Forever young script on upper back

You will laugh when I tell you Mr Pell has finally let me hold the good brush. Eleven years I have mixed his size and ground his black on the marble slab, and on Tuesday he put the quill in my fingers and told me to copy the words for the dance hall's board on the seafront. Forever young, in that loop-legged script he learnt from a Dutch book before the war. I thought it a bold thing to paint in a town where half the people are past forty and the other half are leaving for Birmingham.

I did it at dawn, before the gulls were up. The board was salt-stung and the first stroke bled into the grain, so I thinned the paint with a drop of turps and went slower. Mr Pell stood below with his pipe unlit, saying nothing, which is how I knew it was going either very wrong or very right. Halfway through the g in young my wrist began to shake, and I thought of Dad's hands at the end, how they would not hold a cup.

When I climbed down he looked up at the words for a long time. "Lettering doesn't make anybody young," he said. "It only tells the street what they already are. The ones who come in tonight will read it and believe it for an hour, and that's the trade." Then he lit his pipe and went inside to fetch the ladder.

The paint was tacky by seven. By nine the first couples were queuing beneath it, and a girl in a yellow coat stopped, tilted her head, and mouthed the words to herself as if testing them for cracks. I signed the corner of the board with my initials, small, the way Pell taught me. Come and see it before the autumn.

Love, Ivy