A Charabanc Day

It is our once a year day,
A day to leave our soot entrusted homes,
We’d earned it!
You needed to have gone to Sunday school all year,
But it was worth it.
First a train ride and then a picnic,
Potted fish paste sandwiches, fruit cake and a sticky bun.
If heaven is like our Sunday school outing then I am starting to queue up for a place now.
Gran had come with us as Mum couldn’t leave my younger brother and sisters,
But she’d given me and my big brother a threepenny bit each that
We’d been promised for doing our chores since Christmas.
No doubt Dad would have preferred to have gone to Rainham in Essex,
He would have liked a half of shandy at the Three Crowns on the Marshes,
But Mum is a tea teetotaler and had signed the Pledge.
He couldn’t have come anyway, because he was trying to unblock the privy out the back,
It was leaking again and the pong was making everyone feel sick.
Paddling is great, but so is just watching,
I wonder if I’ll ever walk out with someone like the girls in their Sunday best hats,
Who are sitting in the pleasure boat.
Perhaps I’ll get a nice clean job working in a dress shop, when I grow up,
And then I will be able to buy a real swimming costume instead of the one Gran has knitted,
Because it weighs like a ton of coal,
And when it gets wet it will show all the bits you are supposed to cover up as I get out of the water.

A Charabanc Day

Dreams are important my Mum says and I think she is right.
Perhaps if I concentrate hard enough I will find a few extra pennies to buy another ice cream cornet,
And one day perhaps I might even have a beau to take me out for a jaunt on a boat.