Six line drawings of waves

She drew it the way her father had taught her on the slipway, with one unbroken line that never lifted off the page. First came a crest that curled over on itself and wound a tight spiral at the lip, then a long low roll running out to nothing, then three small peaks like the teeth of a saw. She did six in all, two columns of three, and was blowing the graphite dust off the last one when Mr Ashdown came in with his newspaper folded under his arm.

He leaned over her shoulder and tapped the spiral with a nicotine-stained finger. 'Wrong,' he said. 'A breaking wave doesn't wind back on itself. It falls forward and goes to pieces.' Nell told him the spiral was not the wave at all, it was the bit the wave kept after it had gone, and he laughed, a rusty sound he rarely made before noon, and said he knew a printer up the coast who would run the sheet in blue for a shilling a copy if she signed it.

The sign went up over the front door that Saturday, six blue waves on cream board, and Mrs Tregear complained that it made the house look like a bathhouse. Nell stood on the step with her sketchbook and watched the real sea roll in beneath it, already building the next line in her head, and did not once look back at the sign to see whether it had come out right.