This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
There’s a Post Box on the morning walk, just a small one, sitting atop a pole, nestling into a hedge. During the Winter months it’s not so noticeable – although a bright and vibrant red, the brown and russet hues of landscape all about seem to envelope it during those darker months, acting as a kind of camouflage. But come the Spring & Summer and the hedge bursts into a lush green and all of a sudden that little Post Box too bursts into life – and yet it hasn’t changed all year, same red, same position, same hedge – its everything around it which has changed, and yet it’s the Post Box which becomes much more noticeable. And despite the utilitarian nature of its role in the community, it is quite a beautiful little thing, just sitting there all along – it seems to be playing the long-game, quietly unassuming, no need to change with the passing months, it seems to know that with a little patience, the time will come for it to shine. One of the wonderful facts about these beacons of red, which are so easily taken for granted, is that 98% of us in the United Kingdom live within half a mile of one. It also seems appropriate that these little portals to written communication were the brainchild of a novelist, Anthony Trollope.
‘Night Mail’ by W.H. Auden
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
The short stories which make up the collection of tales in ‘Hearts & Bones’ by Niamh Mulvey are a great reflection of our times, the Signed 1st Editions are now available. Elsewhere, our other Coles Signed Editions from great storytellers include works by Karin Slaughter; Saara El-Arifi; Gill Hornby and Ottessa Moshfegh; Emily McGovern’s ‘Twelve Percent Dread’ is a graphic novel about obsession; Baroness Floella Benjamin inspires with her memoir, ‘What Are You Doing Here?’; Alex Light is equally inspiring when it comes to positivity; former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ‘Seven Ways to Change the World’ has been updated for the new paperback edition, each with a hand signed bookplate and finally the memoir of former British No.1 tennis player John Lloyd is now shipping.
The complete Newsletter can be found HERE
