Flower flash sheet in grey silhouette

The cutting room is still dark when I write this, the only light the lamp over my bench and the grey square of the window where the mill chimney goes up. Mr Hallam has given me the flower sheet to finish before Monday's van. Thirty blooms, he says, every one different, and not one he can tell from the last once the card is laid on the cloth. I have cut lilies with their throats open and roses that look like cabbages, and a sunflower I have now ruined twice because the knife slipped on the spiral.

Yesterday I found the corner he never mentions. Under the old press bench there was a yellowed copy of this same sheet, pinned by a brass tack, and in the bottom row one daisy has a petal cut backwards, a little notch where the blade must have dragged. Somebody's father, I suppose, in 1952, or somebody's apprentice on a bad morning. Mr Hallam says the mill has printed that daisy on tablecloths for seventy years and nobody has ever complained, because nobody has ever noticed.

So this morning I cut my own daisy, and I gave it a notch too, deliberately, on the left side where the light falls. I was half afraid to hand it over. He came in with his tea, looked at the sheet for a long time, and said nothing at all. Then he took a fresh tack from his waistcoat and pinned the daisy to the wall above the kettle, notched petal and all.

Come and see it when you're home. It's the third row down, next to the sunflower I ruined, and you'll know it at once.