Paula

There is one fairly important thing to establish before we begin.

This song is not about my first wife.

Her name was also Paula.

I realise this has not helped.

In fact, the coincidence has caused some confusion over the years. More than one person has quite reasonably assumed that a song called Paula must have been written for the woman I later married.

It wasn't.

I hadn't met her yet.

The other Paula

I was an apprentice at Atlas Aircraft and, for a while, living in the apprentice hostel in Boksburg. Somehow our group of apprentices established what I can only describe as diplomatic relations with a group of student nurses living in a nurses' residence in Pretoria.

Friday nights increasingly involved Pretoria.

That was where I met the first Paula.

I remember what she looked like. I remember that she was Afrikaans. I remember that she was a very good dancer, particularly the kind of Afrikaans langarm dancing I enjoyed at the time.

I cannot remember her surname.

We became friends.

There was probably always that vague possibility that it might become something more — at that age, I'm not sure anything was ever quite as uncomplicated as we pretended it was — but mostly we simply enjoyed one another's company.

Eventually I didn't need the rest of the group as an excuse to go to Pretoria. I'd ride through on my motorbike on a Friday evening and see her. If she wasn't working, we'd go dancing or meet friends. If she was on night shift, I'd sometimes stay at her flat anyway and wait for the weekend to catch up with her.

It was an easy friendship.

Then came New Year's Eve.

We went into Church Square in Pretoria with friends to see in the New Year. There was a huge crowd, an open beach buggy and, at midnight, an equally enthusiastic contribution from the weather.

We got soaked.

Later that night, the friendship became a little more intimate than it had been before.

There are details of other people's lives that aren't mine to publish, even thirty-something years later, so I'll leave that evening where it belongs. What mattered to me was that at some point Paula reached a boundary that mattered to her and she wasn't prepared to cross it.

She seemed embarrassed by that.

I was impressed by it.

The following morning is mostly an emotional memory now. Memories do that. They lose the edges of the actual events and somehow retain the feeling.

I remember breakfast. I remember a quiet Pretoria. And I remember coming away thinking that Paula had absolutely no reason to be ashamed of something I actually admired about her.

I wanted to tell her that.

So naturally, I wrote her a song.

In three-quarter time

By then I was already becoming frustrated with the limitations of my own songwriting.

I could write a verse.

I could write a chorus.

I could put them together in 4/4 time.

Then, if inspiration really struck, I could write another verse.

This was not exactly stretching the boundaries of contemporary music.

So I decided Paula would be a waltz.

I can't give you any profound artistic reason for that decision. I knew how to play waltzes. It was another tool I actually possessed, and changing the time signature forced me to approach the song differently.

So Paula bounced along in three-quarter time while I tried to tell this girl that the thing she seemed embarrassed about was precisely the thing I thought she should value.

The opening said it quite plainly:

Paula, Paula don't be so sad
Paula, Paula I want you to be glad
Paula, Paula can't you see
That the virtue inside you is what keeps you happy

Then I got to the second verse.

And things went somewhat downhill.

Now I'm a man who loves woman, I want you to know
And many a woman has been through my door...

Oh dear.

I knew it was bad then.

Apparently everybody else did too.

The first few times I played the song, “I'm a man who loves women” tended to produce raised eyebrows and some variation of:

Oh, really?

It wasn't what I was trying to say.

I wasn't attempting to announce myself as the Casanova of the East Rand. I was trying, rather clumsily, to establish that I had enough experience to recognise that what Paula valued in herself was worth protecting.

The message was right.

The line was awful.

But it fitted the music.

And, perhaps more importantly at that stage of my songwriting, it got me to the end of the song.

I think I did that quite a lot when I was younger. Finishing the song sometimes mattered more than interrogating every line in it. Once it was finished, it tended to stay finished.

My songs were a little like journal entries.

I didn't generally go back and rewrite yesterday.

The envelope

I never played Paula for Paula.

In fact, as far as I can remember, the morning after that New Year's Eve was the last time I ever saw her.

