The door was ajar to a pokey room
All gloomy and morbid inside,
It gave off an air of despair and gloom
Not joyful, befitting a bride,
The couple arrived as I wandered by,
But she with her eyes on the ground,
While he simply glared as we passed on the stair
As if to say, ‘See what I found!’

I wasn’t that curious back in the day
For couples, they came and they went,
Those pokey apartments so full of decay,
They’d be better off in a tent.
But these two had stayed there much longer than most,
She rarely came out in the light,
And he placed a padlock from door to the doorpost,
Whenever he left in the night.

Whenever he left, and he certainly did,
He’d leave her in there on her own,
Though where he would go, I now think that he hid
For sometimes I heard the girl moan.
I’d feel the floor shudder, and hear the walls creak
While out in the hall it would whine,
And I would go searching, like hide and go seek
To be sure it was nothing of mine.

One night with a rumble behind their front door
I heard someone dragging a case,
That terrible screech on the lino, at least
In that something was dragged out of place,
Could that be a trunk, was he doing a bunk
With her body to sink off the coast?
I called in the cops as I thought she was lost
And they blocked the door off, he was toast.

They opened the trunk, took the padlock away
And that’s where she was, true enough,
When they questioned him why she was locked up inside
‘She’s a penchant for travelling rough.’
They said did she mind and to this she replied
The woman, whose first name was Joyce,
‘He showed me the padlock and said it was wedlock,
I thought that I had little choice.’

David Lewis Paget