Love script inside a heart on a wrist

The rain has been at the chapel roof since Tuesday, so Mr Pell has set a bucket under the east window and the whole congregation sits on the left side now, pretending not to notice the drip. I went to the Thursday hymn-singing anyway. Your mother sat beside me and said nothing about the coal ration, which I took as a kindness.

I've been trying to write the way you taught me, with the loops joined, the way your father painted the shop signs on Abbey Street before his hands went. Yours came out crooked on the envelope last week, and I thought you'd laugh. So I've drawn you something instead. Turn this sheet over. I drew a heart with one unbroken line, the way you'd trace a leaf, and then I put the word inside it, looping the L down under the heart's left curve so the e and the v run out into the point. It took me four goes with the pencil and most of Sunday's paper.

The station master says the Leeds train is in on the eighth. If you're on it, don't carry your kit bag up the High Street on your own. Walk it with me past the bakery, and I'll show you your father's sign above the door, with the same long tails on the letters. We can stand under it in the wet, and I'll tell you the real reason I never married the Coombs boy, which is that he couldn't write his own name in a straight line.

Yours in the same ink, Margaret