The Brigadier

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Up where we live we’ve got everything, 
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We’ve got a cuckoo and a nightingale, 
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We’ve got a shop and chapel and a boozer 
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  And a little jail. 
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We’ve got a brain-sick witch and a cricket pitch, 
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We’ve got a pump and a duck pond here, 
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A vicar and a blacksmith and a local idiot 
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 And a brigadier, a frigging brigadier. 



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Let the caravans come 
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let the charabancs roll! 
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Tripping our hills, picking our daffodils 
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Getting stuck in our holes. We don’t care. 



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We don’t mind trippers and scouts and ramblers, 
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They can come and stand in the rain all day. 
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They give us money and beer and a right good belly laugh, 
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Then they go away. 
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But who pins medals on the chests of our children? 
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Who pins a rose on our biggest pig’s ear? 
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Who pins a little red poppy on our cenotaph? 
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A brigadier, a frigging brigadier. 



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Let the bearded wonders come. 
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Whether we like or not 
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They squat in the cottages of our ancestors 
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Making bloody pottery! We don’t care. 



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We get drunk, we get rowdy, 
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And we get nicked when the flatfeet come; 
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How are we judged? By whose almighty 
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Finger and thumb? 
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Not by Bacchus’s, not by Jupiter’s. 
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Not by Solomon’s. We’re summonsed to appear 
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Underneath the beak of his week-a-day worship 
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A brigadier, a frigging brigadier. 



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Let the rain-god come, 
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spitter and spat and spout. 
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At least he’s a god who is impartial: 
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He waggles it about. We don’t care. 



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On a Sunday when the vicar admonishes our wickedness 
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Whose “Amen” resounds down the aisle? 
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Who reads the Sermon on the Mount with a Holy 
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Ghost of a smile? 
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Who takes the wine? Who takes the biscuit? 
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Who brings the plate? Who bends the ear? 
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Singing of his hopes for a new Jerusalem, 
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A brigadier, a frigging brigadier. 



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Let God’s pale archangel 
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the Grim Reaper come; 
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He can hack my bones, he can step upon my gravestone, 
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He can kiss my bum. I don’t care. 



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If he wants my chimneys, if he wants my acres, 
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If he wants my trout, if he wants my grouse, 
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If he wants gold and silver titbits, 
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   He’s got the wrong house. 
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He can rattle my latch, bang my knocker, 
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There’s not one whit of a titbit here; 
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Go tap with his dainty sickle on the windowpane 
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Of the brigadier, The frigging brigadier.