Friday Afternoons, BTC 780

Not long after graduating from the Royal College of Music, Britten started composing his collection of mostly unison songs (the last song, "Old Abram Brown", being in canon) to texts he selected from Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither. Britten noted in his diary on 2 November 1933 (just over a month before his twentieth birthday) that he had composed that afternoon "a song, for R.H.M.B. & Clive House, very light & bad – 'I mun be married a Sunday'". "Ee-Oh!" followed on 19 December.