West Wind Blows - 25aug2024

This program is sponsored by Bounce Back Recycling, offering a sustainable way to get rid of old furniture and mattresses. The West Wind Blows is a weekly program of poetry, song, and story. They start with a poem by C. P. Cavafy, followed by a story called "On the Telephones." The story reflects on the importance of phone boxes in the past as a means of communication and connection with the outside world. It also mentions the role of dance halls as meeting places in Ireland during the 60s and 70s. The interview for a job at the Clifton telephone exchange is also described. This program is kindly sponsored by Bounce Back Recycling. Say goodbye to your old furniture and mattress in an affordable, convenient and sustainable way. Call 091-760-877. Hello again and welcome to the West Wind Blows, a weekly program of poetry, song and story. My name is Kathleen Faherty and Bridie Cashin is producer and technician for the program. We'll begin this week's program with a poem by C. P. Cavafy and the poem is read by Anne-Marie McGowan. Ethica by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, born in 1863 and he died in 1933. This poem was recited at the funeral of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. As you set out for Ithaca, hope that your journey is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Lystragonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidons, do not be afraid of them. You'll never find things like that on your way. As long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare sensation touches your spirit and your body. Lystragonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidons, you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul. Unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope that your journey is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time. May you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things. Mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind. As many sensual perfumes as you can. And may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and learn again from those who know. Keep Ithaca always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years. Know that you're old by the time you reach the island. Wealthy with all you have gained on the way. Not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience. You will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean. Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you. That is how I know you'd go on. Far across the distance and spaces between us. You have come to show you go on. Near, far, wherever you are. I believe that the heart does go on. Once more you open the door. And you're here in my heart. And my heart will go on and on. Love can touch us one time and last for a lifetime. And never let go till we're gone. Love was when I loved you one true time. I hope you in my life will always go on. Near, far, wherever you are. I believe that the heart does go on. Once more you open the door. And you're here in my heart. And my heart will go on and on. You're here in everything I feel. And I know that my heart will go on and on. We'll stay forever this way. You are safe in my heart. And my heart will go on and on. And that was Céline Dion with My Heart Will Go On. And that, of course, is the theme song from the Titanic. Now we have a story written by Tom Mongan. And it's called On the Telephones. And Tom himself will read the story. It is when we had a manual telephone system. And it was also a year where we had a great song called The Candy Store on the Corner. This was recorded by Tony Bennett in a New York singer and later here in Ireland by a Dublin singer called Dickie Rock and the Miami Showband. It was a song about a boy and a girl aged 17 years who met in a sweet shop, fell in love, and dreamed of going to the chapel on the hill to get married. A simple story telling the way they wished their whole lives to be now and forever. Happy, innocent days, not yet damaged by the world they lived in. I was comparing its lyrics to those of Don McLean's wonderful Starry, Starry Nights, which was a song written as a tribute to the great artist Vincent van Gogh. A very different song with The Candy Store having a more wishful thinking for the person there beside you. Sharing that moment in time and planning for the future, the lovely happy world that everyone would wish it to be. The Candy Store on the Corner is an easy-going song with a simple story and not unlike the Dreamland plot for a Mills and Boom romance story of that time, where the young couple met, exchanged glances, saw the stars in each other's eyes, perhaps drank a bottle of orange, held hands as they walked home, said goodnight, each hoping that the acne spots on their chin would not cause the other to think that they were not the bee's knees. Here in Ireland during the sixties and the seventies the meeting places were mainly the local dance halls. In the rural areas the dance halls were usually under the management of the local priests and their supervision was to keep young couples from close encounters and avoid the occasion of sin. Adam and Eve were long gone but some of the punishment for their sinful ways were passed on to the rest of us, and we seemed to inherit some of their wicked inclinations as well. In moments of weakness we seemed prone to a fondness for the garden of Eden's fun and frolics that remained with the human