Through the Hawse — the album

Songs from the book by James Laird · 9 songs · 33 min · listen free

1. The Most Easterly Point

   Born at the edge of England where the road gives up the ghost
   Ness Point in the morning, the last of the English coast
   The North Sea in the window before I knew my name
   A cold green light in winter that never looked the same

   We were protected people — that's the thing my mother said
   At the last inch of England with the grey sea overhead
   The house was cold and falling but it somehow kept us warm
   We were protected people, born to weather every storm

   The Georgian house was falling but it held us all the same
   Broken sashes, a leaking roof, and a father made of flame
   I stood upon the beach in every weather I was given
   The land behind me silent, and the water lay forgiven

   We were protected people — that's the thing my mother said
   At the last inch of England with the grey sea overhead
   The house was cold and falling but it somehow kept us warm
   We were protected people, born to weather every storm

   There was thunder in the hallway, there was quiet at the shore
   So I turned my face to the water and I wanted nothing more
   The sea, she never loved me, but she never told me lies
   And she held the only future that a boy could recognise

   We were protected people — say it soft, say it true
   At the last inch of England where the road runs out to blue
   We were protected people. We were protected people.

2. Grace on the Pipes

   I was seventeen that spring, and the spring would not hold still
   An ordinary morning — and then it never will
   They told me and I heard it as a sound and nothing more
   The world was making noises I had no meaning for

   He came down out of Banff with a darkness he couldn't drown
   A drink that turned to thunder and it brought the whole house down
   He never once looked at me, he never called me son
   But I stood beside his ashes when his running days were done

   Then Amazing Grace came through the speakers on the pipes
   And a hand upon my shoulder in the falling of the light
   I lost a half an hour I have never found again —
   That was where it started, the long grieving of a man

   My uncles came and found me where the flowers stood in rows
   Half an hour gone and vanished, and God only knows
   They shook me by the shoulder and I broke there on the floor
   And everything I'd carried came pouring out the door

   Then Amazing Grace came through the speakers on the pipes
   And a hand upon my shoulder in the falling of the light
   I lost a half an hour I have never found again —
   That was where it started, the long grieving of a man

   Both things can be true at once, the anger and the ache —
   Forty years to lay it down, forty years to break

3. Sparrows Nest

   When the house threw me out I had nowhere left to go
   Slept in Sparrows Nest with the cold rain falling slow
   Seventeen and no one, just a boy the world forgot
   Looking for the trouble that would tell me what I'd got

   Then Harry made a phone call on an ordinary Tuesday
   Took me in from the rain and he showed me there's a way
   Signed me to the Winkleigh and the tide began to turn
   The sea would be my mother and the deck was mine to learn

   Ray Head at the gangway and old Harry Smith's warm bread
   Seven souls and a side-wind trawler running out ahead
   I was seasick as a dog and I never once let go
   The water didn't love me but it gave me room to grow

   Then Harry made a phone call on an ordinary Tuesday
   Took me in from the rain and he showed me there's a way
   Signed me to the Winkleigh and the tide began to turn
   The sea would be my mother and the deck was mine to learn

   No great speech, no promises, just a hand and an open door
   A man who saw a drowning boy and asked him to come aboard
   Every father that I needed, the water sent to me —
   One good man on a Tuesday, and a lifetime on the sea

   Signed me to the Winkleigh and the tide began to turn —
   The sea would be my mother and the deck was mine to learn

4. Through the Hawse

   I came up through the hawse, boys, from the bottom to the crown
   Chipped the rust and hauled the wire and I never once sat down
   No cadet and no college, just the deck beneath my feet
   From a deck-hand to a Master on the ocean's open street

   Through the hawse, through the hawse, from the keel up to the sky
   Every rank and every ticket, every storm I sailed on by
   From Malaysia to South Georgia, from the ice to the burning line
   The whole wide world my logbook, and the salt sea forever mine

   Pelican hooks and rig moves in the North Sea's bitter cold
   Punta Arenas to the Falklands with the cargo in the hold
   The deer on the hills of South Georgia where a soul is seldom seen
   And a Force twelve Mediterranean tore the water clean

   Through the hawse, through the hawse, from the keel up to the sky
   Every rank and every ticket, every storm I sailed on by
   From Malaysia to South Georgia, from the ice to the burning line
   The whole wide world my logbook, and the salt sea forever mine

   They said which ship, which ocean — and I'd answer, any one
   Aden, Congo, Vietnam, and the setting of the sun
   A Master Mariner standing where the boy once stood alone —
   Thirty years of water, and the whole world for a home

   Through the hawse, through the hawse, from the keel up to the sky
   Every rank and every ticket, every storm I sailed on by
   From Malaysia to South Georgia, from the ice to the burning line
   The whole wide world my logbook, and the salt sea forever mine

5. The Aberdeen Bridge

   We came up from Conakry with the Gurkhas at our side
   Into a burning city where the good had run and died
   I will not tell you all of it, some things a man can't say —
   But I crossed the Aberdeen bridge, and I carry it today

   There were bodies on the pathway and a smoke that would not clear
   And a horror on that bridge I still see when the dark is near
   I was only a captain, I could not turn the tide —
   I saw what men can do, and a part of me has died

   I went ashore a sailor and I came back something less
   A witness to a wound that words have never learned to dress
   The children on that bridge — no, I'll leave it where it lay
   Some things need no telling for a soul to know their weight

