2025 Has Much In Common With The Rise of Fascism In The 1930s.

In part, this substack is about an odyssey through the hostile badlands of capitalism by those I loved the most, my family. People should not be alone in their joy or sorrow because living well or living harshly is a collective experience. Hopefully, this substack provides encouragement. After all, if a working-class revolution in the 1940s could bring about a Welfare State, something similar but geared to our digital age can also be achieved through another people’s revolution. It’s just going to be more difficult this time. Our means of employment are more splintered than in the past, where vast swaths of labour could be unionised and then mobilised to fight against their oppression from the entitled classes. Now, we live in a surveillance state where everything is monitored and dissent against the wealthy is punished swiftly and without mercy. It’s not a hopeless situation but this struggle may only produce results long after we are dead. I don’t know.

Below is a long excerpt from the Green and Pleasant Land. There is a lot of new stuff to post before the new month begins. But, today, I felt more neurotic than normal about the rent, and so it was difficult to focus on the task at hand.

Since COVID, cancer and being poor struck, I have lived an isolated life. However, I don’t find it lonely because as long as I am connected through this Substack to so many people and also take my daily long walks, I feel like I am connected to humanity in the best of ways.

Enjoy, until tomorrow. I have included a tip jar for those who are able and inclined.

Chapter Eight:

Acrimony was ripe for picking, during the last few weeks of Mum's pregnancy in September 1930. My parents harvested the bitter fruits of their failed marriage and served my sister and me a daily feast of their loathing for each other.

When she wasn't berating my dad, Mum wrote desperate begging letters to O'Sullivan.

My sister and I were charged with posting them. More often than not, Alberta would tear open the letter and read Mum's pleas to her former lover aloud, urging him to be a gentleman and take some responsibility for his child, soon to be born. They were never answered.

Much later, Mum pretended they had been. My mother claimed she couldn't accept the ultimatum contained in his reply. According to Mum, O'Sullivan "wanted her to run off to Australia with him and his child. "But I couldn't bear to leave you and your sister behind."

On the 24th of September, my mother went into labour, and Alberta fetched the midwife. I stayed with my mother, who moaned in birthing pain whilst lying on a filthy flock mattress until the midwife arrived.

For the remainder of my mother's labour, Dad, Alberta and I were holed up in the kitchen. Dad sat expressionless on a stool that faced an empty stove.

Dad only broke his silence once. It was after he grew irritated with me when accidentally during horseplay I hit my sister. "Good men never hit women."

After hours of listening to my mother curse the midwife and the midwife curse my mother back, all of us- finally, heard the screams of a young life arriving into this world.

The midwife yelled for us to come and see the new addition to the family. Dad did not leave his stool.

But my sister and I came to our mother and marvelled at our baby brother.

My mother named him Matthew after his biological father, ensuring my dad would reject him outright. 

Not long after Matt’s birth, our unhappy family did a midnight flit from Chesham Street because of rent arrears and ended up in a miserable slum called St Andrew's Villas. The new neighbourhood was fraught with itinerant labourers, unemployed mill workers, former soldiers from the Great War and struggling pensioners.

My parents paid a reduced rent under the agreement; we cleaned the common areas, including the outdoor privy, which stank as if it had been used since the Doomsday Book.

As in Chesum Street, our new doss house neighbours were told Dad was our granddad. It was a necessary deception in my mother's scheme to find another man to provide for us. My dad went along with it reluctantly. But I was shamed not only by my dad's surrender to his debasement but also by my acceptance of it when I started calling him "Grandad" in public.

St Andrew's Villa had a common room where I became acquainted with the other tenants. Once they had been workers, drawn salaries, and had pride in their accomplishments. But the Great Depression ground their self-worth into factory floor waste. Some accepted their fate, and exile from the working world whilst others were angry about it. Mr Brown was one of the angry ones.

Brown had been a soldier in the Great War, and he was pissed off that the land fit for heroes had turned out to be bollocks. There were a few other veterans of World War One, who lived under our roof, and they looked to Brown for leadership and guidance. He knew what to say when shell shock overcame them. He went to their rooms when they screamed at night, "GAS, GAS,” or cried for a dead comrade blown to nothing from artillery.