race, and we needed to be chastised for it. Anything that you like is bad for you, and the chastisements that you hate are good as a penance for your erring ways. That was the way it was, a continuous work to rule plan for the eternal salvation. In even the best kept gardens the four winds of the real world are both calm and peaceful one day, and may be fast and furious the next. So all creatures, big and small as they say, experience the changes in climatic conditions, and do not have heavenly days every day. To continue and foster any friendship between people that lived far apart, some type of contact was required back then as it is now, though nowadays it is much easier to keep in contact with the modern means of communication and indeed transport. Then the phone box on the corner was often the ongoing link for many. It probably played a greater role in the court trip than the candy store on the corner, except perhaps in the USA where the Yanks say that the candy store was very likely to be high on the list of favourite meeting places for young people. Since the beginning of time people needed to make contact with each other, and did so by various different means, including smoke signals, mirrors, jungle drums, and carrier pigeons to mention but a few. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but like in most inventions, others played a part. The name telephone comes from the Greek word tele, which means affair, and phone, which means sound or voice to sound. A telephone reproduces sound by electrical means, and for that reason the Victorians called it talking by lightning. In the 60s and 70s the phone box on the corner was the only means of contact with the outside world for many. That's if you didn't have your own landline, and the great majority hadn't in the 60s particularly. It was often the place where romances were made and broken, and sometimes big business deals were discussed and finalised. It was the place you called for the doctor, or vet, and rang for the hospital for information of ill family members. It was sometimes a place of great joy, but on the other hand it was also a place where tears were often shed. To make a call a number of plans of action were required. Firstly you had to leave home, rain or shine, to go to the nearest public phone box, and we always called it box when the grander title kiosk was the post office title for it. Whatever about its title, you needed the correct amount of money to make the call, although some didn't, they were able to make sounds by tapping a coin on the top of the box. I remember seeing an ad somewhere for the Clifton telephone exchange job, and I applied. Not having a clue in the world what was involved up to this, all my work had been in various mountains around Ireland with forestry. Most of them far from towns and villages, doing the forestry work which consisted of ploughing, fencing, draining, spreading sand on new roads and planting trees. It was very far removed from sitting down at a switchboard in a telephone exchange. Some weeks after applying for the job I got a call to do an interview, which took place upstairs in the Clifton post office. That day as I climbed the stairs the idea of turning back and vanishing out onto the street in Clifton crossed the mind, but the stairs were short and I was at the door of the interview room quicker than I expected. Three men sat at a table and invited me to sit down opposite them. They were all strangers to me. One of them started the proceedings and introduced himself and the others, and his name was Tommy Brinnan, the Clifton postmaster. At that time the post office and the telephone service were all under the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, known as the PMT, and the postmaster was in charge. I cannot remember the names of the other two men with Tommy Brinnan. One of them didn't say much, if anything. The other was sharpish enough and threw in a few questions that I stumbled with, and I thought it was out-the-door time, the door I was thinking about not entering a few minutes earlier. But as I had I did not want to get thrown out now. When he asked about my knowledge of the Irish language I had to tell him the truth, almost none. So he said, what are you going to do if someone comes on from Carna or somewhere else for that matter and speaks only in Irish to you? I had no answer, and as he sat there tipping the top of his by-row against a notebook I felt the body-heat rise and the sweat flow, but before the flow got as high as a flood at Stirling and Burbridge, the Clifton postmaster came to my rescue and said, Well, there's nine switchboards in the Exchange, and if anyone is having a problem here they pass it on to the colleague. Not that they're all manned at night, but if he ever had to do duty alone on an all-night shift he can always pass the call on to an operator in the Galway Exchange, where they would have no problem with different languages. So by the skin of my teeth for want of a better description I got the job, and started training some weeks after that. Being a slow learner I found it tough enough it wasn't out on the mountainside I was now, listening to my workmates talk about the price of ewes and rams, lambs and wool, and me owning no sheep, trying to figure out the difference between a hoggart and a weather. No, this was a different job, inside a switchboard, waiting to cook into the next light coming up on the board. Part of our