Skull and dagger banner on thigh

The thaw still hasn't reached Hollin Fold and the ewes have started eating the hedge out of spite. Dad's tin of decaf has sat on the kitchen shelf since Michaelmas, because the shop in Kirkby stopped stocking it and the van can't get past the ford. I suggested the instant. He said he would sooner be dead, in the voice he keeps for tractors, so I put the kettle on for the strong stuff and left him to brood.

Then the cold came down properly. He took the bolt cutters up the top field and came back with a ewe's skull in his coat pocket, bleached white as a teacup, from the one we lost in January. He has nailed it above the byre door with a strip of pink ribbon off Mum's sewing box knotted round the crown, and the old pocket knife he uses for baler twine hangs from a nail beside it. "Death before decaf," he says whenever anyone walks past, as if it were a creed carved over a church door.

Last Tuesday your parcel came, the one with the tin of decaf from Leeds and the note in your terrible handwriting. I carried it into the kitchen and Dad looked at it for a long time, then at the skull through the window, then at me. He said nothing. He filled the kettle, spooned the decaf in with great ceremony, and drank two cups standing by the range without once making a face.

This morning I found the empty tin on the step outside the byre, rinsed and upturned, with frost on its lid. Nobody has mentioned it. I think the skull is looking rather pleased with itself.

Love, Ada