"Water, water, wallflower" is in Ritchie's "The Golden City", recorded in Edinburgh in the early Fifties.

There's one song theme which dates back to the 17th century in Scotland as "Jenny jo" and is also found in German in "Das Knaben Wunderhorn" (set by Mahler as "Irdisches Leben"). A child is starving, but before she can get any bread it has to be (in successive verses) sown, grown, reaped, threshed, milled, kneaded and baked... and it's too late, she dies. There were several catastrophic famines in 17th century northern Europe and that's presumably where it comes from. The moral point, that the desperate *can't wait*, isn't made in any other song I know of.