Manuscript

Prince Louis Battenberg is burning the Admiralty lights down low Silently sifting through papers sealed with a crown Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more Dreadnoughts The houses in Hackney are all falling down And my grandmother sits on the beach in the days before the war Young girl writing her diary, while time seems to pause Watching the waves as they come one by one to die on the shore Kissing the feet of England Oh the lights of Saint Petersburg come on as usual Although the air seems charged with a strangeness of late, yet there's nothing to touch And the Tsar in his great Winter Palace has called for the foreign news An archduke was shot down in Bosnia, but nothing much And my grandmother sits before the mirror in the days before the war Smiling a secret smile as she goes to the door And the young man rides off in his carriage, homeward once more And the sun sets gently on England Ah the day we decided to drive down to Worthing, it rained and rained Giving us only a minute to stand by the sea And crunching my way through the shingles, it seemed there was nothing changed Though the jetty was maybe more scarred that I'd known it to be And Mandi and I stood and stared at the overcast sky Where ten years ago we had stood, my Grandfather and I And the waves still rushed in as they had the year that he died And it seemed that my lifetime was shrunken and lost in the tide As it rose and fell on the side of England Prince Louis Battenberg is burning the Admiralty lights --- Manuscript - Al Stewart