The Drawing of a House She Never Saw

My father died before my daughter turned two; her memories of him are secondhand at best. But our family does 'heaven birthdays' — cake, candles, stories — because grief needs formats children can hold.

For his fourth heaven birthday, my daughter, then six, insisted on making him a card: 'a picture of his house so he doesn't get lost going home.' Sweet. She worked on it with unusual seriousness, tongue out, forbidding anyone to look.

The result: a stone cottage, green front door set oddly off-centre, a chimney with a visible kink — she'd drawn it crooked deliberately and defended the choice: 'it IS bendy' — a water barrel under the window, and a rope swing on a tree to the LEFT of the house, with one seat-board hanging by a single rope, 'because the other string broke and nobody fixed it.'

My father grew up in a stone cottage four hundred kilometres away, demolished for a road scheme in 1969, when he was nineteen. I have never seen it. There are, as far as our family knew, no photographs — his family was poor, cameras were an event.