Lyrics

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