Pocket watch, skull and roses on ribs

The thaw came through on Tuesday and the lane is a river of slush, but the frost held long enough for Dad's old plough to turn up something in the bottom field. Mr Pryce had the spade that morning and it was him who found the watch, a silver pocket watch no bigger than a biscuit, its lid sprung back like a mouth. Its hands still stood at twenty past four. Ma wiped the glass on her apron and said it was Grandfather's, the one he lost the winter before he went to France, though none of us can say how it came to be under the rosebushes by the wall.

The chain was wound through the roots like a bit of wire, and beneath the watch, in the same clay, Mr Pryce's boy dug up a small grey skull that the crows had clearly been at. Ma says it is a jackdaw and I should stop being morbid, but I have kept it on the windowsill in a saucer. The two white roses by the gate, the ones that flowered late in October in all that sun, have gone to nothing now. Last week a red admiral came in from the byre and sat on the kitchen table as if it had been invited, its wings open like a page with the ink not quite dry.

The strange thing is that she winds it every night at nine, before the kettle goes on, and sets it by the wireless. She says it keeps better time than anything in the house and that Grandfather would want it going while he is still out there somewhere, waiting on his own return. I told her the mechanism was clearly broken and she told me to mind my tongue. So I am writing to ask if you can get leave for the spring, because the watch is ticking now, Tom, and I do not know how long Ma can keep it wound.

Your loving sister, Nell