Carnations On The Roof

by Clive James and Pete Atkin

He worked setting tools for a multi-purpose punch
In a shop that made holes in steel plates
He could hear himself think through a fifty minute lunch
Of the kids, gas and stoppages, the upkeep and the rates
While he talked about Everton and Chelsea with his mates

With gauge and micrometer, with level and with rule
While chuck and punch were pulsing like a drum
He checked the finished product like a master after school
The slugs looked like money and the cutting-oil like scum
And to talk with a machinist he made signals like the dumb

Though he had no great gifts of personality or mind
He was generally respected, and the proof
Was a line of hired Humbers tagging quietly behind
A fat Austin Princess with carnations on the roof

Forty years of metal tend to get into your skin
The surest coin you take home from your wage
The green cleaning-jelly only goes to rub it in
And that glitter in the wrinkle of your knuckle shows your age
Began when the dignity of work was still the rage

He was used and discarded in a game he didn't own
But when the moment of destruction came
He showed that a working man is more than flesh and bone
The hands on his chest flared more brightly than his name
For a technicolor second as he rolled into the flame

Though he had no great gifts of personality or mind
He was generally respected, and the proof
Was a line of hired Humbers tagging quietly behind
A fat Austin Princess with carnations on the roof

Note (from Collected Poems)

I got the idea for this lyric when I was working in London at a Holloway sheet-metal factory before I went up to Cambridge, but at first I thought it might be a poem, and didn’t realize until later that it had to be a song lyric. At the base of the theme is the conviction that the labourer is worthy of his hire. After the war from which my father failed to return I would play with the gauges and spirit levels in his metal toolkit and imagine that my future lay in the machine shop, which is more or less how things turned out, although the things I make fold into books. My earliest Fleet Street editor and dear lost friend Nicholas Tomalin was kind enough to say, on the basis of this one song, that what we were doing was something strange, new and worth pursuing. If he had not been killed when covering the Yom Kippur War I would be still trying to impress him now.