Two arrows on a wrist

The goose feathers came in on Tuesday, grey as a wet dog, and I've spent three evenings cutting them to the slant you taught me, though my hands keep drifting back to the old habit. Your mother wants to know whether you are eating. I told her London feeds people on pastry and spite, which she says is no answer at all.

You'll remember the butts behind the chapel at Haddon Lane. The Michaelmas shoot, you and that Pickering boy, and the arrow you loosed that went clean through the gap in the hawthorn. Nobody believed it could be done. I went out after the prize and found your shaft lying in the wet grass, its nock still dark, and across it the Pickering arrow, as if it had been told to wait.

I kept both. They're in the rack above the bench, bound with the same waxed thread. Yours points up, the way you always aimed when you were trying to beat the wind. His points down, because he never knew which way was forward. Each morning I take them down, sort the feathers and think how little separates a hit from a miss, a few degrees of nerve and a bit of luck.

Come home at Christmas. I'll mend the cracked string on the long bow, and you can tell me what the city has done to your aim. The workshop door sticks in the damp, so lift as you push. The rack is still there, and so are the arrows, waiting for you to take yours back down.

Your uncle, Walter