Ribbon and swirls on the top of a foot

The copperplate master at Halsey's School has gone to his sister in Harrogate, and the board has given his room to me, so I am now the one who stands at the blackboard with chalk up to my wrists, teaching eleven-year-olds to make their loops hold still. Mr Abbott left a tin of peach silk ribbon in the cupboard with a note saying it was for prizes. Nobody has won a prize yet. I have been tying it round the top of the letters I cannot bring myself to post.

Your mother's sampler still hangs in my hall, the one with the two swallows curling round the initials. Every morning I look at it and think how sharply you wrote back then, before the sea air got into everything and made us all lazy with our hands. The flourishes you taught me on the back of the bus timetable are still the only ones I trust. Start with a small circle, let the pen come round on its own, and never lift it where the hand wants to rest.

The Thursday post came with nothing from you, so I have taken the bus to the end of Quay Street and back twice, which Mrs Penrose at the shop has noticed. I am not writing to scold you. I am writing because the ribbon is the only colour in the room now, and I wanted you to know I kept one length back for you, folded flat between the pages of the register where nobody will find it.

Come home when the boats are in. The chalk is ready, and so is the kettle.

Yours in ink, Ruth