OWAIN:
Aye, very passable, that, very
passable bit of risotto.
LIZ:
Nothing like a good glass of
Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
AARON:
You're right there, Obadiah.
PHIL:
Who'd have thought thirty year
ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
OWAIN:
In them days we was glad to have
the price of a cup o' tea.
LIZ:
A cup o' cold tea.
PHIL:
Without milk or sugar.
AARON:
Or tea.
OWAIN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.
PHIL:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used
to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
LIZ:
The best we could manage was to
suck on a piece of damp cloth.
AARON:
But you know, we were happy in
those days, though we were poor.
OWAIN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad
used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
PHIL:
Aye, 'e was right.
OWAIN:
Aye, 'e was.
PHIL:
I was happier then and I had
nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the
roof.
LIZ:
House! You were lucky to live in
a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf
the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear
of falling.
AARON:
Eh, you were lucky to have a
room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
OWAIN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in
a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank
on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish
dumped all over us! House? Huh.
PHIL:
Well, when I say 'house' it was
only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house
to us.
LIZ:
We were evicted from our 'ole in
the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
AARON:
You were lucky to have a lake! There
were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
OWAIN:
Cardboard box?
AARON:
Aye.
OWAIN:
You were lucky. We lived for
three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six
in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work
down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and
when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
LIZ:
Luxury. We used to have to get
out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of
'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and
Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
AARON:
Well, of course, we had it tough.
We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick
road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four
hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad
would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
PHIL:
Right. I had to get up in the
morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup
of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner
for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother
would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
OWAIN:
And you try and tell the young
people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL:
They won't!
So that was alot of fun. The recording of this will be uploaded soon too!
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