Tribal sea turtle on the back

The turtle came up the harbour wall on Tuesday, as if it had read the tide tables and disagreed with them. Mr Penrose fetched the boys with the lantern and they carried it on a hurdle to the slipway, the great flat shell as wide as our kitchen table. Its flippers went out like oars that had forgotten the water. Nobody in Falmouth had seen one this far north since the year you were born, and old Ada said it was a sign, though she says that about the gulls too.

Mother asked me to draw it for the chapel book, so I sat on the step with my pencil and tried to copy the shell. The pattern is the part I cannot get right. Every panel is a diamond inside a diamond, and the lines curl back on themselves like the fern fronds up by the quarry, and at the very centre there is a spiral that goes round and round until your eye loses the end of it. I counted the chevrons along the edge, nineteen on the left and twenty on the right, and that is the only thing I am certain of.

They let it go on the Wednesday evening, when the tide turned. It slid down the slip like a dropped coat and was gone before the lantern was properly lit. I kept the drawing, though it is not much like the turtle, and I have pinned it above the stove where you used to hang your sea boots. When your ship comes in, you can tell me which of us got the pattern wrong.

Love, Nell