A fine shot at deciphering the words, and very close. The following is pretty much as I wrote it all those years ago. Thanks to Bruce for reviving a song I'd forgotten myself. He's made the song his own. I have a recording of a fine performance by Nigel Broadbent which is close to the original. Let me have an email address and I'll send a soundfile. Cheers - Bob
RETURN TO FIDDLER'S CROSS (Bob Pegg)
1. Well, he stood all alone by the grey market cross as the moon's ghostly face rose behind the black hills He was back for the first time since he was a lad, on the soil where his father once tilled; And there came from the distance a magical sound he'd not heard since he'd last left that land: The fiddle and cello, melodeon and bones, the voice of an old village band.
2. Well, he paid up his shilling and entered the hall. The dancers flocked round him and welcomed him in, And someone called out for an old fashioned waltz, and he felt it was called just for him. Then the band on the stage struck up with the tune The Young Sailor Cut Down In His Prime; And the dancers formed up and began to wheel round like clocks that could keep perfect time.
3. He stood all alone at the edge of the dance when an arm slipped round his arm and gathered him in- to the crowd, whose eyes burned like cold midnight stars, and whose faces were lit from within; And he looked at the girl he held in his arms and he knew that it couldn't be her, For he'd left that girl crying on a dark kitchen stool some fifty or more years before.
4. He gazed at the shadows that skimmed round the room. "Surely I know them - is this a dream? It's fifty long years now but they haven't changed; they can't be the people they seem." Then the band stopped playing - began a new dance, and the fiddler flaked out a reel. "Oh, I'm moving as fast as the earth round the sun; I can't be as young as I feel."
5. Then the music reached out like a smoky black hand, whipped them around like tops on the floor, And he suddenly felt the weight of his years and he just couldn't dance any more; And the girl in his arms let go of his hand, and he fell without speaking a word, And her ghostly pale face was the last thing he saw, and the wind was the last sound he heard.
6. Well, the dancers stopped dancing and knelt to the ground, and they lifted him onto a table nearby, Then they formed up in silence like a circle of stones and the music began with a sigh. And they danced it so quiet, and they danced it so slow, like leaves floating down from a tree, As if they were dancing the last dance of all, for dancers wherever they be.
7. They came at the weekend in a bright-colored car to the village abandoned for fifty long years. They unpacked their picnic, sat down on the green, when their child ran up screaming in fear, And they found in the ruins of what once was the hall, the thing that had made their child cry; The corpse of a tramp lying back on the stones, with his eyes staring up to the sky.