Sweet pea sprig on an upper arm

The sweet peas came up after all, though not where I sowed them. Mrs Okafor's boy must have knocked the seed tin off the wall in March, because the first shoots came through the paving crack by the water butt, bent sideways like they were looking for the light. I left them. You always said I'd pull anything that didn't do as it was told.

I took three stems to the Marsh End show on Saturday in a jam jar, the purple ones that smell of nothing until you bury your face in them. The judges move down the trestle tables with their notebooks and their pencils behind their ears, and when they reached my jar they stopped. Dennis Pryor, who has won the cup for twenty-two years, stood behind them looking at his own roses as if they had let him down.

The judge asked who had grown them. I said I hadn't, not really, that a bit of gravel and the rain had done it. She laughed and wrote something down. The red ones have a crumpled silk look to them, and the pink ones fade at the tips the way your cheeks used to in the cold at Blackpool. I kept thinking you would have wanted to see the tendrils, the little curled hands reaching for the netting.

The cup is on the mantelpiece now beside the clock. I've put the second-place jar on the kitchen windowsill for you and left the lid off so the smell can find its own way through the house. Come up when the weather turns. Bring the good secateurs, tell me about the lodger, and say whatever you didn't say on the phone.

Your brother, Tom