People don’t listen to me any more, now that after the army coup,
our country has a new regime.

Indeed, they call me an old bore who sits in a bar, while everyone’s watching football,
lamenting ‘It all changed when we lost the old queen.’
 
I would tell the young ’uns about the bravest man I ever knew, Endacot Dashitall,
whom I met talking to a tree on top of Mulligawtanny Hill.
 
He was a wizard with children, his long beard emphasising his fantastical stories;
ah, I can see him still.
 
The dads thought him weird but, unusual in a village so conservative, he was a hit with the mums,
but rumours abounded of his past, how he was a witness to horrible scenes.
 
It seemed he’d fought for king and country, and on return was expected to
follow his father and run the family estate, but shocked everyone by
saying he’d embraced Karl Marx, condemning his government’s sharp swing to the political right.
 
A keen musician, he formed a folk band called The Strumming Chums,
and I remember him telling me that was how he’d met his fiancée,
as he sang Woody Guthrie protest songs outside the
USAAF air base at Upper Manningford,
where they were beaten up by representatives of our
government’s lurch into what they call 'a new ordered world’.
 
It was there he met Flight Lieutenant Mary Lou, who admired his playing,
confessing she used to strum and play, back home in Tennessee,
saying, ‘I’m a great fan of Woody.’ 
 
‘Indeed,’ he concurred, ‘the voice of the dispossessed people. 
 
‘And here you are, coming out of a place that has enough explosives to make those
huge dust-bowl winds he sang about look mighty feeble.’
 
‘Oh, you’re a radical then?’ She countered, ‘But this is a violent world,
and we need to defend our nation.’ 
 
‘But you’re on the soil of England, and I prefer to ward off enemies with music and song.’
 
She laughed, ‘You should manage that easily, the way you sing!’
 
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
A year later Mary Lou and Endacot were gazing into each other’s eyes,
their police handcuffs preventing too much physical ardour in their cold cell,
and when they tried it, guards rushed in and indulged in what looked like a rugby maul.
 
‘You’re a right chump,’ she declared, and Enders laughed at her
somewhat-less-than angry expression, as she continued,
‘I represented the USAAF at baseball, so you should have let me
throw that egg at President Trump.’
 
At which  Endacott rebuked her ‘I told you that man was a fraud.’ 
 
‘Yes, but it would have spoilt his suit, apparently it cost two grand.’
 
‘Indeed,’ he laughed, ‘Right, let’s sing Woody Guthrie’s anthem for the people, This Land Is Our Land.'

Which was the last thing my old pal heard before they faced the firing squad.