Brown was a chain smoker and the brand he smoked advertised itself as World Famous. To prove it, inside each packet of cigarettes, they placed a national flag printed on a silk card from a country that sold their brand.

Each time, Brown opened a fresh packet of cigarettes he'd give me the silk card inside.

At bedtime, while my baby brother cried and my parents quarrelled; I'd stare at the flags on those silk cards and wonder what those countries looked like and whether kids were as poor there as I was in Bradford.

One morning, when the money from the poor relief had run out early, and there was no food for breakfast. My mum told me I needed to work like a man now, or the family would starve, be homeless and end up in the Poor House. During our talk, she wept & cursed Ramsey Macdonald, whom she called a lying Labour bastard.

Mum grabbed my hand and said the off-licence down the road was looking for help. She said I should go immediately and alone. I was to speak clearly and tell the owner I would work longer and harder than anyone else in the neighbourhood.

I did as I was told. I went to the off licence and approached the owner behind the counter. I told him I was looking for work. He laughed and gave me a disdainful glare. I told him that my dad was once a miner, but injury had robbed him of employment.

I was hired for one reason. Capitalism was cold-hearted. Children worked like adults in the 1930s because it was less expensive for the employer.

I worked for him every day after school, late into the night and, a half-day on Saturdays. I scrubbed floors and stacked shelves on an empty stomach after doing a full day at school. The owner liked how I could work for next to nothing because my family was famished. I was quickly promoted to beer barrow boy.

I was tasked to deliver crates of beer to local customers. I weighed no more than seventy pounds, and I stood less than five feet. But I pushed a steel-wheeled handcart, wide enough to fit five crates of beer containing nine half-pint bottles. It was arduous work for a seven-year-old, and I was threatened with lost wages for broken or stolen bottles.

My tiny legs and arms hurt after pushing the barrow during my daily shift. I manoeuvred my wares up and down the narrow industrial streets of our neighbourhood. It was a great humiliation for my father to watch me return from work and place my wages into the family’s piggy bank.

My tips, however, I hid from my parents. With those pennies, I bought treats for my sister and myself. At bedtime, my sister and I rushed upstairs to our cold attic room, where we shared a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, cut into enough pieces to last us the week.

There was now little time for lessons and homework because my work at the off-license took precedence. I was angered by this because even a seven-year-old knows when they have been enslaved by economic circumstances. I also felt dumb because the more I worked, the more, I fell behind in schoolwork.

I started skipping school because I was ashamed to not have done my homework and hated the teasing from those who didn't need to work to help pay the rent.

I spent most of my days loitering or daydreaming in the city centre of Bradford. I walked myself to distraction. Sometimes, I met my father on the High Street in a similar state of truancy. If he had a penny, he'd give it to me sheepishly.

“Be on your way lad. Make sure your Mum is none the wiser of our encounter.”

We then went our own way lost, in daydreams and terrors.

On Saturdays, after work, if I had enough tip money, I'd take my sister Alberta to the Thruppeny Rush at the local movie theatre.

We watched the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. For a few pence, my sister and I disappeared into a celluloid dream for an hour. At the Odeon, everything was funny and ended with a smile or a kiss. In the pictures, everything was different to our way of life and those who occupied our doss house.

The cinema was a place of refuge for a small boy like me. Movies and serials let me fantasize and drift away into a world filled with adventure and rewards. On the giant screen, sadness was overcome with laughter, the villain vanquished and justice was always delivered.

But none of that existed in my world. In my doss house reality, it was the opposite. There was hunger, unfathomable melancholy and anger erupting from adults betrayed by a society that only benefited the rich. Or worse those who had no fight left in them and resigned themselves to a miserable death on the dole.

The movies were a temporary escape that melted like film against a match- the moment I got back into the door of St Andrew's Villas.

Once after I returned home from the pictures elated by the fun I had it was slapped out of me by my mother's intent to humiliate me.

I came into the common room of the doss. My father sat in the corner, pipe in mouth, staring forlornly at a wall. In another corner of the sitting room, my Mum sat breastfeeding my brother Matt. Irritated by my entrance or my calls for attention, my mother pulled out her engorged breast from Matt’s wet lips and pumped her milk across my face. It ran down my cheeks as if I was sobbing cream.

