Cross with 2 Cor 5:17 script

The lock keeper at Hambleton says the Mary Ann has been seen moving upriver again, and I suppose that is Dad's doing, though he would never say so. He came back to the cut last Tuesday with a tin of white gloss and a brush he bought from the chandler's in Stone, and he spent three days on the cabin side with his tongue between his teeth, the way he used to bend over your sums.

You will remember the old name, flaking off in strips since before you left. He scraped every letter back to bare wood. I asked why he didn't just paint over it, and he said the old colour would bleed through in a wet summer, and that a thing ought to be finished properly or not at all.

Mum's Bible is still in the locker under the bunk, the one with the broken spine. On Sunday I found it open at the second letter to the Corinthians, with a pencil line under a verse I could not read in the lamplight. He pretended he had not been reading. He said the bit about old things passing away was the only part of the book that had ever made sense to a man who had spent twenty years on the water.

Yesterday we went through Bridge Four with the new name still tacky. He stood at the tiller and I stood on the roof with the mooring rope, and when we came out into open water he turned round to look at the stern. The letters were drying in the sun, plain and square, and for once there was nothing showing underneath them.

Come home at Easter. There is room for you on the bench.

Love, Jess