training was that every call was of the utmost importance to the caller, which of course it was. Now, with the mobile phone system, emails, Skype, to mention only a few, it's a different world today. I think anyone that wasn't around at the time might not believe some of us that were. So vastly different it has become over the years. It went something like this, and it was the same all over Ireland, but as we're in Connemara, let's keep the story here as we look back to the pre-automatic days. From 8am to 10pm calls went through the local post office in the most roundabout fashion. After 10pm the calls bypassed the local post office and went directly to the Exchange. As I've said earlier, the operator was required to know the sound of each coin as it dropped in, so that callers paid the correct amount for their cause. It is amazing in today's world where everything you know, like inserting money, shows up somewhere. But at that time that did not happen, it all depended on the hearing of the operator to identify the sound. Some of the callers were able to beat the system by jingling the coins on top of the metal box in a particular way. Although the operators were usually well aware of this, you could never prove it, and the policy was that the customer was always correct. However, as ordinary calls through a public kiosk were supposed to be limited to three minutes, the doubtful caller would be reminded that his or her time was up on time, whereas the genuine paying customer often got the extra few minutes unofficially, with no mention of it and no fuss about it. However, at peak times in summer, the time limit had to be enforced strictly across the board, as if not, you could get a big queue of people queuing outside the kiosk waiting to make calls to various parts of the world. Many of those in the summertime could be tourists ringing home, but in the middle of that queue there could be someone waiting desperately to get through to a doctor. The only calls that were legally free were emergency calls. When a caller booked such a call, the operator stayed on the line and wrote down all details of the booking and put the booking slip in a special box for emergency calls, so to be checked later by the supervisor. Today, with modern technology, the phone box on the corner is no longer the central point of communication that it used to be. It is now part of the history of communication, and it is difficult for anyone that never had to use this means of contact to even remotely visualise how vital a role it played in people's lives in the recent past. Or that it was once a major boost to a rural community to have a telephone kiosk erected in your area. As I said earlier, the phone box had an ongoing part to play in the ongoing romance of couples that lived far apart, and your happiness or lack of it for the week ahead, or indeed farther into the future, might well depend on your look on the phone call. One way or another, the phone box on the corner, together with the candy store at another corner, and possibly sometimes at the same corner, and not forgetting the chapel on the hill, played some part in the shaping of romantic affairs of the heart in days and nights from another era for many. The Clifton Telephone Exchange was the second last in this country to go fully automatic. The honour of being the last one was snatched from Clifton by one week, with Mount Shannon in County Clare getting the dubious honours. Hello, caller. This is the Exchange here. Sorry, your three minutes are up. No, I cannot give you another few minutes. The postmaster will be on my back. Do you want me to get sacked? Today's phone system has come a long way from the days when operators had to listen to the jingle of coins, a long way, too, from the days when Ronnie Drew from Dun Laoghaire and the Irish folk band the Dubliners worked at a telephone exchange in Dublin, or my many friends and colleagues at the Clifton Manual Telephone Exchange, and all the telephonists at the Connemara post offices and around the country who were part of a great team that kept communication alive under very difficult circumstances. Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's busy, too busy to come to the phone. Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's trying to start a new life of her own. Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's happy now, why don't you leave her alone? And the operator says 40 cents more for the next three minutes. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to talk to her. I'll only keep her a while. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to tell her goodbye. Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's packing, she's gonna be leaving today. Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's marrying a fella down Galveston Way. Sylvia's mother says please don't say nothing, she may curse, start crying and stay. And the operator says 40 cents more for the next three minutes. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to talk to her. I'll only keep her a while. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to tell her goodbye. