Star Wars characters and Death Star full sleeve

The lorry from Kaunas came through the barrier at ten past four with a roll of canvas wedged behind the seat, tied with baler twine and smelling of diesel. The driver said it was an old film poster he'd bought off a stall in Vilnius for his nephew. I asked to see it because that is the job, and he untied it on the bonnet of my Land Rover while the wind tugged at the corners. Three faces looked out of a black sky: a helmet with a grim visor, a young man with a blaster drawn like a pencil, and a woman with her hair pinned up, shouting at something beyond the frame. Behind them hung a grey moon with a dent in its side.

I should have stamped the form and waved him on. Instead I stood in the drizzle and read the small print along the bottom, which had faded to the colour of weak tea. He told me his nephew had copied the whole sky onto the back of a school exercise book, every star in its place, and the poster was only the thing he wanted to take back to him. He asked if I had children. I said I had a brother who never writes.

So I let him through with a warning about the axle and nothing else. The poster went back into its twine, and the boy's exercise book, which he showed me through the cab window, had a dozen tiny ships drawn in biro with the names printed underneath in careful capitals.

I've pinned a photocopy of the moon above the kettle. When the barrier lifts each morning, I think of a boy in Kaunas holding his drawing up to the light, and I raise the barrier a little higher than the rules say.

Love, Dilys