Rose made of newspaper print

The press went quiet on Thursday, which is how we knew the rain had reached the bridge at Haddow. Mr Ellery sent the compositors home at four and kept me back to strike the last of the parish notices, the ones about the ferry timetable and the lost spaniel. I set them by hand, letter by letter, until my thumbs were grey with lead. You would laugh at how careful I was. Every line still felt as if it might matter to somebody out past the hedgerows.

Afterwards I took the spoiled sheets down to the yard, the ones with the ink run or the columns jumbled, because Mrs Pargeter wanted old paper to line her larder shelves. The pages were warm from the stove. I saw how the light came through the thin stock and picked out the print, and I thought of the roses her mother grew by the forest gate, how they went papery at the edges before they dropped. So I folded one, then another, and tucked the corners under the way Ellery taught us to fold a proof.

She laughed when I brought her a rose made from the mayor's speech on drainage. Still, she kept it on the windowsill, and this morning it had opened a little further, the way paper does when the damp gets into it. Tell me the sea hasn't swallowed you whole. Write back with a line in your own hand, not printed.

Your loving sister, Nell