Treble clef made from handwritten lettering

The Broadwood is still in the front room where your grandfather left it, and I have not had the heart to shift it. Mr Felkin from the chapel came round on Tuesday offering eighty pounds for the lot, and I told him the instrument goes with the house or not at all. He called me stubborn. I called him a man who had never once tuned a middle C by ear in January with the damp coming through the floorboards.

The reason I write is the biscuit tin under the stairs. Your grandfather kept his pencil stubs in it, and under the stubs I found a sheet of manuscript paper, the staves drawn freehand, the treble clef curled so tight at the top it looks like a fern frond. Down the stem he had written in that slanted hand of his: whisper, then words of wisdom, and at the foot, where the note head would sit, let it be. He never once told me what it was for. He wrote the way he spoke, in short bursts, as though every word on the page had cost him a shilling.

I sat with it at the kitchen table until the kettle boiled dry. I think he meant that a tuner listens more than he plays, that you lower your voice to catch the beats between two strings, and that some things come right only when you stop insisting they do. I may be wrong. You know how he was about jokes.

Come up at Easter if you can. Bring your fiddle and we will leave the back windows open and let the garden in.

Love, Aunt Win