Roses and flowing hair sleeve with script on a leg

The Kershaw job is finished, and I want you to hear it from me before Mrs Kershaw tells the whole of Harrogate Road. She wanted the verse down the side of the shop window, the one from the hymn book her mother kept, and she wanted it in gold leaf on black. I told her gold leaf runs in damp, and she told me she had paid for the damp too.

So I spent four evenings with a magnifier and a fine sable, lettering it backwards on the glass so it would read from the pavement. Each line I tried to do in one stroke. You know how the hand goes when you stop thinking about the letters and let them come. I got the first six clean. On the seventh my wrist shook the way it used to when you were small and held the brush for me, and I had to wipe it away and start again.

The roses came next, one in the top corner and one low by the door, shaded in grey enamel because she said she wanted them to look as if somebody had drawn them in pencil and loved them while they did it. Between the two I painted a column of hair, waves of it curling off the frame like something lifted by a window that has never been shut. Mrs Kershaw cried at that part. I told her it was only lines.

I left the bottom rose unfinished, three petals and no shading. It sits on the glass by the latch where nobody will look unless they are hunting for a fault. When you come up at Easter, you can finish it. I would like to see whether your hand still stops where mine did.