, innit.”

Those words seem to sum everything up. For him, the Chalk Farm chocolate eater, and the well-off mothers in Hampstead, any idea of the handkerchief wiping the table is gone. The world is indeed a dustbin. And other people, unseen in every sense of the word, are employed to empty it.

Where I live, weeds grow between cracks in the pavement if allowed. But there are no weeds on our patch of street.

Every few weeks I am out with my tools, scraping them away, tidying the area, even venturing into a few people’s drives to do the same if the occupants are letting them grow. Indeed, a few years ago, one former resident apparently saw me so often he assumed me to be employed by the council.

I may not be, but I am always contacting them. Whether cycling along the canal, or walking in the open spaces of London, if I see rubbish I am emailing, asking for something to be done. And my approach to strangers who litter is relentless.

Hope springs eternal and occasionally is vindicated. In Camden yesterday, two older teenage boys swaggered out from a shop, swigged a large bottle of water, then dropped it ostentatiously at their feet.

“There’s a bin just there,” I said, stepping up. “Don’t you care about the environment?”

“Sorry Miss,” one grinned, perhaps or perhaps not assuming me to be a teacher. “Oy you loser,” he said to his friend. “Pick up your litter, man.”

• Emma Goldman is a writer and English teacher at Central Foundation Boys’ School in Islington