I swear, I didn’t even know this existed. It’s great, though…

There is also, apparently, a film called The Caretaker’s Daughter.

Here are the lyrics to my “Caretaker’s Daughter”:

The caretaker’s daughter

went walking with me,

out in the nature,

the birds and the trees.

The caretaker’s daughter

took care of me.

You mended my heart, girl -

don’t you know you did that for me?

I like to remember

all the kindness you showed me.

You can talk about nature’s

immutable laws

but I swear I never kissed her -

just friends, was all it was.

The caretaker’s daughter

took good care of me.

Well you saved my life, girl -

don’t you know you did that for me?

I like to remember

all the good things you did for me.

All of which is, to a first approximation, true; but the point of the song, besides being a belated tribute to the girl in question, is to advance an innuendo and then retract it (unlike the Revere Endor song, which in true music hall style establishes an innuendo and then builds on it).

What was, precisely, a big deal for me at the time was that “Nature’s immutable laws” seemed to confine very considerably the range of possible relationships between male and female persons - you could find someone who fancied you and go out with them, or be unable to find anyone who fancied you and be alone, and that was apparently it. Later on, at university, I seized on any indication I could find - in Victorian prose fiction, of all things - that non-romantic friendship between men and women was both possible and valuable, with what may have seemed to others a rather bewildering fervour.

The problem, really, is that you can’t just censor the innuendo, or screen it out, since it arises from a context of social / discursive conventions that no individual actor can control. You have to traverse the innuendo - get a fix on it, establish a position in relation to it - before you can move on. Thus, in Middlemarch - like I said, Victorian prose fiction! - the first really frank and amicable conversation between Dorothea Brooke and Sir James Chettam begins after she has rejected him for Casaubon:

Hence it happened that in the good baronet’s succeeding visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.