MARY MAKE BELIEVE

(Noel Coward)


As recorded by:
Noel Coward, w. Orchestra
Dir. Carroll Gibbons
Recorded 27th April 1928



If you’re romantic temperamentally
You must restrain it all you can
If you see life too sentimentally
You’ll never find your man
You’ll build such terribly pedantic dreams
But your romantic scheme may go awry
Your thoughts are such
You claim too much
And love will pass you by

Mary make believe
Dreamed the whole day through
Foolish fancies, love romances
How could they come true
Mary make believe
Sighed a little up her sleeve
Nobody claimed her
They only named her
Mary make believe

She’s just a girl who’s always blowing mental bubbles
Till she’s quite our of breath, quite out of breath
She seems to have the knack of magnifying troubles
Till they crush her to death, crush her to death
She’s just a duffer of the ineffective kind
She’s bound to suffer from her introspective mind
Her indecisions quite prevent her visions coming true
Imagination is a form of flagellation
If a sensitive child lets it run wild
It dims the firmament
Till all the world is permanently blue
She’s simply bound to make a bloomer
Until she’s found her sense of humour
If love should touch her ever
She’ll never, never see it through.

Nobody claimed her
They only named her
Mary make believe




(Transcribed from John Wright’s 78 RPM 
Record Collection by Bill Huntley - September 2013)