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to talk to her. I'll only keep her a while. Please, Mr. Davery, I just want to tell her goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. And that was Mike Denver with Sylvia's mother. Next, we have a poem by Porrie Cullum and the poem is called The Drover and it's recited here by Paul Craven. This poem is called A Drover. Just a few words on Porrie Cullum, the writer. He was born in 1881, died in 1972. Porrie Cullum was born in County Longford and as a youth he met many people who had lived through the Great Famine which ravaged Ireland in the 19th century. His uncle was a poultry farmer and poultry trader, dealer, jobber, whatever you like to call it, and he went from fair to fair. That way, Porrie was able to meet different people, ballad singers, storytellers and the like. And this poem reflects his experiences during that time. The poem, for me, describes the life of a drover, who was a man who drove other people's cattle for a living. There was no transport in them days, so he drove the cattle from place to place, fair to fair. Driving cattle left his mind free to wander to the sort of magic places, a bit like poultry cabinet farming in Monaghan. He could think about all sorts of things as the cattle drove away on the road in front of him. It reminds me of a night long ago when I was probably about maybe 12, 13, something like that. There used to be a fair in Lough Rea every February and at that time we drove the cattle to the fair. So myself and my brother John, who was older than me, it was our task to drive the cattle to the fair and arrive there at approximately daylight, if you like, so that we would be there when the jobbers would arrive and the sales would begin. It was a great experience for us because it was, for me, a window into adulthood at the time. And this isn't a hard luck story, it was a great experience to get a foothold in, as I say, in manhood. And it was very important to me. And in some ways, when I think of this and think of the darkness of the night and all we had was little flash lamps and the like, it reminds you of the old long black hand and the banshees who lurked in the darkness behind us as we made our way through the night. Now this is the poem. Drover, to meet of the pastures from wet hills by the sea, through Leithrim and Longford go my cattle and me. I hear in the darkness their slipping and breathing, I name them the byways there to pass without heathing. Then the wet winding roads, brown bogs with black water, and my thoughts of white ships and the king of Spain's daughter. O farmer, strong farmer, you can spend at the fair, but your face you must turn to your crops and your care. And soldiers, red soldiers, you've seen many lands, but you walk two by two and by captain's commands. O the smell of the beasts and the wet wind in the morn, and the proud and hard earth never broken for corn, and the crowds of the fair, the hearts loosened and blind, loud words and dark faces, and the wild blood behind. O men with your best, I could strive breast to breast, I could quiet your hearts with my words, with my words. I will bring you my coin where there's grass to the knee, but you'll think of scant croppings, harsh with salt of the sea. Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by, me mind then bent on rambling to Ireland I did fly. I stepped on board a vision, I followed with the wind, when next I came to anchor at the cross of Spansel Hill. Beyond the twenty-third of June, the day before the fair, when Ireland's sons and daughters, friends assembled there, the young, the old, the brave and the bold came their duty to fulfill. At the parish church that flew me a mile from Spansel Hill, I paid a flying visit to my first and only love. She's as white as any lily, gentle as a dove, she threw her arms around me, saying, Johnny, I love you still. As she's next, a farmer's daughter and the pride of Spansel Hill. I dreamt I held and kissed her, as in the days of yore, I, Johnny, her only joke and as many a time before. When the cup he grew in the morning, sure he grew both loud and shrill, when I awoke in California, many miles from Spansel Hill. And that was Paddy Riley and the Fair of Spansel Hill. Jo Conmey is a member of Loch Rea Writers' Group, and this is one of Jo's stories, Thread Softly, and it's read by Debbie Ruddy. Thread Softly by Joseph Conmey The afternoon was clear and sunny as I drove from Bangareras to Belmullet. All my family have left Belmullet now, but the old farm is still in the family name, and my brother-in-law Bobby has a lovely bungalow there. The house is right beside the sea, nestled in a valley away from the village of Carr Cluck. It is a peaceful place to visit. My wife Anne and I were on our way here for a week's holiday. Driving past the area known as the Glen, I reached the graveyard situated outside Glencastle Village. My parents, brother and sister are buried in this hill-sloped graveyard. Every time I visit Belmullet, I walk up the grass slope and say hello in silence. The memorial is a plain slab of granite, showing their names, their dates of birth and death. Standing at the grave, I read all the inscriptions on the stone. On the bottom are the words Rest in Peace. As I stand, my mind is at ease and my thoughts are of the departed resting here. I do not feel the urge to speak or weep for my departed relatives. Thoughts of kindness and good deeds race across my mind as I gaze at the grave. A bond of friendship unites me to the dead. Leaving my parents' brothers' and sisters' plot, I feel they are happy. I said hello. I wandered around reading the inscriptions on the other graves. In the north-east of the graveyard, I spotted the graves of some of my parents' neighbours. I