Castle with pennant flags line drawing

I was nine the summer I took over. My hands were smaller than his and the towers came out crooked, the tall one leaning as if it had heard something it didn't like. The little flags were the only part I got right. Grandad showed me how to make each one a sharp triangle pointing away from the wind, so the sea would know which way the castle was facing. Nobody on Skerrow had a flag that wasn't already frayed, so we drew ours on the stones with whatever we had.

The tide took the drawing each night, most of it, though the arch always survived until morning, its curve scraped rather than rubbed out. One August a fog sat on the island for four days and the ferry didn't run. On the fifth morning a woman stepped off the boat with a battered case and stopped at the slipway. She looked at the chalk castle for a long time. Then she pointed at the tallest turret and said, quietly, that her brother used to draw that exact one on the inside covers of his school books.

I didn't know what to say, so I gave her the chalk. She drew the flag at the very top, the one I always forgot, and the tide came up the slipway and took it before she had finished. We stood there laughing, and she walked up the hill with the chalk still in her fist. Grandad says the castle has been coming back ever since, a little more crooked each week, and I have stopped minding.