Mentioned above & see also: Help: Dirty Old Town? Meaning??? (MacColl)

Trafford Road Ballad
(Words and music by Ewan MacColl.)

Trafford Road runs through the heart of the dockland in Salford, on of Britain's bleakest cities. The above song was written in 1948 for Landscape with Chimneys a play dealing with life in Salford.

I've never been out of Salford town
The place where I was born
Except when I was in the ranks
And wore a uniform.
But I'd sooner never travel
If the only way to see
The world is through the battlesights
Of a Mark IV-303.

I have a little baby
He's the apple of me eye,
When I think about his future
My thoughts take wing and fly,
What kind of future can there be
With planes and tanks and guns,
With flying high and dropping bombs
On other people's sons?

I'd like to see the whole wide world
North, south, east, and west,
I'd like to travel everywhere
With the girl that I love best.
But I'll stay beside the Irwell
All me life before I'll stand
In some foreign country
With a bayonet in me hand.

I work each day upon the docks
And see the ships come in
And no one asks to see the color
Of a sailor's skin,
Side by side they're working men
From Norway, China*, Greece,
Why can't the statesmen do the same
And let us live in peace?
[Liner notes: The New Briton Gazette, Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger, Folkways Records FW 8732, Trk A5]

*Just fyi: The Chinese sailors' pinyin word for Norwegians, Greeks, Ewan MacColl & me & thee is yí. Translated variously as: barbarian, ordinary, uncivilized and/or wild; as all non-hua are regarded, then and now.