the Ballad of Thomas Helliker

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Ben Gunstone

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Trowbridge town, Trowbridge town
On the banks of the Biss
Shallow that dirty river
Like a streak of piss

The county town, Trowbridge town
Where day is black as night
And winter comes in spring
With a bunch of aconites

Trowbridge town, bent old town
A monkey for a bribe
To nail a blue cat son
To hang him till he died

Trowbridge town, crooked town
Yes, it did for young poor Tom
As the mill burnt in flames
He slept a drunken song

For the want of blood, they got it quick
But no one saw Tom there
Least of all Read and Heath
In that blazing summer air
In Trowbridge town

The barley, fleece and crown
Respice, prospice, send us down

In Salisbury sat the jury
That's who they claimed to be
Ten bare minutes it took them
To find the young the boy guilty

And if he knew more truth
Tom didn't say a word
But sat and lonely listened
And the world outside just heard

Mr Garrow was his counsel
As thick as shipyard oak
To the gallows went a boy
His defence barely spoke

The night before his death
Tom wrote his kith and kin
Sending love and hoping
The Lord would save his soul from sin

But the good Lord's judgement
Tends to favour those
Who suffer not from war and loss
And all poverty exposed

So came the day a Trowbridge son
Was sent to the rope to die
On his nineteenth birthday
For someone else's crime

At the bleak and lonely side
Of a bleak and lonely road
A body hanged, a body hung
And so the story's told.

But they carried Tom across the plain
Back to Trowbridge town
So you and I, the sons of others
Can lay our flowers down

The barley, fleece and crown
Respice, prospice, send us down
The barley, fleece and crown
Mea culpa - send us down

Lie on the chalk hills and gaze at the moon
Count the stars with a daisy
We'll be all stars soon
Like two lovers we'll lie
Like two lovers, we'll break down and cry
Wiltshire boy, Wiltshire boy
Wiltshire boy, it's in every line you thought
It's in every chalk path you walk
Wiltshire boy
It's in every single battle you fought
Wiltshire boy
Wiltshire boy

Trowbridge town, my home town
Or as close as I will get
In there many cousins
That I have never met

This old town, red brick town
It's soul as dark as lead
Days built of ashes
Of the living and the dead

By thick of night Trowbridge town
In rain stained streetlight red
The lanes shiver low
The thunder's overhead

In the streets of English towns
Old cries still you'll hear
The groan of broken children
And the wind howls in your ears

I left that place years ago
As they pulled the old ways down
But when I wake in a cold sweat sleep
That old town haunts me now

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