Semicolon and birds with watercolour wash

The birds came back to the tip this morning, a dozen of them over the spoil, black as coal dust and twice as restless. Mam says they are starlings and that they always come when the wind turns north. I told her you would want to know, so I am telling you, though the page will not behave. Mr Ridley down the row has taught the boys to write with the stops in their right places, and I keep thinking of the one Dad showed you on the back of the wages slip: the stop with a tail, which does not end a thought but holds it open while the next part arrives.

Dad is on the afternoon shift now. The cage stuck at the twelve o'clock bell on Thursday for near an hour, and when it came up he sat on the step with his cap in his hands and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked for the paints you bought Sarah in Newcastle, the little pans of colour, and he painted the back wall of the wash-house pink and yellow and blue, the streaks running out sideways like a sky that had been pulled. Mam scolded him for the soap-stained floor. He did not stop.

I have not finished the sentence I started to you in March, and I am not going to finish it today. Come home when the ship is paid off. The pink is still wet on the wall, and there is room left beside our names for yours, with a little dot above it, so the rest of us know you are only pausing.