The Yellow Book/Volume 2/Thirty Bob a Week

Thirty Bob a Week

By John Davidson

I COULDN'T touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth—I hope, like you—
On the handle of a skeleton gold key.
I cut mine on leek, which I eat it every week:
I'm a clerk at thirty bob, as you can see.

But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss;
There's no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It's just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur!
Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad suburban Park
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

And it's often very cold and very wet;
And my missis stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let—
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, the wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.

But you'll never hear her do a growl, or whine,
For she's made of flint and roses very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine
Or I'd blubber, for I'm made of greens and sod:
So p'rhaps we are in hell for all that I can tell,
And lost and damned and served up hot to God.

I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silvertongue;
I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung
Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?

I didn't mean your pocket, Mr.; no!
I mean that having children and a wife
With thirty bob on which to come and go
Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife;
When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven, it makes you think,
And notice curious items about life!

I step into my heart and there I meet
A god-almighty devil singing small,

Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.

And I meet a sort of simpleton beside—
The kind that life is always giving beans;
With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
He fell in love and married in his teens;
At thirty bob he stuck, but he knows it isn't luck;
He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.

And the god-almighty devil and the fool
That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
Are my good and evil angels if you like;
And both of them together in every kind of weather
Ride me like a double-seated "bike."

That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled;
But I have a high old hot un in my mind,
A most engrugious notion of the world
That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind:
I give it at a glance when I say "There ain't no chance,
Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind."

And it's this way that I make it out to be:
No fathers, mothers, countries, climates—none!—
Not Adam was responsible for me;
Nor society, nor systems, nary one!
A little sleeping seed, I woke—I did indeed—
A million years before the blooming sun.

I woke because I thought the time had come;
Beyond my will there was no other cause:
And everywhere I found myself at home
Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape, of mollusc, or of ape,
I always went according to the laws.

I was the love that chose my mother out;
I joined two lives and from the union burst;
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
Are mine alone for ever from the first.
It's just the very same with a difference in the name
As "Thy will be done." You say it if you durst!

They say it daily up and down the land
As easy as you take a drink, it's true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that's the proper thing for you.

It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It's walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck:
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one. . . .
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.