Around the many farming sheds stories come and go,
Of how some people get the names they keep,
Like a shearer known as ‘stitch’ because he always had to sew,
The wounds he made while shearing others sheep.
The publican was ‘Lofty’, though he wasn’t very tall,
And ‘Hessian’, was always getting sacked,
Another one that comes to mind was Johnny ‘knuckles’ Hall,
A mountain of a man with little tact.
In a town called Boggy Creek, where muddy waters wind,
A young man took a fancy to a lass,
He tried his best to win her, but her father had declined,
Thinking him unsuitable and crass.
Perseverance as they say, will always conquer all,
So it was the case in Boggy Creek,
He’d finally arranged to take the girl out to the ball,
On Friday night to end the working week.
To gain her father’s trust he was made to swear an oath,
To keep his filthy hands in his pocket,
Then admiring a shotgun her father showed him both,
Barrels on the thing and how to cock it!
The remainder of the week saw him puffing out his chest,
While scheming to avoid a fatal shot,
‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him’, he quietly confessed,
I’ll play the gentleman although I’m not.
Convenience was not a word that quickly springs to mind,
In Boggy Creek the latest hits around,
Were Tilly lamps and lavatories, of the ‘Long Drop’ kind,
Where refuse disappears without a sound.
Friday night arrives and he’s set to make his mark,
Boorishly swaggering up the road,
In Polished boots and gaberdine like a Doctor’s Clerk,
His wallet nearly bursting with it’s load.
He stops awhile and rolls a smoke to calm his inner fears,
While sitting in the ‘long drop’ on the hill,
With her father’s friendly warning still ringing in his ears,
His wallet somehow falls into the swill.
Rolling up his shirtsleeves as a quick resource,
While observing the wallets slow descent,
He looks into the quagmire, and holds his breath of course,
Then dives his arms into the effluent.
Panicking, he blindly grasps at any solid mass,
With hungry creatures clinging to his arms,
Putrefying discharge and choking methane gas,
A smelly cocktail dripping from his palms.
He finds the soggy wallet but the problem is the smell,
His only choice to hide his hands from view,
So he keeps them in his pockets resolving not to tell,
Hopefully the girl won’t have a clue.
He meets the farmer’s daughter a feisty little wench,
Who’s eager for some wild and hot romance,
But he had no cure or antidote to mask the dreadful stench,
Emanating slowly from his pants.
The ball is a disaster from beginning to the end,
The plans he made were left in utter ruin,
Forced into a corner to pathetically defend,,
The girl’s advances when he was a ‘shoe in’.
She finally confesses that she’s been on better dates,
He wasn’t quite the type she thought he’d be,
And he can’t control the ribbing that he’s getting from his mates,
By following ‘fathers’ orders to the tee.
He ended up by marrying another girl he met,
Her father owned a piggery we heard,
But down in Boggy Creek they never would forget,
The young man who so blindly kept his word.
Locally they still recount ‘the wallet in the hole’,
Perhaps it’s just a tale of rotten luck,
One thing is for certain though, he never told a soul,
But somehow the name of ‘pockets’ stuck.
© Steven Smith – 28th May 2000