God, hes left as on aur oun.
The Railway Bridgeman.
On a lonely string of camp cars
The lonesome bridgeman stays
After leaving his family and home
He starts out counting the days
With Monday and Tuesday made
There’s Wednesday and Thursday you know
Say we’ve made these all in succession
There’s four hours Friday to go
Suppose then it rains through Friday
Of course we must shack all day
And then we must stay over Saturday
Or else we cut our pay
So our time this week with our boys and girls
Is twenty-four hours shy
We never have time for all their games
Until again it’s goodbye
We leave there with Mother’s kindness and care
And back to our camp cars again
We start counting the days of another week
And trusting this time it won’t rain
So if we get these days as they come
We’ll be checking off Friday at eleven
And catch the first train headed for home
For there is our earthly heaven
—F.G. Manley
Sunday, January 28, 1940
At this point in his life your grandfather was a working member of a crew that kept the trains running by rebuilding the wooden trestles that spanned rivers, gorges, etc. all of which had to be done without any delay to train schedules. They left home late on Sunday or early on Monday depending on how far away the work was from home—put in a 40 hour work week in four and a half days and then went home for the weekend—a lonely and hard way to make a living. Perhaps he was especially melancholy at the time he wrote this because four months earlier in September 1939, my parents lost a child—my brother Charles Kenneth who died as an infant from whooping cough.