This is the story of Chinese Li,
Who lived with his mother in Liverpool 3.
She kept a shop and she sold fried fish
And chips as crisp as a person could wish,
So people said you’d have to be dippy
To go anywhere but Li’s mum’s chippy
For fish and chips or hot meat pies
Or pickled cukes of gigantic size.
Out in the back room all day long
Chinamen sat and they played mah-jong
With their faces turned into scowls or smiles
By the clackety-clack of the falling tiles.
And Li came back from school each day
And helped his mum in the following way:
He peeled the spuds and he poured them in
To a sort of tumbling mechanical bin,
A type of rumbling electrical barrow.
They went in round and they came out narrow.
The slicing machine! When you come to grips with it,
Start with spuds and you end with chips with it.
One day Li was churning them round
To that deep old, hungry, grumbling sound
When he was amazed to hear a song
Raised from the slicer, loud and long:
Oh, I am a spud, a very old spud,
And I do not wish to die.
I’ve missed the boat and I’ve lost my coat
But I do not care to lie
In a number of bits in a pan that spits –
Without ever knowing why.
So Li was quick as the flash of a fin.
He whisked that spud from the slicing tin
And he set it up on the chip-shop shelf
Where this ancient potato sat by itself.
And when the Chinamen came to play
Each one of them wished the spud good day:
‘How are you doing? All right? OK?
Warm enough there? Good. That’s the way!’
At night it was off for a roll downtown
On a piece of string that Li swung down.
Now, some keep dogs and some keep cats
And some have zebras and some have rats
But Li, by city wall and hedge,
Walked with nothing but a singing veg.:
Oh, I am a spud, a very old spud,
And I’m glad I did not die.
For I’m free to roll on an evening stroll,
Which nobody can deny,
And there’s no spud in or out of mud
That’s quite as happy as I.
It sings it once, then it sings it again.
Li’s mum thinks the boy’s insane!
