Script quote with stars on a foot

Your last letter came up the drift road with the post on Tuesday, and Mam read it out twice at the table before she would let me have it. She says you have the look of a girl who will not be told, which is her way of saying she is proud and frightened at once. I have stood the stamp on the mantel where the clock used to be, before Da pawned it.

The night shift came up at five this morning, grey as ash, and Da stood in the yard with his lamp unlit and looked at the sky. Stars were still out over the spoil heap, the small hard ones that look like pinpricks in tin. He said nothing, which is how I knew he had been counting the cages again. Yesterday I walked down to the Co-op on my own, and the lad at the counter asked if I was the one going to Newcastle. I said no. He laughed, and I did not mind it much.

I found your slate in the press under the good tablecloth. You had scratched across it, Dreamer of Improbable Dreams, in that fancy copybook hand Miss Lowther beat out of us. I thought it a daft thing to write on a slate meant for sums. Then I thought it might be the only sum that matters round here.

I am going to copy it onto the back of Da's old pit ticket with a pencil from the Co-op, and I will leave it on the step for when you come home at Christmas. Write soon and tell me about the sea, or the shop windows, or whatever you can see that I cannot.

Your loving sister, Maggie