When I say that England has played a major role in Caribbean life, I’m telling you something you already know, but when I tell you I wrote a song about missing England, that has to be news to you because I never lived in England.
This unusual incident illustrates one of the conditions in songwriters where ideas for songs rise up and embrace you wherever you live. This one came about when I was living in Cayman, still a British colony today, with scores of resident Englishmen, a few of whom I came to know in my time there, and among the things I came to know was that many of them, even most, remember their homeland with great devotion. England is a big part of who they are. Also in play was this: while the English have this conservative reputation, they are actually some of the most flamboyant and eccentric people on earth; trust me: they are often an emotional and excessive bunch.
When, therefore, about 15 years ago I set about writing a full-length musical of the story of Cayman’s emergence, it was a given that one of the songs would be of an Englishman, in a reflective mood, deeply into the sauce late one evening, tearfully remembering his homeland and wishing to be there again. The musical was never staged (a complex matter I won’t bother you with here) and the song was never recorded, but there was a recent eruption to my mentioning in this column a composition about Guyana’s development, Why Um Tekkin Suh Long, also never recorded, and that episode reminded me of the song dealing with the Englishman’s lament.
In the musical, named GALLEON, after Cayman’s first hotel, Galleon Beach, built by an English millionaire in the 1960s, one of the “English boys,” as the Caymanians referred to them, is having a few at the hotel bar with a Caymanian friend and there comes this emotional longing to be Back In England. I must emphasise that I spent four days in London many years ago, but I never lived there. However, from what I know about England, and largely from chats with the English expatriates in Cayman, I gleaned the nuts and bolts of the song. I have no immediate plans to record this but I have learned, after two divorces, never to say never. In the meantime, here are lyrics. Imagine a representative Englishman, under some Appleton, with his arm around my shoulder, waxing emotional in the sunny Caribbean about “over o’me,” as the English put it:
BACK IN ENGLAND (Copyright David Martins – Luton Music SOCAN, 1995)
“(REFRAIN) Shades of England stain my every memory
Over ocean, riverside and sand
Rising, falling, always on the edge of me
Waking, sleeping, ever close at hand
(VERSE) Far from it now, I can see the morning mist
Wafting slowly over cobblestone
Children playing hopscotch on the road in town
Nights in Soho, when no one is alone
Back in England in the morning, waking up to rain
Sounds of horse and buggy passing outside in the lane
Gliding swans upon the river underneath the moon
Celebrating sun again in days of flaming June
To feel the sense of early days that live on and endure
To walk the roads at Christmas and see holly on the doors
Back in England, back in England.
(REFRAIN) Low slung barges, up the River Thames and back
Homes in winter, creaking in the cold
Trams in bright red, the London Tower and the Clock
Lakes of Yorshire, shining silv’ry gold
(VERSE) Sunday voices in the churches, confident and keen
Sound of willow hitting leather on the village green
And when the balmy days arrive, the sounds outside your door
They hang like crystals overhead, you hear them so much more
Back in England, back in England.”
I cannot close without mentioning how totally outlandish this all is: a simple country boy from West Dem, who was actually leery of the British in my youth, growing to sympathise with one of them yearning for his homeland. Time and again, in life, we end up where we never dreamed we’d be as we feel our very foundations shifting beneath us.