But sometime afterwards I rode back to Pretoria hoping to find her.

She wasn't home.

I had written the song out as neatly as I possibly could. I can write neatly when I put my mind to it, despite considerable evidence accumulated since then suggesting otherwise.

Somewhere in Pretoria — perhaps at a flea market — I bought a simple silver chain with a plain silver cross.

I folded the song up, put it and the cross into an envelope, and pushed the envelope through an open window of her flat.

I think it was the kitchen window.

And that was that.

I never heard from her.

I don't know whether she found the envelope.

I don't know whether she read the song.

I know she never heard it.

Life simply moved on.

The wrong Paula

Life also has a sense of humour.

Some years later I met another woman called Paula.

I married that one.

This has occasionally made explaining the song more difficult than it really ought to be.

There have even been suggestions over the years that perhaps Paula should disappear from my repertoire because of what people assume it represents.

I don't see it that way.

There are photographs in old albums of people who were once important in my life. Keeping the photograph doesn't mean I'm trying to return to the life in the photograph.

The photograph is simply evidence that the life happened.

Songs carry more emotional weight than photographs, certainly. Singing one can bring an old moment startlingly close again.

But I don't think moving on from someone requires deleting them from your history.

Paula belonged to a brief friendship with a young woman I knew in Pretoria more than thirty years ago.

For whatever reason, she mattered enough in that moment for me to write a song about her.

That is part of my history.

Thirty-something years later

When I began going through the old songs for Mom's album in 2026, Paula eventually came back across my desk.

And there it was.

Waiting patiently for me after all those years.

I'm a man who loves women...

Nope.

The difference was that this time I was prepared to do something I very rarely allowed myself to do with these old songs.

I rewrote it.

Not because 54-year-old me had decided that 20-something-year-old me needed editing.

And not because I wanted to make an old song sound as though I'd written it yesterday.

I changed it because I already knew the line was wrong when I wrote it.

I'd simply never finished fixing it.

The new verse became:

Now I've chased after shadows that slipped through my hands
And built little castles on crumbling sands
It's easy to wander when nothing takes hold
But a girl named Paula's the one who troubles my soul

Later, where the original had said:

Now I want to tell you Paula my friend...

the new version says:

Now, Paula, I speak as a man who has learned...

Perhaps that's closer to what I was trying to say all along.

The original lyric tried to establish authority by telling her how experienced I was.

The older me doesn't need to do that.

He can simply admit that he wandered, got things wrong and learned a few things along the way.

The original page stays exactly as it was.

That's history.

The song doesn't have to.

Paula — 2026 lyrics

Paula, Paula, don't be so sad
Paula, Paula, I want you to be glad
Paula, Paula, can't you see
That the virtue inside you is what keeps you happy

Now I've chased after shadows that slipped through my hands
And built little castles on crumbling sands
It's easy to wander when nothing takes hold
But a girl named Paula's the one who troubles my soul

She's pretty and honest and laughs from the heart
If I did it over, I'd choose her from the start
There's one thing about Paula I don't understand
She's ashamed of the virtue she holds in her hand

Now, Paula, I speak as a man who has learned
That the virtue inside you, you must keep to the end
Don't listen to others who would lead you astray
For the virtue inside you will be a light for your way

Paula, Paula, don't be so sad
Paula, Paula, I want you to be glad
Paula, Paula, can't you see
That the virtue inside you is what keeps you happy

Did she ever hear it?

No.

That's the strange little unresolved part of Paula.

I wrote a song for one particular person because there was something I wanted her to understand.

Then I never got to explain it.

I don't know where she went. I don't know what her life became. I don't even remember her surname.

And I don't know whether that envelope ever reached her hands.

Somewhere on a quiet day in Pretoria, I folded a neatly handwritten song into an envelope with a little silver cross and pushed it through an open window.

More than thirty years later, I finally fixed the line that had bothered me from the beginning.

As for the rest of it, I put it out there.

Hopefully it went where it was supposed to go.