Lion head inside a lightning bolt

The storm came in off the Channel on Tuesday night, and by nine the wind had got under the back slates of Number Four, so I put the kettle on and sat in the hall with the lodgers' lamps. Mr Fennick in the front room would not come down. He said the thunder sounded like a cage door being dragged across a yard.

I went up with a candle at half past ten. His door was ajar. On the washstand he had laid out a sheet of cartridge paper, and on it was a lion drawn in pencil, its mane blown back in long strokes like wind over the harbour, and inside a bolt of lightning he had shaded with so many tiny dots it looked like sand. He had been a keeper with the travelling show that wintered at Margate before the war. The lion was called Samson. He died in '22, and Mr Fennick has never once said the name aloud in my hearing.

Then the real lightning came down the chimney stack and the whole house shook. Mr Fennick was on his knees by the grate. He said, 'There, he's out,' and he laughed, and I did not know whether to be frightened for him. He picked up the drawing, tore the bolt away from the lion very carefully, and handed me the lion.

I've pinned it by the kitchen door. It looks out at the yard the way Samson must have looked at the crowds, mane up, unbothered by anything. The bolt is ash in the grate now. Come home at Christmas if the trains run.

Your loving sister, Win