My song today is ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’. This a song by the English duo ‘Wham!’ It was first released as a single in the UK on 14 May 1984. It became their first UK and US Number I hit. It was written and produced by George Michael. The single was certified Platinum in the US, which at the time commemorated sales of over two million copies. The song was ranked Number 28 on VH1’S ‘100 Greatest Songs of the 1980s’.
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After I had completed a planned two-year stay in Canada between 1963-65, I returned to live at the parental address until I married several years later. During this time, I was preparing myself to settle down into married life, and I was attempting to advance my career prospects in the textile industry. I recall having an important meeting/interview one Saturday morning to discuss the possibility of a new job as foreman/under manager in a Liversedge mill. The night before, I had gone out to the ‘Hightown Heights Working Men’s Club’ with a few friends and had arrived back home just before midnight, having had a good night. I never could drink much alcohol, and rarely got drunk, so the worse I would have been was probably tipsy.
As usual, when I got back home just prior to midnight, my mum was still up doing some housework before settling down to bed at the end of her day. I was never surprised with the saying, ‘A woman’s work is never done' because, to put bluntly it never is, especially for working-class mothers and wives. I would estimate that every married woman and mother of larger families in the land never slept more than an average of six hours daily, and rarely went to bed before midnight any day of the week. In fact, given that their hard-working husbands went to bed early on a night to get their beauty sleep for the next day’s hard graft, God only knows where and when a man and his wife were allowed to remind themselves that they were indeed married and would like to parent another child?
Being tired, I reminded mum that I needed to be up, dressed, and off out the front door tomorrow morning by 9:00 am at the latest to catch the Heckmondwike bus. Mum had never spent one morning in bed in her entire life after changing her status from girl to womanhood. She was always up every day of her life before 6:00 am and would usually have broken into her second packet of cigarettes and have drunk her tenth cup of tea before 9:00 am.
I knew that dad would be at the foundry in Cleckheaton by 8:30 am whenever he managed to get Saturday morning overtime work. Although the overtime work wasn’t pleasant and generally involved cleaning and oiling the engineering machines, the extra money narrowed the monetary gap between ‘not enough' to that of ‘just managing’.
So with dad up and out at work, mum was duly nominated by her number one son as being my ‘waker-upper’ that Saturday morning. It was an important job interview for me in respect of advancing my working prospects prior to marriage, as the most that a clever working-class man could aspire to in those days (without university qualification at degree standard) was the position of ‘working foreman’ on the shop floor. To wear a brown coat as the ‘foreman and under manager on staff pay instead of a boiler suit, represented a significant shift up the greasy pole of advancement in one’s workplace.
As life would have it, the one Saturday morning I wanted my mother to wake me up instead of letting me sleep in was the only time on a Saturday morning since the age of five years she had allowed me to sleep in. I was naturally angry with her afterward, and that job opportunity passed me by. All she could say in her defence was, ‘I was going to wake you up, Billy, but you looked so peaceful laid there in bed. It would have been a shame to disturb you. It would have been like waking up sleeping beauty after a hundred-year sleep”.
For a year or two prior to my first marriage, I never allowed my mother to forget that she had stomped on my dreams. I told her that ever I awoke in the future to find myself lying in the gutter, she would be the one to blame, having put me there! This accusation instantly angered her and she reminded me that if ever it was my misfortune to find myself in the gutter, it would be nobody’s fault but my own. She also told me that opportunity in life rarely comes once only to those who merit it. She was so right. Within two years before I married, I was the youngest textile manager in Yorkshire who had not married to the mill owner’s daughter to secure his position in the family firm; neither had I been born into a life of privilege as being the mill owner’s only son and heir. I was a mere 25 years old and was in the partially blind process of socially deceiving myself of my true birthright and working-class status.
Come to think about it, almost anyone who does not look like the back of a bus can look good in bed on a Friday night in the right time and place and in the company of the right bed companion. We have all heard about the wife who berated her husband for the way he looked one Friday night after he had stumbled his way home from the pub blind drunk. She said “Good God man. Look at yourself! You are a disgusting sight!”. After hiccupping, belching loudly, and farting even louder, the husband looked back at his wife and replied, “A disgusting sight of a sad drunk I may look tonight, but I will at least look better in the morning!”
A workmate frequently told me about not being able to look at his wife’s face beside him in bed on a Saturday morning whenever she had been drinking the night before and went to bed in her curlers and without cleansing the makeup off her face before it cracked up. So, perhaps my mum was simply transfixed by my beauty of face and innocence of look that Saturday morning over seventy years ago when she let me sleep in?
Love and peace
Bill xxx