# The Yellow Book/Volume 2/Thirty Bob a Week

​Thirty Bob a Week
By John Davidson
I COULDN'T touch a stop and turn a screw, And set the blooming world a-work for me, Like such as cut their teeth—I hope, like you— On the handle of a skeleton gold key. I cut mine on leek, which I eat it every week: I'm a clerk at thirty bob, as you can see.
But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss; There's no such thing as being starred and crossed; It's just the power of some to be a boss, And the bally power of others to be bossed: I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur! Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!
For like a mole I journey in the dark, A-travelling along the underground From my Pillar'd Halls and broad suburban Park To come the daily dull official round; And home again at night with my pipe all alight A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.
And it's often very cold and very wet; And my missis stitches towels for a hunks; And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let— Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks. And we cough, the wife and I, to dislocate a sigh, When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
But you'll never hear her do a growl, or whine, For she's made of flint and roses very odd; And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine Or I'd blubber, for I'm made of greens and sod: So p'rhaps we are in hell for all that I can tell, And lost and damned and served up hot to God.
I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silvertongue; I'm saying things a bit beyond your art: Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start! With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks, Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?
I didn't mean your pocket, Mr.; no! I mean that having children and a wife With thirty bob on which to come and go Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife; When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven, it makes you think, And notice curious items about life!
I step into my heart and there I meet A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in the street, And squelch the passers flat against the wall; If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take, He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.
And I meet a sort of simpleton beside— The kind that life is always giving beans; With thirty bob a week to keep a bride He fell in love and married in his teens; At thirty bob he stuck, but he knows it isn't luck; He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.
And the god-almighty devil and the fool That meet me in the High Street on the strike, When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool, Are my good and evil angels if you like; And both of them together in every kind of weather Ride me like a double-seated "bike."
That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled; But I have a high old hot un in my mind, A most engrugious notion of the world That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind: I give it at a glance when I say "There ain't no chance, Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind."
And it's this way that I make it out to be: No fathers, mothers, countries, climates—none!— Not Adam was responsible for me; Nor society, nor systems, nary one! A little sleeping seed, I woke—I did indeed— A million years before the blooming sun.
I woke because I thought the time had come; Beyond my will there was no other cause: And everywhere I found myself at home Because I chose to be the thing I was; And in whatever shape, of mollusc, or of ape, I always went according to the laws.
I was the love that chose my mother out; I joined two lives and from the union burst; My weakness and my strength without a doubt Are mine alone for ever from the first. It's just the very same with a difference in the name As "Thy will be done." You say it if you durst!
They say it daily up and down the land As easy as you take a drink, it's true; But the difficultest go to understand, And the difficultest job a man can do, Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week, And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
It's a naked child against a hungry wolf; It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck; It's walking on a string across a gulf With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck: But the thing is daily done by many and many a one. . . . And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.