We’d hear the horse with its iron shoes
And the dray with its wooden wheels,
Approaching slowly over the hills
And down to us by the fields,
...
The doctors said: ‘Take her away,
There's nothing we can do,
The life is seeping from her blood
Her soul is weeping too,
...
Her Gramps had dealt in consols,
Whatever 'consols' were,
Her father was a partner in
A place - 'Chemin de Fer',
...
'There's nobody in
But the light is on
And a chair just creaked,
Did you hear it, son?
...
There once was a time
When there was but one,
He came in a sleigh with his bells turned on,
With a long white beard and a fat red pelt
...
My father died of the cholera
In eighteen thirty-two,
There wasn't a place at the cemetery
To bury him, that we knew,
...
We were sitting, reminiscing
Of the civil war in Spain,
Where my uncle fought for Franco,
Never saw his home again.
...
The mother lay in a stupor filled
With alcohol and drugs,
The twins lay wet in the carry-cot
And screamed at the top of their lungs,
...
The store had been closed for a month or more,
The Receivers opened the door,
To auction off all the fittings there,
Whatever stood on the floor,
...
There wasn’t much left of the woods out there
By the time that they built the town,
Only a dozen square miles or so
For the rest had been cut down,
...