Daisy with script along a stem

The daisies came up along the railway embankment this week, the first thing that has bothered to grow since the coal lorries started parking outside the Co-op. Dad cut a bunch for the kitchen table and I stood there with my hands in the washing-up water thinking of the stem you used to snap off at the knuckle to make it bend. You called it a telephone wire. Mum said you were too clever for your own good, and you wrote back that she had never been clever enough to know it.

Mr Pollard from the bank came by on Tuesday to ask after the mortgage again. He stood on the step with his hat in both hands like a man at a funeral, and I gave him tea in the good cups, because that is what Mum would have done, and because I wanted him to see we still had good cups. I did not tell him about the tin under the stairs. I am only telling you because you were the one who never believed Mum's stories about the house being haunted, and I need someone to say I was right to be frightened of the bank and not of the house.

The letter from the Ministry came yesterday. Ronnie is coming home in March, and they have stopped saying missing in the leaflets. I walked up to the ridge with the envelope in my coat and read it twice in the wind, then pressed a daisy from the verge between its pages, the way you used to.

Write soon. Tell me what you have decided about Charles. And tell me you still believe things will turn out, because I have stopped being able to say it for myself.

Your loving sister, Maureen