stood at the plot of John Keogh, Carr Cluck East, died 1974. I remembered John calling to our house when I was about five years old. He would sit and drink tea, placing his huge hat on the armchair. Father always gave John a few woodbines as he left our house. Higher up the slope, I saw the grave of William Coyle, American Street, Belmullet. Willie owned a shop in town. I remembered when I was twelve years old watching the All-Ireland football final on Willie Coyle's television. We had no television in our house then. A short distance from William Coyle's grave, I spotted the tombstone of Paddy Hopkins, late of Durney-Nameel. I remembered Paddy in the bog cutting turf. He was a frail man with blonde hair and spoke in a quiet tone. While my brother Martin and I scrawled the bog bank, Father and Paddy would sit and chat while smoking woodbines. I was thirteen years old then and felt very excited when I saw the girl with the long blonde hair cycling up the bog road. I never spoke to her as I was afraid to stop working. Making my way down the slope to the road, I spotted the grave of Philip McAndrew. Philip lived in our village. He was a bachelor. In the summer I used to help him save the hay. I remember cutting turf with Philip in Gallagher's bog in the townland of Durney-Nameel. At lunchtime we ate our sandwiches in Gallagher's house. Mrs Gallagher would make tea and leave homemade currant buns on the table. Mrs Gallagher had two daughters, Nora and Sheila. One day while cutting turf with Philip, I spotted Nora in her school uniform coming home from school. Philip saw me admiring the girl as he leaned on his slain. I bet you would like Nora as your girlfriend, Philip said. I blushed, smiled, leaned on the slain and said nothing. Years later I met Nora at a dance in Dublin. I took her home that night and we courted on the sofa in her flat on North Circular Road. I recalled to her the day I spotted her coming home from school in her short uniform dress. We laughed and kissed again. Leaving the graveyard I stopped at the exit gate and glanced once more up the slope. In my mind I thanked my parents, sister and brother, and my good-natured neighbours for leaving me with such happy memories. When I attend a burial I am aware of the pain and sorrow of relatives and friends as the prayers are said in the coffin lowered into the earth. But I have also noted great stillness after the burial. People linger over the spot, shake hands and whisper. I wrote a poem once comparing the aftermath of a burial to the stillness of the sea after a storm. This was the last verse of that poem. You swallow into earth our pain. Dazed and tearful we stand. Afterward. Calmness prevails. Just like a sleeping tide. A month ago my brother Frank brought me to the old graveyard in Cairn, Belmullet and showed me my grandmother's grave. The inscription on the stone read, Pray for the soul of Margaret Conmey, who died the 12th of May 1924, aged 37, rest in peace. I never knew that my grandmother died so young. My father was only 13 years of age when his mother died. Standing at the grave I thought how lonesome the old house was for my father and his four younger sisters, my aunts, when their mother died. My auntie Lena was just a baby when her mother died. And that's the beauty of graveyards. They relate time and history to you. Seeing my grandmother's simple headstone brought another chapter of my life together and closed a chapter in my grandmother's. Her grandson had seen her resting place. Is this then the sequence of life hereafter? The living relate to the dead in thoughts and prayer and the dead in turn calm the mind of the living. I never think of God when I visit a grave. Nor do I visualise a spirit resting in a heavenly kingdom. No, my thoughts are with the legacy and the connection left with the living memories and a bond of friendship. May we all lie in peace after our struggle is over in this life. And I hope our spirits roam freely with the stars in the sky. The tears have all been shed now. We've said our last goodbyes. His soul's been blessed. He's laid to rest. And it's now I feel alone. He was more than just my father, my teacher, my best friend. And he'll still be heard in the tunes we shared when I play them on my own. And I never will forget him for he made me what I am. And though he may be gone, memories linger on. And I miss him, the old man. As a boy, he'd take me walking by mountains, fields and streams. And he'd show me things not known to kings but secrets between him and me. Like the colours on a pheasant as he rises in the dawn. Or how to fish or make a wish or make a wish beside a fairy tree. And I never will forget him for he made me what I am. And though he may be gone, memories linger on. And I miss him, the old man. I thought he'd live forever. He seemed so big and strong. But the minutes fly and the years roll by for a father and a son. And suddenly, when it happened there was so much left unsaid. No second chance to tell him thanks. For everything he's done. And I never will forget him for he made me what I am. And though he may be gone, memories linger on. God, I miss him. The old man. Written by Catherine Conlon. Entitled Seal. Containing thoughts of well-known people on life and living. This week, we're featuring the thoughts of Father Peter McFerry. Mary Faherty will read the extract. While working as a priest in the inner city in Dublin, Father Peter McFerry encountered some