Night Train
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film, July 1935)
   
      by W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
             
     

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 and 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 the 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 the bedroom gently shakes.

II

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

III

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or 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 in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, 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.

IV

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Ah the heady days of the Steam Age when the post arrived before you got out of bed and you knew your postie’s name, address and family circumstance. When I was at boarding school, I lived for letters. I’d happily take other’s cast-offs. Not that my parents didn’t write, but you felt so out of touch with the actual world when you were stuck in a dark corner of Yorkshire and there had been an earthquake in Cairo and your housemaster wasn’t in so you couldn’t ask to use his phone (not thinking of course that an earthquake would mean that the phone lines were down.) Now we have mobile phones so the Mothership (or Father for that matter) can text from darkest Africa, usually much more reliable than the local phone or indeed power suppliers. And we have email and the interweb, so you don’t have to wait to hear about babies being born or job applications, you can shop at 11 o’clock at night and you can read the news without having to leave the house to buy a paper. But we still cannot manage without the Royal Mail, though sadly most of our mail is bill-related except for high days and holidays. And eBay purchases of course.

The strikes have really muddled me, not least because there is now a backlog of mail that may take a while to be ‘unlogged’. I don’t know how I’ll cope emotionally if they are unable to reach an agreement, as I still feel quite unnerved when I don’t get any mail; have I been forgotten? My teenage insecurities are still evidently right at the surface.