WILLIAM'S TALE

This is the town where I was born
It's the town where I live now
There’s many a tale to be told of this place
So I’ll tell one to you now
In Nineteen-O-One I entered the world
The year Victoria died
My mother died delivering me
How my father must have cried and cried

As a young lad of twelve
Just fresh out of school
I spent my first day in the mine
And it seemed like the hell
Of a dark prison cell
But Christ knows I'd committed no crime
The West Stanley Pit Disaster I remember it well
When a hundred and sixty-eight lost their lives
We were little more than slaves then
Growing old before our time

When the Fourteen-Eighteen Great War came
My father was among the first to go
He joined with the Durham Light Infantry
And we were proud of all the medals he won
Pozzieres, Mons and Ypres, Cambrai and the Somme
He fought in all the major campaigns
But when they shipped him back home at the end of it
He wasn't the father that I had once known

In Twenty-Six the General Strike
Saw all the men on the streets
And from Jarrow they marched in Thirty-Six
But all they got was blood on their feet
Half a century on it all happened again
It seems that some things never change
Jarrow cried and now Sunderland’s died
And strikes are still all the rage

When the Second World War came along
In Nineteen-Thirty-Nine
My son got a note from the government
Saying "We need your services son for a while"
Then they sent me a note at the end of it all
Saying "Sir your son did fine
Now he's buried in North Africa
You can visit him from time to time"

Now I sit here at home with my plaque on the wall
It's not much to show for my life
Of fifty-odd years of toil down the mine
It's been a long haul of struggle and strife
And now that the Tories are back in power again
It's driving me bloody insane
And now that the Eighties have become the 'Haties'
There's no future left for the bairns of today

(Gary Miller)