homeless children and opened a hostel for them in 1979. He subsequently opened 12 more hostels, 3 drug treatment centres and 90 apartments. The organisation he started has now been renamed Peter McFerry Trust. He has written about his experiences in a book The Meaning is in the Shadows. His most recent publication is Jesus, Social Revolutionary. The following words are those of Peter McFerry. The human race is one messed up family. All around us, we see homelessness. People who are stressed and depressed. Children who are going to school hungry. On our television screens, we see the victims of war and violence and natural disasters. A huge amount of suffering. And most of it is unnecessary. For me, the purpose of life is to leave the world a better place than we found it. Other people, their suffering and their happiness gives meaning to my life. We all have an innate sense of compassion. When we see a child suffering, something stirs within us. Our hearts go out to that child and we wish we could do something to take that suffering away. This sense of compassion belongs to us as human beings even before we become Christians or Muslims or Hindus or whatever. Religion could give meaning to our compassion but it is not the source of our compassion. God is a large part of my life. A God whose passion, like every parent, is the children. I imagine God looking down at our world seeing one billion people on our planet living on the edge of destitution. Seeing people sleeping on our streets. Seeing people fleeing from violence and war. And each of these people is God's beloved child loved with an infinite love. God too suffers from the suffering of his children. God wants nothing more than that the human family of God would live together in peace and dignity. And that's where we come in. Those who are suffering or homeless or in poverty offer us the greatest gift anyone can offer us. They invite us to open our hearts to include them in our love. If I expand my heart to include them in my love then I become a more loving person and therefore more human and therefore more divine. My own happiness and fulfilment is ultimately and intimately linked to the happiness and fulfilment of others. As the African proverb says if your neighbour is hungry, your chickens aren't safe. Love is expressed more in deeds than in words. And love is our greatest fulfilment. Any two teenagers locked in an embrace they wish would never end know that. They wouldn't swap that moment for all the playstations in Ireland or even the latest iPhone. And the greatest suffering is to see the one we love suffering in pain. I am the luckiest person alive. I often say that I must be one of the few people in Ireland who actually wants to get up in the morning. The job satisfaction I get is second to none. But I get angry. I am angry at the unnecessary pain inflicted on those around me. I am conscious that most of the time I am incapable of taking that pain away. To do so requires major changes in the economic, social and political structures which contribute to that pain. Those structures are built on the attitudes and sometimes on the apathy and prejudices prevailing in society. To reach out to those in pain is necessarily to challenge and inform those attitudes. I cannot work with homeless people without seeking to change not just their world but the world around them also. Is there life after death? For many people in our world there is no life before death. The God I believe in calls me not to turn in on myself and focus on what I have to do to get into heaven but to focus on others and what we can do to help each other. The human race is one messed up family. We have to try and heal the broken relationships that threaten the very survival of the human race. I will pass this way but once And if there's any good that I can do Let me do it now For I'll never pass this way again I will see this day but once If there's any kindness I can show Let me show it now For I'll never see this day again Tomorrow may be too late my friend To do all the good that you planned So reach out to those who need you And lend them a helping hand I will know this world but once And if there's any love that I can give Let me give it now Oh Lord, please show me how For I'll never know this world I'll never see this day I'll never pass this way again And that was I Shall Never Pass This Way Again with Glen Campbell. To take us to the end of the programme we'll listen to Phil Coulter with Steal Away. Steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away Let's steal away and chase our dreams And hope they never find us The dreary days, the empty nights We leave them all behind us And steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away We leave but just our memories And make a new beginning We have to choose to win or lose And it's time we start to lose Steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away Steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away Steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away Steal away, let's steal away No reason left to stay For me and you, let's start anew Darling, steal away Bye for now We're coming to the end of this week's play Thank you to everyone who was part of it Thank you to Bridge for the technical help Thank you to everyone at home for listening Please listen to the other play this week from the 16th of July And until we meet again Bye for now Goodbye Thank you for watching!