Jake Thackray—what is a songwriter if not a poet?—is one of the finest wordsmiths ever to grace both page and stage; and, indeed, one of the finest horror writers, though he might not be commonly acknowledged as such. With an unbridled passion for words (and all the hoops through which he could get them to jump), Jake would frequently weave entire worlds from the threads of language, producing the silken, impenetrable fabric of verse. Via the odd—in every sense—little ditty, assisted in no small part by the relentlessness of the slant rhymes that one imagines came to him as naturally as breathing, he could convey an atmosphere of dread, of doom, of death, all of which are rife in Old Molly Metcalfe, published in Jake’s Progress, Star Publishing, 1977.

When performing it, Thackray would introduce the tale thus: “In Swaledale, North Riding of Yorkshire, sheep farmers used to—and some of them still do—count their sheep in a curious fashion: Yan, tan, tether mether pip…” and explains that Molly Metcalfe was a shepherdess on a moor, sent to mind sheep at the age of eight. “She was found rotting with her ghastly sheep at about the age of twenty-eight. This is a song for her.”

The repetition of “Yan, tan, tether…” (is the girl really counting sheep, or is she counting down to her own demise?) conveys methodically the cold, cold atmosphere of both the Yorkshire moors and the dreary situation. But for me, it’s the beautiful, delicious assonance that hammers home the horror of the tale, particularly “…steep and bleak,” and “In her back in the bracken…” These two fleeting phrases top-and-tail the narrative, summarising the history of Molly’s short life rather nicely. Or, to be more accurate, rather horrifically.