Also, I am word perfect--almost--in a certain very popular
street-song that the cockneys took to the trenches and the tommies
brought back again to town [London], and which I have sung often as I
ran (for this search turned out to be a race, with the films for
adversaries) because its plot, its characters, and its point-of-view
compose the very marrow in the bones of that melodramatic old family
group whose descendants I pursued. Listen.

She was pore, but she was honest;
Victim of a rich man's whim.
First he loved, then he left her;
And she was with child by 'im.

Chorus:
It's the rich what gits the pleasher.
It's the pore what gits the blime.
It's the sime the whole world over.
Isn't it a bleeding shime!

She him in the 'Ouse of Commons,
Making laws to put down crime.
While the victim of his passions
'Urries past to hide her shime.

And her parents, sunk in sorrow,
In a cottage where they live,
Drink the champagne what she send 'em,
But they never can forgive.

So far as libraries record, this ditty, like most of its many
dramatizations, is not known to print; like them it belongs to the
literature of the unlettered, and words come and go in it according to
the memory and mood (and the modesty---for there are bawdier verses
than these) of the singer.

June 1925. From "Elephant and Castle Melodrama" by Velona Pilcher in Threatre Arts Monthly.