 | An English recollection
From Donkey Town to Dummer
through the Fairleigh Wallop hay
From Alfred's Tower to Croydon Hill all along the Brendon Way
I wandered as a pilgrim bent on feckled mare
never knowing what I'd find
whensoever I got there
I took a turn at Battery Hill bound for the Freedom Trail
to find myself a peddling head on agin a gale
I set myself one mighty fight
to task that vicious storm
knowing I would some day find my way back home.
It was then and there I smelt it like a vat of rhubarb wine
that old familiar Holborn air where me granddad wasn't born
or was it no me granddaughter, well I'm really nay so sure
it must have been but one, but it might have been t'other
cos I duzna have no sister and I's only got one bruvver.
The doctor said he couldn't help
I had a solid head
no matter what he pumped at it
’twould cure nowt all he said
So I took to eating sawdust pie every Saturday afternoon
with a kind of hopelessness, every bite the taste of doom
that stretched just like the avalanche of a tidal wave at sea
oh gawd look out now Christ — here it come again
I woke at Effingham Junction and missed the last damned train
The cleaning woman looked at me at a little after five
my ankles in the urinal where I smelled more dead than live
I wouldn't have been as stinking if only the flushing would stop
but then she started swabbing me with her evil smelling mop.
And would you believe it was Sunday, the worst bloody day of all
no trains leave from Effingham Junction and its miles to any watering hole
there's a train that leaves on Monday, but it goes the other way
and the next one's not till the Monday next, and when it comes in it don't go away.
Really there's nothing for it, the cure is so fatal a dose
that the very thing that's curing simply prefers to give up the ghost
and return again to Donkey Town and the Fairleigh Wallop hay
to take up residence on White Sheet Hill and be mistaken every day
for the memory of somebody who long ago once passed on close by there
upon the gentle dappled back of a sprightly feckled mare.
Written by Keith Harris
Submitted by Keith Harris |  |
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