Thoughts of Yesteryear....

The Good Old/Bad Old Days....

I was obviously feeling down this morning when I looked out the window onto another bleak winter’s day.   It seems to me that this year it is dragging on and although the daffodils are a few inches high it still seems that spring and summer are a long, long way off.

I kicked myself later whilst grocery shopping and had a look around me.   I saw the shelves of food, clothing, electronics and literally almost everything imaginable, the likes of which were almost unheard of back in 1966 when I first came to London.

It is a totally different world we now live in and bears no comparison with the city I first saw on my arrival from Ireland to join the London Police................

It was then only twenty years after World War Two and evidence of the devastation that London suffered was still in clear evidence everywhere one looked.   Poverty was extreme and the poor had nothing..........There were bombsites everywhere…..

Things improved vastly over the following ten years with new buildings cropping up everywhere.   Foods that could not be found during and just after the war and the subsequent twenty years were now plentiful and reasonably priced.   We were comfortably off and able to afford a small car.   We were all doing well......

However, there were always the ones who complained about everything and begged for the return of the past great days.   They were looking around themselves through rose-tinted glasses and proved beyond doubt that they possessed very short memories...............

I got tired of hearing their moaning and decided to put my thoughts on the subject in the form of a poem.   (It tells of a sad period in time when strikes were all the rage.   The municipal workers struck causing the closure of cemeteries thereby leaving them closed to funerals; refuse collectors and road sweepers refused to collect rubbish.  (Several similar withdrawals of labour took place). It was a very sad time……

I titled the poem ‘The Good Old Days’...............

The Good Old Days.............

Bring back the good old days again, when we were young and free,

When we were fit and felt no pain, when we were twenty-three.

We laughed all day, and drank all night, from dusk until day-break,

With ten ‘ P’ fags, and ten ‘ P’ beer, we lived on sirloin steak.

No guns, no bombs, no radios, no need a three foot stick,

No riot gear, no night-time fear; just don’t go down the ‘Wick’.

When Magistrates were strong but fair, like old McElligott,

When ‘No Comment’  was never heard, and villains said ‘Fair Cop’.

But memory, it plays sad tricks, the hurt it does erase,

It numbs the mind; it makes one blind, and leaves us only praise.

But think you of the cold and damp, the hunger-pain and stomach cramp,

The dying child, the dirty room, the poverty, the dismal gloom.

The rasping cough, the winter smog, bodies unburied, graves undug.

The rubbish heaps, streets unswept, I swear to God, I often wept.

For truth is times were seldom good, no happiness and little food.

So don’t  say you now how times are tough, no overtime, pay’s not enough,

Or I’ll take you back to days gone bye, then you will know, not wonder why,

That I accept the modern ways and you can keep The Good Old Days.

Mike

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