Knocker-Upper

Lyrics

[Intro]
(cobbles, a long pole, and a soft tap-tap-tap on glass)
Before alarm clocks were cheap, somebody had to wake the town.

[Verse 1]
Four in the morning in an industrial city, and she is already out —
Mary Smith of Limehouse, with a pea-shooter and a bag of dried peas,
firing them at the bedroom windows of people who have paid her
a few pence a week to be got out of bed in time for the mill.
Others used a long bamboo pole and tapped the upper panes.
The job was called knocker-upper. It was a job for a hundred years.

[Chorus]
Tap, tap, tap on the glass at four in the morning.
And she does not stop tapping until she sees you at the window,
because the contract is not the tap — the contract is that you WOKE,
and she stands in the cold street and waits until you're up.
Knocker-upper. Somebody had to be awake first.
Somebody had to be the one nobody woke.

[Verse 2]
And people asked the obvious question even then, in the papers:
who knocks up the knocker-upper? And the answer was mostly
that they didn't sleep in the ordinary way, or they had a spouse,
or they were night watchmen already, or publicans going home,
and one man in Manchester reportedly just... didn't much sleep,
and did it for forty years, and everybody knew his tap.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
The trade died in the nineteen-fifties, quite fast, when clocks got cheap,
and the last of them worked into the sixties in the mill towns
for old customers who preferred a person to a bell,
which I understand completely, and would probably pay for.
There is a photograph of one of them from nineteen thirty-one.
She is looking up at a window. She is waiting to be seen.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(one last tap, and a curtain moving)
There you are.
Right. On to the next one.