Tiger cover-up on a calf

The Marigold went through the lock at Hythe on Tuesday with the old tiger finally gone from her cabin side. Your grandfather's painter, the one who came up from Gravesend with his tins of red lead, put that beast on her in 1961, and it has been fading ever since, the way a thing does when nobody looks at it properly. I told Mam it looked like a wet cat. She said I was being unkind to a dead man's work.

Grand-dad's tiger had always been too small for the wall, and the wall was always damp. So last month I took it to a man in Ware who does the work on the narrowboats for the hire fleet. He said he would not paint over the bones of it. He would draw something bigger that lay on top. He turned the beast's head so it looked out over the water, laid the shadows down in grey like smoke, and set three red petals around it, the same red as the lead. He called them lily petals and I did not argue.

Mam came down to see it finished. She stood on the towpath with her hand over her mouth for a long while, and then she said the tiger had been waiting to be seen from the front all along. I have not decided whether that was kind or only true.

Come home at Easter. The boat is painted and the petals will outlast either of us. Your sister, Ruth.