Mountain landscape with moon on an upper arm

The lock at Hatton kept us three days, so I have had time to watch the hills you said I would miss. From the towpath they are only a grey line behind the poplars, but at dusk the top of the big one catches the last light and holds it, like a lamp somebody forgot to put out. Dad would have called it a sign. I call it a nuisance, because it means I keep looking up instead of at the bow rope.

The boat is loaded with slate for a roofing yard in Stourport, and Tomas has been teaching me to read the water the way he reads the sky. He says the moon comes up over the weir before it shows over the trees, and he is right, though I will not tell him so. Last night it rose pale and small beside the ridge, and the pines along the far bank went black in a neat row, as if someone had drawn them with the finest pen in the drawer.

I have decided to stop writing to you in pencil. Pencil smudges, and I always make you guess what I meant. So here it is plainly. I am not coming back to Shropshire this winter. The barge pays, and the canal does not ask me to be anybody but the person on the tiller. I have bought a notebook with a green cover to keep count of the locks, and I have started sketching the hills in its margins, badly, because I cannot get the shadows to sit the way they do.

Write when you can. Address it to the lock-keeper's cottage at Hatton and he will pass it on.

Love, Ruth