A New Great Depression is just around the corner but when it comes this time, governments will just deny its very existence.

We have now arrived at Chapter 8 of Harry Leslie Smith's The Green and Pleasant Land. Harry is seven years old, and he has survived the first years of his life which were rife with extreme poverty and homelessness. His eldest sister is now dead from tuberculosis and buried in a pauper's pit. His father is unemployed owing to an injury in the mines following the 1926 General Strike. 

Harry and his family in debt fled Barnsley for Bradford, where they lodge in a series of dilapidated doss houses populated with down and outers, shell-shocked First World War soldiers and pensioners.

His mother has taken an Irish navvy as a lover in hopes that she can ditch Harry's dad for a man who had employment to ensure her kids don't starve in the harsh environs of Great Depression Yorkshire. It doesn't work out and to add to the calamity experienced by Harry and his family, his mother is now pregnant with her lover's child. The problem was after a while, he ditched her. 

The Green & Pleasant Land was unfinished at the time of my dad’s death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards my father left behind. Over the next few months, I will be posting the entire work here on substack because it is a brilliant read and an important history of working-class life during a time before the Welfare State. Sadly, those times have almost returned for many because democracy in the 21st century has become more about giving the good life to its top-income earners at the expense of everyone else.

It's the end of the month and I am trying to make my rent. So remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me. I am offering today and tomorrow a sale on yearly memberships. At the reduced rate, if I get 12 paid yearly subscriptions by the 30th, my rent is covered for next month.

The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter Eight:

Home, spurned by O'Sullivan and pregnant with his child, Mum was in a sorry state. She returned to the doss with the same air about her as a captured prisoner marched back to their cell. First, there was initial bravado. Quickly followed by dour silence after she began to contemplate a life sentence behind the four grim walls of poverty.

No one took pity on her- either in our family or the outside world. Instead, the neighbours put two and two together about the reason for her long absence from the doss that coincided with O'Sullivan's sudden disappearance.

Once her pregnancy began to show, they tittered about "naughty weekends"- and then Scarlett lettered my mother- whilst making cruel jokes about my father "leaving the back gate open".

You can't stop gossip, and you can't stop people poking their noses where they shouldn't go. Everyone had to have a whiff of my family's troubles to pretend to themselves their own lives didn't reek as much of squalor, disappointment, and loneliness.

Near Mum's death, forty years after her tryst with O'Sullivan, she confessed the bolt down south in the winter of 1930 was because the "navvy had got me in the family way." My mother hoped a new life could be forged on the outskirts of London from the ash leavings from her one up north.

It didn't work out because nothing ever does for the poor. O'Sullivan was as bad at holding a job as my father was at finding one. Naturally, that led to arguments and the cooling of their mutual desire for each other.

In the 1960s, when all my mum's passions were spent except self-recriminations, she admitted to a sister that O'Sullivan's affections for her were "unsteady." Any love or loyalty O'Sullivan might have had for my mum did a runner at the prospect of responsibility for her and his child. The notion that his wages earned from the sweat of his brow couldn't be used for craic down at the pub because he'd helped make a baby was a language he refused to learn.

Like all her pregnancies, it wasn't a joyful time for Mum. In the precarious age of want that was my mother's time, a baby was just another mouth to feed in a household of hungry, underfed mouths. It was made worse because my father was shamed and humiliated by her affair with O'Sullivan. He resented Mum and despised himself. As for the child growing inside my mother's womb, he didn't hate it, but he didn't like it either.

Nightly, a dense fug of acrimony from screaming bouts between my parents hung heavy in the air of our squat doss house room. My parents raged at each other from teatime until bedtime. They cursed each other about being a jobless husband or a wanton wife. The din from them was so loud, and persistent neighbours pounded on our walls for my parents to "pack it in." Even as I approach the last breaths of my life, the roar of outrage, fear, and desperation my parents expelled when they awakened in 1930 to the reality their existence was doomed to perpetual unhappiness crashes about in my skull like heavy surf during a storm.

There was no love, trust, or hope left between them, only animosity. Their sixteen years of marriage were based upon a belief; that things could work out and even get better if they just held out long enough for the tide to turn. However, the opposite occurred; the longer they stayed together, the worse things got. Mum knew it couldn't go on that way- for much longer. We were sinking lower and lower into the mire of a poor relief that kept you alive just enough so that you knew how much of existence was an awful losing battle for the unemployed.

To make it out of the Great Depression- one of us had to be forsaken.

Mum chose to save me, Alberta, and herself whilst Dad was to be the one abandoned as if he were excess cargo, on a ship in danger of capsizing. My sister and I didn't have any say in the matter because our mother knew we'd have fought her tooth and nail. So instead, Mum used emotional Dum Dum bullets that she shot into my heart and Alberta's which exploded out a shrapnel of fear that unless we followed her plan, we would have no parents rather than only one.

Mum vocalised what should have remained silent within her adult mind and heart. "It's to the workhouse for thee and thy sister if your dad doesn't find work." At bedtime, I'd close my eyes and wish for sleep to cleanse her words from my imagination. But the feelings the words left in my small boy's imagination never departed. Like Prometheus learned the knowledge of fire, my mum gave me the knowledge, that nothing was secure in this life- and love does not outlast famine.

It terrified me to understand at the age of seven, I was not safe- and could be abandoned, shorn from my family at any moment.

In an age when millions of men were out of work, my mother's only plan to turn her pig's ear of a life into a silk purse was to find a man, unlike my father, who was employed. To initiate her machinations, we had to leave our current doss. Everyone there knew our family dynamic and working-class misogyny had already pilloried my mother for her dalliance with O'Sullivan and then getting pregnant from him. But since my parents were seemingly still a couple, albeit one, who had a nightly- riotous barny, their outrage was not hot enough to burn my mum at the stake.

The working class in 1930 did not divorce because women were still considered their husbands’ chattel if not by law by social convention. For Mum to openly cuckold Dad would have branded her a whore and an outcast even in Bradford's down-and-out underworld. Any attempt for my mum to attach herself to another man had to be done under the ruse that she was widowed, and my father was not my dad but my mother's.

On the night of our flit when we walked on cat’s paws on streets smeared in gaslight towards our new residence, Dad was quiet. He was surrendered to what we were about to learn Mum had drawn up to be his end.

Mum said my sister and I were for the foundling home if we didn't do as she told us. From now on, our dad was to be called granddad. To not do so guaranteed my sister and me a one-way trip to the workhouse where we would have not even one parent.

Alberta fought a bit against our mother's new directive, whereas I surrendered to it.

I joined this conspiracy and pushed my dad to the periphery of my life when in the company of strangers because I was so fearful of ending up like my sister Marion, who had died in a workhouse. Like that, I let go of someone I loved. I betrayed them and ignored their place in the hierarchy of my affection because someone else I loved said it was necessary to do this to save me and them.

Our new abode on Chesum Street was arid of kindness, and hope burned as low as the sputtering gas light that cast our one-room squat in despairing shadows.

On Chesum Street, we didn't mix or socialise with other doss house residents like in our old slum. It seemed best to keep as far away from them- than let slip that the old man who lived with us was our dad rather than grandad. My only escape from the misery that surrounded me and the lie I told was to forage through the streets of this slum, looking for diversions as a damp summer sun began to unfold itself around Bradford.

Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me. If I get 6 paid yearly subscriptions by the 30th, my rent is covered for next month.