He caught my eye as he stared to sea,
I noticed his shoulders heave,
And tears were flowing so fast and free
More than you would believe,
He wasn’t young, but was not too old
To be caught in the pangs of love,
I thought I’d see what his fortune told
So I called to him from above.

I leant right over the balcony
Looked down at the old sea wall,
And called out ‘Friend, would your heartache mend,
Is there much I can do at all?’
He turned and twisted his face to me
And I saw the pain in his eyes,
And round his mouth was the misery
He’d caught from all of her lies.

‘I wish I’d never believed her spin,
She swore that she loved me true,
She opened her heart and she asked me in,
What was a man to do?
She taught me things that I didn’t know
She let me into her world,
A world of stockings and petticoats
And the sweet perfume of a girl.’

I thought that I was a lucky man
To have a wife such as mine,
Who’d wait at home and would hold my hand
And smile with a look divine.
We’d sworn our vows in the little church
That sat way back on the hill,
‘Do you take Annie-gelina now?’
She said that she would take Will.

‘So what is it turned your world about,’
I asked the man down below,
I thought to get all the story straight
As he was turning to go.
‘She said she was married, I’d have to go
Though she’d never said it before,
I couldn’t believe that my Annie-gelina
Was simply a painted *****.’

David Lewis Paget