Winged angel on a pedestal across the back

The angel is finished, and the railway company has sent a man down from Derby to look at her. He stood in the yard for a full hour without speaking, which Mr Ashdown tells me is the highest praise a monumental mason can hope for from a clerk. She lies across the plinth with her forehead on her forearm and her wings let down either side like a coat thrown over a chair. I cut the drapery so thin in places you can see the knuckles beneath it. Ashdown wanted her standing. I told him she had stood three years on the platform at Harrow Lane waiting for a train that never came, and she was entitled to sit down.

The lettering was the trouble. The widow wanted a verse and the vicar wanted a psalm, but the widow's boy came to the yard on Tuesday with a scrap of paper bearing one word, copied off the signal box wall where his father had chalked it the morning before the accident. ONCE. I asked him what it meant. He said it was the last thing his father had said to him, and he did not want anything else on the stone, because anything else would be a lie.

So I carved it on the plinth above the laurel, plain capitals, the serifs cut as deep as my chisel would go. Nell, I have spent my working life making things that say more than they ought to. This one says exactly what it means, and I find I cannot stop looking at it when I walk past the yard gate on my way to the station.