Colourful bird and cloud full sleeve

The painter came back to Fenley on the Tuesday bus with a hatbox and a ladder strapped to the roof, and by Thursday he had the whole of the Co-op's back wall under sheets of blue. Mum says he is a Londoner who never paid his lodgings, but he paints like a man who has spent a good deal of time up in the sky. He calls the swirls weather. He says a bird is only a bit of wind that decided to stay put.

I have been sitting for him in the afternoons, holding the tin of orange while he works. Last week he showed me the sketch he is making for the sailors' club hall, a sleeve of purple clouds turning round like a dropped ribbon, a big blue bird climbing the top of it, and down near the wrist two robins, one red-breasted and one grey, perched on a wave striped with every colour the rainbow has. I asked him what the robins were for. He said they were the ones that always stay, even when the rest have gone south. I said that seemed a sad thing to paint. He laughed and said the clouds were sad, the birds were just getting on with it.

Yesterday the sun came through the chapel window and caught the orange on his palette, and for a second the whole wall lit up like the inside of a shell. I wished you had been stood there beside me. Write soon, and tell me the sea really is as blue as he says.

Love, Eve