Night Mail

This is the night mail crossing the Border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order.

The recent extensive discussion of the 1970s weirdscape [ FT354:30-37, 357:74

76, 359:72] has been fascinating: I wondered if your readers remember one feature of the era’s nocturnal soundscape – the ‘Post Plane?’ We all draw comfort from the notion that while we sleep, thousands of paramedics, fire and police officers and engineering crews are working through the night keeping watch; keeping us safe. Once, we would have ascribed lighthouse keepers and coastguards to their ranks – although the fact that they’ve all been cut, rationalised, merged and outsourced throws a jug of cold water over this particular twinge of Gemutlichkeit.

As a teenager in the Seventies, in the early hours of the morning, if I woke to the faint drone of a propeller-driven plane, I would think sleepily, “There goes the Post Plane”, somehow reassured by the notion that it really was a twin-engined type; part of some sort of designated domestic flight network, resplendent in Royal Mail livery, its hold filled with letters and parcels, tracking north or south, ensuring that people from the Shetland Islands to the Lizard could open their post over breakfast. It was, I guess, like the shot of

Hygge that hearing the Shipping Forecast gives us: we are snug and safe while gallant seafarers are battling wintry gales in the North Atlantic. Royal Mail does use a small fleet of ‘planes – but they are three Boeing 737 jets flown by Titan Airways, variously out of East Midlands, Bournemouth, Exeter, Stanstead, Edinburgh and Belfast airports – not propeller driven ones. The railway Travelling Post Offices – and older readers will recall fondly that you could even post a letter if you were hurrying along the platform and found one temporarily sided there – are long gone.

But the story persists; it has regional variations and context: in Merseyside, the Wirral and North Wales, people insist it’s a regular, scheduled flight from Speke, Hawarden or Borras to London, carrying the mails and, some allege, sensitive police, legal and intelligence-related documents. Along the length of the Pennines it’s regarded as ‘The London Plane’; in Newcastle, I’ve heard people insist that they listen out for it, and the engine note helps compose them for sleep – and it is even ascribed a type: a Short SC7 Skyvan.

Even if this is simply a kind of foaftale or wish-fulfilment; merely assigning a cosy, nostalgic story to a random night charter, ferry, passenger, or freight flight, or a residual memory of hearing the pre-dawn whistle of the Night Mail train – its a rather wonderful one.

And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of heart For who can bear to feel himself forgotten. Keith Davies Newcastle upon Tyne