Colourful floral sleeve on an arm

The Whitsun show came and went without us, and I am writing from the potting shed with mud to my elbows, because somebody has to tell you what became of the Lady Hester. You will remember she was the pink hybrid tea Father raised from a cutting he took off the vicarage wall in the hungry year. Forty winters he waited for her to open properly, and last Thursday she did, all at once, the way a thing does when it has finally made up its mind.

The judges came up the lane at half past nine with their clipboards and their wellingtons. Mr Abbott from Cleckheaton looked at her for a long while and said nothing, which from him is praise. Then he asked who had been feeding her, and I said nobody, only the rain and the bonemeal Father left in the tin with his initials scratched on the lid. He wrote something down and underlined it twice.

I have been stubborn about those initials. Father carved them before he went into the hospital, and I will not polish them off, though the tin is rusting at the seams. I think now that was the right sort of stubbornness, the kind that keeps the good things from fading.

We did not win the cup. Mr Abbott gave it to a man from Bradford with a yellow rose that looks like a custard tart. But he pinned a plain white card with a blue ribbon to Lady Hester's stem, and he wrote Highly Commended in a hand like a schoolmaster's.

Come home at the weekend. The bush wants cutting back before the frost, and I would rather you held the secateurs than me.

Love, Maud