Slides That Follow Your Voice: Yorkshire Accent Audiobook Narration

Slide 1: The Last Post Office in Ellerby

0:17Right, that's the slate. Can you hear me all right in there? Good. Chapter one, from the top, whenever you're ready.

0:25Chapter one. The Last Post Office in Ellerby.

0:29The post office at Ellerby had been closing for eleven years, in the way that some people are dying for eleven years, that is to say with great determination and no visible progress. The notice had first gone up on the door in the spring of twenty fourteen, printed on a sheet of pale green paper that had since faded to the colour of a hospital corridor, and underneath it, in a hand that everyone in the village recognised, Maureen Thwaite had written, we shall see.

Slide 2: We shall see.

0:57Ellerby sat in a fold of the hills where the road gave up pretending to go anywhere, fourteen houses, a chapel, a pub that opened when Derek felt like it, and a view, on the three clear days a year, all the way to the sea. Maureen had been born in the house with the blue door and had never seen the point of leaving, though she had read a great deal about the places other people had left for, and had formed views.

Slide 3: Ellerby

1:21And see they had. The bank had gone in twenty fifteen, sorry, sixteen, the school in twenty nineteen, and the bus, which had come twice a day for forty years, now came on Tuesdays and Fridays if the driver remembered, and the post office stood where it had always stood, between the chapel and the house with the blue door, selling stamps, pensions, dog licences that had not existed since nineteen eighty-seven, and the only newspaper for nine miles. Mark that, would you. I'll pick it up from the bank had gone. No, I'll carry on, I'll do it at the end.

Slide 4: What went

1:55Maureen opened at half past eight. She had opened at half past eight for thirty-one years. On the morning this story begins, she opened at half past eight and found a man asleep against the door.

2:09He was perhaps thirty-five. He had a good coat, a bad night, and a rucksack that he was holding the way a child holds a toy, and when she nudged him with her foot, not unkindly, he said, without opening his eyes, I am waiting for the post office.

Slide 5: I am waiting for the post office.

2:24It does not open until half past eight, said Maureen. What time is it, said the man. Half past eight, said Maureen, and stepped over him. [chuckles]

Slide 6: It does not open until half past eight

2:34Sorry. Sorry. I've read that line forty times and it still gets me. Go again from it does not open? No? Fine, keep it, she'd have laughed too. Where was I. The shop, yes.

Slide 7: Inside

2:47Inside, the shop smelled of brown paper and the paraffin heater that Maureen was not supposed to use, and the counter had been polished by thirty-one years of elbows to a shine that the council had once described, in a letter, as a hazard. Maureen had kept the letter. She had kept all of them.

3:04He followed her in. He bought a stamp, which was the first stamp anyone had bought that week, and he asked for a pen, and he wrote something on the back of a uh... a postcard that showed the view from the top of Ellerby Edge in a summer that had clearly been invented, and he put the postcard in the box by the counter and said, when does it go.

Slide 8: The first stamp anyone had bought that week

3:23Maureen looked at the box. Thursday, she said, which was true, and which was also three days away, three days away, and which did not seem to trouble him at all.

3:34Sorry... pickup. He sat... he sat down on... He sat down on the chair by the pensions window, the one that Mrs Ackroyd used on a Thursday, and he waited, and he was still waiting at half past five when she turned the sign, and that, as far as Maureen could later establish, was how it started.

3:53End of chapter one. [sighs]

3:56Was that all right? I stumbled on Ackroyd, I know, and on the postcard, and I skipped a line somewhere round the box, so mark those. And then I need a cup of tea before chapter two, because chapter two is forty pages and she goes to the council meeting, and I have met that council. Not that one. One like it. [laughs]