Long, long ago, when I was 8 or 9 years old, I was walking home from school with my mother. As we trotted past the imposing Edwardian terraced houses of Wellswood Park we noticed that outside one of those buildings was a skip.

My mother could never resist a good rummage in a skip and indeed, this one had treasure within: books, hundreds of books, a lifetime’s worth of books. They had been dumped unceremoniously into this skip and were now waiting their inevitable destruction. 

We saved as many as we could.

It soon became clear that the books must have belonged to a man who would probably have been in the Royal Air Force or at the very least had a great love for aeronautics, engineering and military history. Tucked in amongst the musty technical manuals, military histories and pulp war novels was a paperback book of erotic verse compiled by Erica Jong.

It had a nude woman on the front. A nude woman with absolutely no clothes on. I did what many prepubescent boys would have done in my stead and I hid the book away for later examination.

The book contained pages of poems and sonnets, ditties and odes; all containing evocative imagery and language far too advanced for my 9-year-old brain. I was about to resign the book back to a pile destined for charity shop when I turned the page and there in between the far more laudable works of Shelley and Shakespeare was a dirty, disrespectful ribald ballad called The Ballad of Deadeye Dick and Eskimo Nell.

9-year-old me loved it. It was rude and vulgar and its rhyme and rhythm lent itself to memorisation. I quickly committed the whole thing to memory and performed it at the next social gathering of my mother’s drinking companions.

It got a lot of laughs. I went on to learn many more humorous poems by rote, particularly enjoying the works of Spike Milligan, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl and Kipling. Yet it wasn’t until my mid teens that I started to write my own raucous adventures. Poetry became a great outlet for me; a way to complement those closest to me, to vent my anger and frustration over the things in life that I could not change and to comment on the sociopolitical and cultural landscape in a light-hearted fashion.

The Ballad of the Thirsty White Dragon Inn was one of my earliest efforts and there is no doubt that it is heavily flawed. It is perhaps culturally insensitive, most definitely historically inaccurate and arguably purile. Yet it is still great fun to perform.

It was dedicated to two awesome girls that used to hang out with us in school.

 In rural Japan the men tell a tale,
 One set to a backdrop of lightning and hail,
 A story as gory as gory can get,
 With bile by the bucket and rivers of sweat,
 With murder and killing, and two kung-fu women, a villain named Big Willy Chin,
 Swords by the score and bad guys in hordes, and this is the way we begin.
   
 A group of old men drinking beer from wood flagons,
 Sat in a bar called the Thirsty White Dragon,
 It was raining and windy with little going on,
 ‘Cept smokin’ and drinkin’ and playing Mah Jong,
 When into the pub, swung five surly fellows,
 They strode up to the bar and one of them bellowed;
 “Give us some drinks or I’ll cut off your head! ”
 The barman complied; he believed what was said,  
 For the huge ugly bruiser was Big Willy Chin,
 A disreputable rogue who revelled in sin,
 And was wanted for murder in twelve feudal lands,
 Many had died at his coarse hairy hands,
 For an easier life the inn-keep poured drinks for the men,
 One drink became four drinks, four drinks became ten,
 Until all of the bandits were uproariously pissed,
 Chin rose to his feet and slammed down his fist,
 “For a year and a half I’ve pillaged Japan,
 With my trusty Katanas and this nefarious band,
 They’re cutthroats, they’re robbers,
 They’re men with no honour,
 They obey me ‘Cos I’m in command”
 

  A band of thugs they were indeed, shocking to behold,
 They’d end your life, abuse your wife and steal away your gold,
 Two were brothers, Ninja trained, dark and lithe and deadly,
 They had no names and neither spoke, not men you’d mix with readily,
 One was massive, built from bricks, as dumb and hard as rocks
 His name was Tele; he was fat and smelly,
 ‘Cos he never washed his socks,
 Apart from Chin that just left Wang, a tall and handsome cur,
 A letch and a looter with a prominent hooter and a cape of finest fur,
 When Willy Chin introduced his crew, 
 The bar did fill with dread, 
 From this point on,
 Each man knew,
 Willy Chin would leave them dead.
 

 Then all of a sudden their fear was no more,
 For two women of legend had walked through the door,
 Armed to the teeth with rain in their hair,
 ‘Twas Samurai Sarah and Kickboxing Clare.
 Now these two hard-core lasses were known through the land,
 They were the Shoguns’ assassins, his vengeful right hand,
 And for a month and a day they’d tracked Willy Chins’ mob,
 Prepared to repay those He’d murdered and robbed,
 The gang stood stock still, not one of them blinked,
 The brothers flexed muscles whilst Tele just stinked,
 Wang grinned like a rictus impressed by the sight,
 Of Sarah and Clare in their armour so tight,
 But not one of them moved, they waited their cue,
 From their leader Big Willy He’d know what to do,
 “Banzai!” screamed Willy and drew forth his blades,
 The murderous marauders advanced on the maids.


 The brothers spun and cart-wheeled,
 A dizzy dance of death,
 Clare just checked her fingernails,
 Far from being impressed,
 When it came down to raw Kung-Fu,
 She knew she was the best,
 And she knocked them aside’
 And bruised more than their pride,
 With a swing of her steel shod chest
 

 “Hello dear Sarah!” Oozed Wang,
 Drooling, he stared at her thighs,
 Past her bottom and hips her neck and her lips,
 But he stopped as he met with her eyes,
 His ardour then dampened and his legs turned to jelly,
 For her stare promised death, but it didn’t faze Tele,
 Who charged at young Sarah, rabid froth on his lips,
 Sarah’s’ hands shot with speed to the swords at her hips.
 

 One brother was dead but the other quite hale,
 Clare’s’ lightening fast feet made him seem like a snail,
 She delivered an axe kick with deadly intent,
 His shoulder-bone shattered, through the floorboards he went.
 Wang (dressed in sable) jumped onto a table,
 Drew daggers from the folds of his coat,
 As shocked and surprised the fat Tele died,
 From a back-handed slash to his throat,
 Wang leapt from the table (ready, willing and able),
 Determined to go for the kill,
 Sarah threw Sai right threw the mans eye,
 Then he fell to the floor and was still.
 

 Willy Chin roared as he saw his men fall,
 And charged into battle not thinking at all,
 Sarah flashed steel; Clare led with her head,
 Chin was nutted then gutted,
 Then fell down quite dead.
 

 The whole place went silent in the absence of violence,
 After such a display of raw skill,
 Then many men cheered and called for more beer,
 Whilst others were noisily ill  
 “That was” said the inn-keep ”one hell of a fight!”,
 And he turned to give thanks to the pair,
 But into the darkness and then out of sight,
 Went those heroines so courageous and fair.
 

 And all through Japan they remember that day,
 When two fighting women made Willy Chin pay,
 For all of the evil that he bought to bear,
 Girls called Samurai Sarah and Kickboxing Clare.