Phoenix with wings and a triangle symbol on the side

Your mother says you have been up since five pinning your veil, so I expect this will reach you on the morning itself, which is the only time anyone reads a letter from an aunt properly. I want to tell you about the fire at Pemberton's yard, the summer I was eleven, because you asked me at Christmas why Grandad never let anyone sweep the back step.

The sheds went up in the night. Everything he owned was in there: the bellows, forty years of pattern books, a rowing boat half caulked on its trestles. By morning there was nothing but black timber and the smell of wet ash, and he stood in the lane with his hands hanging as though he had forgotten what they were for. Then he went down on his knees and started raking, and I thought he had lost his wits. He pulled out a small iron triangle, scorched blue at one corner, with a ring hung inside it and a bar running straight down the middle. He wiped it on his shirt and put it in my palm. "Something survives," he said, "if you're stubborn enough to look."

He had it cut into a copper bird that spring, wings spread, the feathers hammered in red and brown, and he hung it over the workshop door once he'd built it back up. People said he was daft to start again at his age. He only ever said the bird had been waiting in the ash for him.

I am giving you the triangle now, Nell, the one from the ashes. Nan wore its ring on a ribbon for fifty years, and it has never once been polished. Keep it in your pocket today if it helps. Whatever gets burned in the years ahead, you will both be the ones who go back and look.

All my love, Aunt Jean