Coming Home
Words and Music: Pat Drummond
For Duncan and Carol Cole
Dateline : Gosford NSW

All of his life he bore a restless heart
Always a night away from where he stood
Brooding above a childhood set apart
It sent it's love to Albion's dark woods.

Beyond the oceans to the fields of Kent
Upon his lonlieness his longing went
And in the darkness of his discontent
He set his heart to Coming Home

And with the yearning of the alien
A vision burning from a childhood dream
of Marlowe's England in the field and fen
Standing, rose-drenched by a languid stream
He sold his land and everything of worth
He tore his family from their southern birth
But when he stood at last on England's earth
It wouldn't seem like Coming Home

All of his life he'd searched for something more
something of which he felt a part
Perhaps some sense within the souls he met
of his essential English heart
But all they saw was one more immigrant
And all they heard within his testament
The foreign music of a harsh accent
Another man they did not know

But still he searched for that elusive dream
Until one evening in the North of Kent
He stood before the door of Marlowe's house
but found it bordered now by cold cement
And there at last he finally realised
The British past he had idealised
forever gone, it's beauty brutalised.
could sing no song to him of home

He watched the eyelid of the Boeing fall
Put on his seatbelt and he closed his eyes
He knew his family must think him mad
For he had disrupted all their lives
But there was no part of England left
In which his troubled heart might find it's rest
He held that thought within his emptiness
Until the plane touched down

The sun was shining bright beyond belief
The sky a vast expanse of cobalt blue
The terminal stood out in stark relief
and from out beyond the broken dunes
Rolling breakers on an open beach
Islands crowned with casuarina trees
Gum leaves fragrant in the summer heat
and shining sands to lead him home

Across the tarmac to the airport lounge
his body stiff now with the nightlong flight
He stumbled with a sense of 'Lost and Found'
Eyes squinting in the morning light
A customs officer with sunbleached hair
Short sleeved blue shirt and a casual air,
said "Do you have anything to declare?"
And what he said is "I am home"

Where is this England that we dream of still
so many years beyond the foam
her Union Jack still splashed across my flag
her memory of kings unknown
Her heritage still lingers on this land
where her unwanted child was thrown
But Duncan's story made me start to wonder
When are we ever coming home?

Chess Set Homepage / The Age Of Dissent / The Descent Of Age / Back to Chess Set Script

---