Anaglypta, artex, emulsion, eggshell, full gloss, inch-tape, shade-card, formica, formica, formica
The King is Dead
Long Live the Queen
Little children should be seen and not heard
In nineteen fifty-two
I'm four year old -- we've just got word
We've got a Scottish Special house
The three of us --
Me, My Dad and my Mum --
Oh they've been waiting and waiting
Thought they'd still be waiting till kingdom come
For their ain hoose
For a hoose o their ain.
At first it was none of a family yet
Then jist the wan wean (Me!), she's an Only One
Now at last their life has just begun --
Been eight long year since
In my granny's front room
They got married in uniform, nae honeymoon
(it's a story I've heard before
About the no-picnic that was the war) --
Now life will never be the same
In Mum n Dad's first-ever married hame.
Nae mair jammed, nae mair crammed
In wi the inlaws, one set
Then the ither, sharing a kitchenette
Steyin in the wan back room
Wi nae room to swing a cat
Imagine that
One room --
Haw, how come
I'm four year auld and still sleeping in a cot
When baby I am NOT?
Oh, I'm over the moon we'll be oot o here soon,
My Mum n Dad've said
I'll get my own room and my own double bed
Just like theirs, three cheers
Now we're maw, paw and the wean
We've got a house an it's a brand new one
A hame o our ain.
God bless
The lovely emptiness
It's bare and spare but it's absolutely super
With the walls still too new too damp to wallpaper
But, ach, there's aye stippling, photaes tae hing
An ither temporary decoration
This hale place'll be a palace
By the time of the Coronation!
Anaglypta, artex, emulsion, eggshell, full gloss, inch-tape, shade-card, formica, formica, formica
(When we become, when we become, when we become,
In rooms of our own)
Been a whole lifetime
Since that room was my lifeline --
Been mair than seventy years
Since I got out from behind that cot's prison bars
And slept all night by mysel in thon big double bed
Below the yellow candlewick bedspread
And golden counterpane
That I had when I was a wean
In my ain room
In that room o my ain
Lulling me into the loneliness of sleep every night either Mum or Dad would read to me
A Child's Garden of Verses, Tanglewood Tales, Peter Pan, I loved them all.
And when they crept away and left me, they'd always leave the light on in the hall
Soon I'd learn to read for myself: Little Women, Woman's Own, The Chalet School, Jane Eyre, old Movie Magazines
Over the years I lay in that bed and read anything at all.
I mind looking in the mirror and learning to say To a Mouse out loud and off by heart.
And Tiger, Tiger and I remember, I remember -- oh I mind actually really liked the old-fashioned, foosty pleasure of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, forbidden Peyton Place and the Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover in below my pillow in a brown paper cover.
I'm minding the way that if you were lying on that bed and you made your eyes go squinty you could imagine you were up on the ceiling and you were looking down and --
The lampshade on the ceiling
Was now a bucket on the flair
And through the door that was now a high window
Might climb Ginger and Astaire
They might shimmy on the ceiling --
I still like this feeling
I like being in this room
I like being on my own
Being all alone
Where I can really go to town
Wi seeing things in my own way
Upside down.