[Intro: John Grierson]
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

Shoveling 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 black-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


Dawn freshens, the 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 lochs
Men long for news


[Verse 1: W.H. Auden]
Letters of thanks, letters from banks

Letters of joy from girl and boy
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations

And applications for the 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 the official and the heart outpouring
Clever, stupid, short and long

The typed and printed and the spelt all wrong

[Outro: John Grierson]

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 hear and feel himself forgotten?