Little Eliza she cries in her cradle,
Benjamin crawls on the rug by the hearth;
Hannah stirs soup with an old pewter ladle,
Jane’s picking blackberries down by the garth.

Mary and Lizzie attend to their baking,
Billy’s a carter out learning his trade;
wee Tommy follows - a man in the making -
gathering horse-dung with bucket and *****.

Widowed at forty with eight children living,
Mary, their mother, cleans houses by day;
money is short and the work unforgiving,
asking for strength, on a Sunday she’ll pray.

Thomas, her husband, was killed at the sawmill,
working long hours to put shoes on their feet;
times they were hard, nothing ever came easy,
but sweet was the love shared in old Sugar Street.