Rosary bead wrist and hand tattoo with cross

The lock keeper at Hawkesbury says the cut will be shut by Thursday for dredging, so we're tied up under the willows at Stoke with the engine ticking as it cools. Dad has been painting the cabin side again. He's put a rose on the water can, shaded grey the way Mam liked it, because the red tin ran out in March and he refused to buy another from the chandlery in Braunston. You'd laugh. Every rose on every boat we ever worked was red.

Mam's beads are still in the biscuit tin under the bunk. I found them looking for the spare windlass. Forty-odd jet beads on a loop of waxed string, a bigger bead at the middle with a rose cut into it, and a small cross at the end worn smooth as a pebble from the river. You remember how she said them at the tiller, counting with her thumb while we went down the locks, and how she told us the rose was for a saint she never once named.

I hung the loop on the tiller pin this morning and it went round twice, which is more than I can say for anything else that's fitted since you left. Then a boy from the moorings came along asking whether we'd take on a load of coal for the Coventry man, and I said yes before I'd thought about it, and by dinner the boat was sitting so low the gunwales were kissing the water. I didn't have it in me to be cross about it. I'm posting the beads to you in a padded envelope, so you'll know I haven't kept them for myself. Dad says the rose is finished now. He's painted the lid of the tin grey too, so nothing rattles when it's moved.

Love, Nell