Cartoon woman with Smart Strong Sensual Woman banners

Mavis painted signs for the Saturday market at Hallam Cross, and in those days stallholders paid by the letter. One wet morning a woman came under her awning with a folded paper and a carriage clock under one arm. She ran a stall of mended clocks and wireless sets, and she had a husband who said no one buys from a woman who talks big. She wanted a banner. Mavis asked what it should say, and the woman thought a long while, rain drumming on the canvas, before she answered: Smart. Strong. Sensual. Woman. Mavis wrote the first three in pencil, each on its own tan ribbon curling round the others, and when she came to the last word she set down her brush, stopped, then nodded and took it up again.

The husband came back on the Saturday with his hat in his hands and the look of a man who'd been told the price of things. He wanted the banner down. Sensual, he said, was no word for a clock stall. The woman put a mended carriage clock in his palm, wound and ticking, and told him it was sold already, to a man who'd asked for the one with the strong tick. Mavis never heard the husband speak again, which I take as a verdict.

So the banner stayed up over that stall, the ribbons going soft at the edges with a decade of weather, and every clock on the table kept its own time. Mind the step on your way out, the cobbles are slick, and mind you tell it right.