   There were bodies on the pathway and a smoke that would not clear
   And a horror on that bridge I still see when the dark is near
   I was only a captain, I could not turn the tide —
   I saw what men can do, and a part of me has died

   Twenty years it slept in me before it found the light
   Now it comes back in the small hours and it takes me in the night
   The doctors have a name for it, the mind that keeps the score —
   I brought a war home with me from a far and bloody shore

6. Seven Men

   January, two thousand, and the Irish Sea ran wild
   Seven men went under, every father, husband, child
   They called me off my leave and I answered as you do —
   To bring the lost ones home again across the water blue

   Seven men in the darkness under the flag of Scotland laid
   And a lone pipe on the dockside where the harbour lights were made
   It was raining down on Douglas and the gale was coming strong
   But every one was going home where every soul belongs

   We wrapped them in their colours and we brought them through the night
   The blue tents on the dockside and the lamps in the failing light
   No man spoke above a whisper, there was nothing left to say
   Just the piper in the raining dark to pipe their souls away

   Seven men in the darkness under the flag of Scotland laid
   And a lone pipe on the dockside where the harbour lights were made
   It was raining down on Douglas and the gale was coming strong
   But every one was going home where every soul belongs

   There was something almost holy in that cold and streaming rain
   The sea that takes will sometimes give the lost ones back again
   And I thought of all the water that has closed above a name —
   And I brought them into harbour, and I'm grateful that I came

   Seven men in the darkness under the flag of Scotland laid
   And a lone pipe on the dockside where the harbour lights were made
   It was raining down on Douglas and the gale was coming strong
   But every one was going home where every soul belongs

7. The Harbour at Aden

   They sent me down to Aden when the smoke had cleared away
   Six weeks too late for the harbour where the warship Cole had lain
   Seventeen of the young ones, an ordinary morning gone —
   A little boat that waited, and then the world moved on

   And I stood at the rail in the white of the day
   Where the Cole had been lifted and carried away
   Seventeen sailors who'll never grow old —
   And somewhere their fathers were getting the news that I was told

   Too dangerous to walk there, we stayed aboard our own
   A Gurkha and a soldier and the drills to keep us home
   Down by Djibouti waters where the pirates learned to prowl
   We were training for a darkness that was rising even now

   And I stood at the rail in the white of the day
   Where the Cole had been lifted and carried away
   Seventeen sailors who'll never grow old —
   And somewhere their fathers were getting the news that I was told

   I didn't feel it yet but the world was turning slow
   Eleven months to a morning that the whole wide earth would know
   A portent in a harbour, a warning in the sun —
   Aden holding its breath for the years that were to come

   Then they lost my ticket home, so I took a Yemen bus
   Seven hours of mountain dust and goats and all of us
   I swore off every bottle on that road to Sana'a —
   Well. Until the aeroplane. A man can go too far.

   A sad time needs its witnesses, even the ones come late —
   Even the ones who leave it on a bus and a twist of fate

8. The Tapestry

   The steroids took my ticket and they set me on the shore
   The sea that made me whole again would carry me no more
   Then came the dark last summer when I slipped beneath it all —
   A month a married man, and then I answered the long call

   But I woke, and the world was there, and mine still to hold
   And a grandson, one week old, with his whole story still untold
   I put the anger down at last and kept the harbour light —
   A tapestry of a life well lived, and I'm still here tonight

   There are stitches that are missing and there's thread that came undone
   Jean and Michelle and Sandy, and the setting of the sun
   But the cloth is full and lovely, and I never really knew
   Till the illness sat me still enough to see the whole thing through

   But I woke, and the world was there, and mine still to hold
   And a grandson, one week old, with his whole story still untold
   I put the anger down at last and kept the harbour light —
   A tapestry of a life well lived, and I'm still here tonight

   Damian's down in the deep now, the line runs on from me
   From Ness Point to the ocean, the blood that loves the sea
   Fay and Georgia and Madison, and the children that they bore —
   The water gave me everything, and then it gave me more

   So I put the anger down at last and kept the harbour light —
   A tapestry of a life well lived. Fair winds, and calm, and night.

9. The One Who Stayed

   Twenty-one years you walked beside me, half a life and more
   You took a ready-made family and you never asked for war
   Born in a house they called The Haven — and didn't I know it true
   When the weather finally found me, the harbour, love, was you

   You're the one who stayed when the sea had had its way
   The one who held my hand in the cold blue light of day
   I married you in June and I fell a month from then
   And you never left the bedside — you brought me home again

   A month a man and married, and I slipped beneath the tide
   Machines to do my breathing and my Ruth there at my side
   They couldn't say I'd wake again, they couldn't say I'd know —
   But you talked me through the darkness and you would not let me go

   You're the one who stayed when the sea had had its way
   The one who held my hand in the cold blue light of day
   I married you in June and I fell a month from then
   And you never left the bedside — you brought me home again

   They gave you no easy first year, love, no gentle honeymoon
   They gave you the truth of me instead, the storm behind the moon
   And you took it like a sailor takes a sea that will not calm —
   Steady at the wheel of it, your hand upon my arm

   So here's the last of all my songs, and I'll give it where it's due —
   Every harbour that I named, love, every one was you

About the book “Through the Hawse”

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