Script quote tattoo along a foot

The Bramley windfalls are rotting faster than we can sort them, and Father has hired the Pritchard boys to bring in the perry pears before the wasps get them. You asked in your last letter whether the harvest supper still happens. It does, though the fiddler is a stranger this year, a thin man with a bad cough who plays as if the tune owes him money.

Last Saturday I went out to the far rows after the lamps were lit, because the heat kept me awake. Gran was already there, barefoot in the grass between the Blenheim trees, her shawl hung over the gate. She had a tin of pears under one arm and she was humming. I stood behind the wall and watched her turn, slow and then not slow, the dust lifting from her heels. She saw me eventually and didn't stop. She only said, "Nobody watches the old ones, Hetty, so mind you don't start now."

I laughed, and she laughed, and then she made me take her hand. We danced until the moon came up over the Malvern side and the dew soaked through my stockings. I am not sure what I expected from that night, but it was not to feel so foolish and so free at once.

Come home at Michaelmas, will you? Bring that dreadful gramophone record you keep playing. I have pinned Gran's shawl over the kitchen door and I mean to wear it to the supper. Your loving sister, Hetty. P.S. Father says the pears are the best in twenty years, and I say you can't taste them from Birmingham.