00:00This is the nightmare crossing the border, bringing the cheques and the postal order.
00:04Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner, the girl next door.
00:09Pulling up beetock, a steady climb, the gradients against her, but she is on time.
00:14Past cotton grass and moorland boulder, shoveling white steam over her shoulder.
00:19Snorting noisily as she passes, silent miles of wind-bent glasses.
00:25Birds turn their heads as she approaches, stare from the bushes at her black-faced coaches.
00:31Sheepdogs cannot turn her course, they slumber on with paws across.
00:36In the farm she passes, no one wakes, but a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
00:42Dawn freshens, her climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends.
00:48Towards the steam tugs, yelping down a glade of cranes.
00:52Towards the field of apparatus, the furnaces, set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
00:59All Scotland waits for her, in the dark glens beside pale green box.
01:05Men long for new.
01:08Letters of thanks, letters from banks, letters of joy from girl and boy, receipted bills and invitations to inspect new
01:16stock or visit relations, and applications for situations, and timid lovers' declarations, and gossip, gossip from all the nations, news
01:26circumstantial, news financial.
01:29Letters with holiday slaps to enlarging, letters with faces scrawled on the margin, letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, letters
01:37to Scotland from the south of France.
01:39Letters of condolence, letters of condolence to highlands and lowlands, written on paper of every hue, the pink, the violet,
01:46the white and the blue, the chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, the cold and official, and the heart
01:52-side pouring.
01:53Clever, stupid, short and long, the typed and the printed, and the spelt, all wrong.
02:01Thousands are still asleep, dreaming of terrifying monsters, or of a friendly tea beside the band in Cranstons and Crawfords.
02:11Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, asleep in granite Aberdeen, they continue their dreams.
02:19But shall wake soon and hope for letters, and none will hear the postman's knock, without a quickening of the
02:27heart, for who can bear to feed himself forgotten?
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