The first page of the first letter.

You have been gone nine days and I have opened the gates three hundred and eleven times. I know because I have kept a tally on the back of the coal bill, which Jack says is the sort of thing a person does when they are going a bit soft, and I have told him it is the sort of thing a person does when they are being paid to keep a crossing and would like to be able to prove it.

Because that is the news. Mr Pickles came down from Threlby on Tuesday with a form. The Company has made me keeper of Cawdale Crossing in my own name, at eighteen shillings, which is four shillings less than they paid you for the same gates, and I signed it, and he looked at his boots and said he was sorry about the four shillings and I said I should think so. So you may stop worrying that they will put some old man from the Junction in your cottage. They have put me in it. I was already in it, but now there is a form.

I will tell you about the first day, because you were on a train going the other way and did not see it.

You went at seven. At half past nine Walter rang down from the box to say a special was coming up the branch that was not the pick-up goods and not the market train either, and would I have the gates ready, as though I ever do not. It was five coaches, old ones, and every window had a child's face in it. Evacuees. The whole of it went up to Kellbeck and came back down empty in the afternoon, and at four o'clock the billeting lady from the village walked down the road with two of them by the hand and a list, and that is how we have come by Peter and Joan Cass, aged nine and seven, of Leeds. Peter has a label on his coat still. He will not take it off. Joan cried until the pick-up goods came through at six and then stopped, because it was a train, and she likes trains. She is in your chair as I write this. Jack has given up his bed with a great deal of noise and is on the settle.

Walter says there were trains like that all over the country that day and the next and the next, more than anyone has ever run, and that he had it from the Junction stationmaster who had it from Leeds. I do not know how he knows what he knows. I have stopped asking.

Then on the Sunday, Mr Chamberlain came on the wireless at a quarter past eleven and said what we all knew he was going to say, and I went out and opened the gates for Haworth's lorry from the quarry, because the stone does not care.