OK, I'll do the combinatorial work to save Susan the transcription and to make it easier for transferring it to the DT-database. My version is slightly different, but what you read here is Pete's version with 2 verses and an additional line from me (that is The Big Red Songbook).

Wolfgang

THE OLD MAN'S TALE

At the turning of the century, I was a boy of five.
Me farther went to fight the Boers and never came back alive.
Me ma was left to bring us up. No charity she'd seek.
She washed and scrubbed and scraped along on seven and six a week.

At the age of twelve, I left the school and went to find a job.
With growing kids, me ma was glad of the extra couple of bob.
I'm sure that better schooling would have stood me in good stead,
But you can't afford refinement when you're struggling for your bread.

When the Great War came along, I didn't hesitate.
I took the royal shilling and went off to do me bit.
I lived on mud and tears and blood, three years or thereabouts,
'Til I copped some gas in Flanders and got invalided out.

And when the war was over, and we'd settled with the Hun,
We got back into civvies and we thought the fighting done.
We'd won the right to live in peace, but we didn't have such luck,
For very soon we had to fight for the right to go to work.

In twenty-six, the general strike found me on the streets,
Though I'd a wife and kids by then and their needs I had to meet.
But a brave new world was coming and the brotherhood of man,
But when the strike was over we were back where we began.

I struggled through the thirties, out of work now and again.
I saw the Blackshirts marching and the things they did in Spain,
But I raised my children decent and I taught them wrong from right,
But Hitler was the man that came and taught them how to fight.

My daughter was a land girl. She got married to a Yank,
And they gave me son a gong for stopping one of Rommel's tanks.
He was wounded just before the end, and convalesced in Rome,
Got married to an Eyetie nurse and never bothered to come home.

My daughter writes me once a month, a cheerful little note,
About their colour telly and the other things they've got.
She's got a son, a likely lad. he's nearly twenty one,
And she tells me now they've called him up to fight in Vietnam.

I'm living on the pension now. it doesn't go too far,
Not much to show for a life that's been like one long bloody war.
When I think of all the wasted lives, it makes you want to cry.
I'm not sure how to change things, but by Christ we have to try.


Verse 7b: "my daughter writes me once a month, a cheerful little note,
About their colour telly and the other things they've got,
She's got a son, a likely lad; he's nearly twenty one,
And she tells me now they've called him up to fight in Vietnam."
^^