I saw her by the showroom window,
Standing alone on a market quay.
As I passed her by I heard her sigh
As the military parade came on TV.
There were twenty screens in the showroom window,
Victors marching large and small.
As they wheeled on by I heard her sigh,
Oh, and oh for my darling boy.
They called him Jack, they called him John,
He was there sat tight offshore.
They caught him cold in the heat of a battle
For a South Atlantic company store.
Mama told me, don't you wed a soldier
Don't ever marry your heart's delight
He will be gone when the fighting's done
And you will be left for to mourn in the light.
Every night I dreamed that I saw him,
Dreamed I never would see him more.
In my dream his body come floating
Away where the ocean rise and fall.
But it was not death that bawled in the alley
Came skittering up to my love's door.
It was not death that cried and howled
In the teeth of a South Atlantic roar.
But the bomb bounding down on the alley,
The bomb wrapped in a silver shell,
The bomb that plucked the face from my love,
Spread it wide on the face of the swell.
Oh, sweet and soothing showers,
Breathe upon his burning head,
Ease among his waking dreams
Whose tears nightly drench my bed.
For it was all a case of saving face
When they sent my love to the war
For eighteen hundred landless tenants
Of a South Atlantic company store.
Eighteen hundred landless tenants,
Eighteen hundred landless poor,
Eighteen hundred waking dreams
Of Empire long gone before.
In my dream I stand at Bluff,
I've an empty shell up to my ear,
The only sound the sound of cash
Being wrung from the snows of Antarctica.
Ring-a-ring-a city roses,
Victors march, and markets bloom.
The flame that melted my love's cheek
Come a-dancing the Iron Lady too.