Thirty Bob a Week

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 a 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 Suburbean 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 misses 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, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
  When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
 But you 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'r'haps we are in Hell for all that I can tell,
  And lost and damn'd and served up hot to God.
 I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silver-tongue;
  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 them 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, countres, 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.