Little Moscow Lyrics

I was born in a northern mining town

At the turn of the century

By the time I was twelve

Me childhood days were history

One cold December day

I rose before the dawn

And I joined the men on their way to work

With me pit boots on

Well I walked beside me fatha

And I listened to the crack

And I watched the wheel at the pit-head turn

To bring the night shift back

Here I was, a collier lad

With me comrades all around

We walked with single purpose

Destination underground

I remember it all clearly now

Like watching an old dream

Working with the hewers

In the cavil on the brockwell seam

We depended on each other

And the town it had great soul

But all the bosses cared about

Was the rising price of coal

Our hardships and our heartaches

Met cold indifference

The company owned us, one and all

When the piper played we danced

But the winds of change were blowing

The storm clouds gathering

A new day it was dawning

And the tide was on the turn

Then Kitchener he called us to war

In nineteen and fourteen

In their patriotic fervour

Many rushed to volunteer

They marched away to god knows where

To the playing of the town brass band

To fight for king and country

In a distant, foreign land

They gave their lives at Passchendale

At Verdun and the Somme

By the time the war was over

The flower of their youth was gone

All around the town we heard

The sombre church bell chimes

And the death march played in Derwent Street

At leased two hundred times

Then the men who dug the trenches

They came back to digging coal

And a land that's fit for heroes

Or at least that's what they were told

Instead came the depression

And they lost all they had won

Demands were made for profits' sake

But to no man we'd bow down

So they locked us out and tried to break

The spirit of our cause

They thought they'd bring us to our knees

With their blacklegs and their laws

And looking back I still believe

When all is said and done

We had to fight for what was right

For our daughters and our sons

They called us Little Moscow

And they damned us all to hell

The reddest village in England

Where precocious Lenin's dwell

But we fought against injustice

And inequality

And the feelings that surrounded us of

What must be must be

They called us Little Moscow

They forgot the sacrifice

Of the men who died and the women who cried

Themselves to sleep at night

They called us Little Moscow

They just didn't understand

What was in the hearts of the men who fell

In the horrors of no-mans' land