... and the plasterer, that's fifteen pence ...

[marnanightingale]

Well, you might think so if you went to Surrey
And stayed for week-ends with the well-to--do,
Your car too fast, too personal your worry
To look too closely at the wheeling view.
But in the north it simply isn’t true.
To those who live in Warrington or Wigan,
It’s not a white lie, it’s a whacking big ‘un.

There on the old historic battlefield,
The cold ferocity of human wills,
The scars of struggle are as yet unhealed;
Slattern the tenements on sombre hills,
And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills
That, since the Georgian house, in my conjecture
Remain our finest native architecture.

On economic, health, um moral grounds
It hasn’t got the least excuse to show;
No more than chamber pots or otter hounds;
But let me say before it has to go,
It’s the most lovely country that I know;
Clearer than Seafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Long, long ago, when I was only four,
Going towards my grandmother, the line
Passed through a coal-field. From the corridor
I watched it pass with envy, thought ‘How fine!
Oh how I wish that situation mine.’
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.

Hail to the New World! Hail to those who’ll love
Its antiseptic objects, feel at home.
Lovers will gaze at an electric stove,
Another poésie de départ come
Centred round bus-stops or the aerodrome.
But give me still, to stir imagination
The chiaroscuro of the railway station.

Preserve me from the Shape of Things to Be;
The high-grade posters at the public meeting,
The influence of Art on Industry,
The cinemas with perfect taste in seating;
Preserve me, above all, from central heating.
It may be D. H. Lawrence hocus-pocus,
But I prefer a room that’s got a focus.