We'd Never Had It So Good

reflective poem

We’d Never Had It So Good
Wartime fears and hardship had faded,
We looked to the future with hope:
Expectations rose high as new flats in the sky,
And “We’d never had it so good!”

In a damp back-to-back, but content,
My friend the ‘cat woman’ lived.
She was lonely and old, had a heart made of gold,
And she’d never had it so good!

They served her a notice that said she must leave,
‘Slum clearance and progress,’ they said.
She begged and she pleaded for cats that she needed,
Still, she’d never had it so good!

Her house they demolished, cats they destroyed,
Later high rises too they condemned.
Fifty years have gone by, I can still hear her cry,
Though she’d never had it so good!

Now I walk down the road passed the place
Where her small back-to-back used to stand,
At the top, by the hill, there its rubble lies still!
No, we’d never have it so good.