Mum laughed and with deranged cruelty said sarcastically.

“He looked hungry too!”

I dashed from the room and hurried up to my attic refuge. Upstairs, alone and angry, I cried because I knew how far my life was from the movie fantasies I watched at the cinema.

**********************

The first seven years of my life were episodes of calamity and despair. It was a tumble of events, not of my making. I was a child who if I wanted to survive had to grow up quickly to defend myself in a world gone feral from economic collapse.

I was weaned on death, grief, homelessness, hunger, familial discord and parents shamed by their inability to survive in the inhospitable financial climate of the 1930s.

It was too much to absorb emotionally. Yet all that I experienced and witnessed during those formative years of development grew in me, wrapped around my heart, tumourous in its dysfunction.

I didn't even notice until it was too late that by the autumn of 1930, my dad had only months left to be in my life. He was being turned into a ghost and I was helping it happen because I didn't fight for him. I chose, perhaps not openly but subconsciously, food on my plate before loyalty to him in my heart. I was overwhelmed then with hunger and despondency. I failed to notice that my mother's machinations to replace my dad with someone who could feed us were finally ready to be harvested.

Bill Moxon was trouble for my family- the moment he took a room in the doss where we lived in St Andrew's Villas.

He was a cowman who worked on a dairy farm- located a few miles outside Bradford.

My mother developed an affinity for Bill because he was young, tall, handsome and thick as a plank. He was everything my dad was not. Mum knew how to appeal to his vanity and pretend she was subservient to him. He was putty in my mother's hands and too dumb to know- he was being cast as the new breadwinner for our family.

No one in the doss gossiped about her affair with Bill because we led them to believe my dad was our grandfather.

In their minds, why shouldn't a "young widow," have a bit of comfort during these "troubling times."

My father had borne so many indignities since he had become disabled from his mining accident in 1928. He took much of it in stride. But, after two years of enduring unemployment, homelessness, seeing his children starve, and me being pressed into child labour, my dad's last straw was being ordered by my mother to take lodgings in the doss house attic.

He asked why, and my mother said, "Bill is moving in with me because you aren't a man anymore."

Mum also informed my sister and me that we'd have to share that damp, lightless attic with our father. According to my mother, it was to keep Dad company but it was because Bill couldn't stand children. If Moxon had his way, my brother Matt would have joined us. But he was still being breastfed and stayed with them.

After my mum told my dad his fate. He walked away from my mother and went to the common room to be alone.

After some time, my mother asked my sister and me to check on our father. We went to the common room, opened the door and found him sitting quietly on a chair with his pipe clenched between his teeth.

I called him. But he didn't answer.

Then- while standing at the top of the stairs, my mother called to him. She said that it was best he went to bed. Her voice triggered him, and a roar of outrage exploded from his mouth.

“I am betrayed; I am cheated.”

Dad charged up the stairs holding a small knife in his hand. He used it to clean his pipe. Its base was shaped like a miner's boot and the last memento my father’ owned from his working life down in the pits. The blade would have had trouble causing a paper cut, let alone physically hurting someone. But at that moment, my Dad did want to physically hurt my mother and cut her for the thousands of wounds he thought he had endured as her husband. When he reached the top of the stairs, he lunged at my mother.

Mum easily overpowered my father and pushed him to the floor. Dad remained there for a long while and sobbed quietly, his anger spent.

The commotion stirred the other tenants, and their doors crept ajar.

The next morning, my mother sent me to the butcher to get two ounces of roast beef.

“For your father.”

(Editor’s Note Ken Loach When he had coffee with my Dad in 2015 found my grandmother’s offering to my granddad, unbelievably moving. A gesture of thanks and sorrow)

At tea time, my father cut slivers of the meat and shared them with my sister and me while my mother fed Matt and tried to pretend that nothing had happened to our family.

By the autumn of 1930, my family had lived rough in doss houses for two years. We had upped sticks half a dozen times, and because of it, nothing felt permanent or secure to me.

My mother doled affection out to my sister and me as if it was as hard to come by as food for our tea. It was portioned in morsels, specs of love no bigger than a scrap of chicken in a watery broth. Her love in the waning months of that year was an affection as weak as the taste made from tea leaves used over and over for a morning brew-up.

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