Clockwork gears and roses corner design

The night shift at Hallam Works has got colder since you left, or maybe I have stopped noticing, which Mrs Pell says is how you know a man has been in a foundry too long. The big press on bay four has a new gear blank waiting for it, cut from a bar that came in on Tuesday, and Mr Okonedo let me set the indexing wheel myself. Eleven teeth to the first pass, then the cutter runs down the face like a pen across paper. I counted every one out loud so nobody would think I was talking to myself.

You will laugh at this, but I have been drawing again. On the backs of the time sheets, in the gaps while the oil cools, I sketch the wheels the way Father used to, a big one with a hollow in the middle and smaller ones knitting round it, and then, because I cannot help myself, a rose climbing through the spokes. Mr Okonedo saw one and said nothing for a long while, then asked if I could do a border for the gate plate. I said yes before I had thought about it.

I walked past the old rose bush by the canal gate on my way in. Somebody has pruned it hard, and the new shoots are already thin green threads reaching for the lamp over the gate. It seems daft to be moved by a bush, but I stood there with my lunch tin going cold and thought, that is the only thing on this street that has not been told what time to finish.

I am sending the drawing folded in this envelope. Keep it flat, it is the only copy. When you get the job in Melbourne, pin it somewhere the wind cannot get at it, and think of the hollow in the middle of the big wheel as the place where nothing needs to turn for the whole thing to work.

Your brother, Danny