Story Line
The lyric's story line is inspired by Hill's early experience as a milkman for Hann's Dairies in Eastleigh, Hampshire. Market Street mentioned in the lyrics is an actual road in Eastleigh. The song tells the fictional exploits of Ernie Price, a 52-year-old (68 in the original TV version) milkman who drives a horse-drawn milk cart. It relates his war with the bread-delivery man ("Two-Ton Ted from Teddington") and their efforts to win the heart of Sue, a widow who lives on her own at number 22, Linley Lane.
In the end the two men fight with the wares they carry on their carts, and Ernie is killed by a rock cake underneath his heart followed by a stale pork pie in his eye (a fresh meat pie in the original TV version).
Sue and Ted then marry, but Ernie's ghost returns to haunt them on their wedding night.
Read more about this topic: Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)
Famous quotes containing the words story and/or line:
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)