Realistic eye with botanical swirls

The pit siren went at six this morning and I was already up, standing at the back gate with the kettle going cold behind me. Mr Ashdown's boy came past with the milk and said the Hadley shaft had given up another two men. I didn't ask him their names, because I know them both and I'd rather not hear it from a boy with a bottle crate. So I went out to the allotment instead and pulled bindweed, which is the only thing in this village that never needs a funeral.

You'll laugh, but the rain has got into the old winding wheel and the bindweed has climbed right up it, curling round the spokes as if it means to haul the whole thing down into the earth. Mr Pryce says it's a sign. I told him a sign is what you get when you're short of coal, and he didn't argue, which is how I knew he was frightened too.

Down by the settling pond there's an oily sheen on the water that goes every colour going when the sun sits behind the stacks: blue, then green, then a pink like the inside of a shell. The children dare each other to touch it. I stood there a long while yesterday, looking at it, and thought of your father the first time you went down with him, how he came up blinking at the daylight as if he'd never seen it before.

Keep your wages, keep your room in Lambeth tidy, and write when you can. I've put your seed packet in the drawer with the good spoons. Bring it home in spring and we'll see what grows.

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