Matching rose and daisy heart wreaths on calves

The Pavilion band has started up again without us, and Ronnie Pell keeps asking where the girl in the red hat went. I told him you had gone to Leeds to be a typist and that your heart was still somewhere on the dance floor, which he did not find funny. I am writing this on the back of a cafe menu because the good notepaper ran out on Thursday.

You will remember the afternoon Mrs Hollis let us pick roses off her garden wall for the summer dance. Half of them were already browning at the edges. We pressed the best ones between the pages of her old hymn book, and I have kept mine. The daisies came from the seam of the bowling green, which nobody was allowed to touch, so naturally we touched them.

We spent the whole of that August on the pier wall stringing them into hearts, pricking our thumbs and arguing over who got the roses. You took the roses because you said you wanted something that looked dangerous to hold. I took the daisies because they were cheap and I could afford to be wrong about them. Mother said we would be talking about boys by Christmas, and we were, but mostly we talked about those wreaths.

Write back and tell me the train is not as cold as they say. I have booked the small parlour off Briggate for the first Saturday in March, the one with the man who paints flowers in ink, so our wreaths will never wilt on us. If the band is still playing afterwards, we will dance until the lamps go out, the way we did before anybody thought to tell us we were grown.

Yours always, Joan