A Daughter Dead In October, But A Son Saved in November-Chapter Three in The Green & Pleasant Land-A working class world before the Welfare State

Grief took up lodgings in our house after Marion died- and it was not stoic or solemn. It was bitter as tea made with vinegar. Rage steeped in my mother's heart over my sister's death. Mum knew and spoke aloud what my dad kept to himself. "She was snatched from us because we are poor."

No one could console my mother during those first weeks of mourning, least of all her husband. Dad seemed to my mum too tepid in his hurt over Marion's passing. The emotional accoutrements of mourning were absent in my dad's outward appearance. My father didn’t weep or employ cross words to others in his grief, and to my mum, that was as good as tugging your forelock at death like a servant to its master.

Mum was being unfair because Dad wasn't lukewarm in his sorrow over Marion's death. He was hot with shame over it. Dad's grief was silent and rheumatic with self-recrimination as he blamed himself for Marion's spiral into death.

My dad realised hunger induced by participating in the General Strike was a factor in Marion's death from TB. He was the family's breadwinner who failed to put food on our table because the General Strike brought famine to our community and every other mining community across the land.

For the rest of his life, my dad never rid himself of the erroneous notion, that he was responsible for Marion's death and the tragedies that befell our family rather than capitalism, which considered us no better than replaceable livestock.

My sister and I were too young to grieve for Marion. She was here and then gone. To where I did not know? Marion was just absent from our home.

Soon enough, I would understand death and its permanence. I would get to know it, and it would call me by my first name. On too many occasions, Death breathed down my neck over the next twenty years because poverty and war are mortality's best mates.

But in that autumn of 1926, I absented myself from the harshness of sorrow by escaping our home during daylight with my sister. We traipsed through the streets of Barnsley and fell in with other children at play or visited our grandparents who lived close by. Many days, I'd lose myself in imaginary treasure hunts with Alberta at a nearby rubbish tip. There in the debris strewn over a dead surface of earth or heaped in ziggurats of busted furniture crockery and rotting clothing, I searched for treasure my sister promised was buried in the ground. We scavenged like Howard Carter for King Tut's tomb. Outside of brass buttons, we never found loot except for things so broken that even coal mining families saw no utility in them.

Mourning is not allowed to last long for the poor. It must be put aside like thoughts of happiness, or desires for higher education if you want to survive. My family's mourning for Marion abruptly ended because death tried to barge again into our lives. This time it came for me.

It wanted to steal me away from life before I was conscious I was living. Whooping Cough was my would-be assassin. That sickness left my tiny frame gasping for air, and I came within a whisper of death.