“Are You Having It or Not?”
In the Shadows of the Welfare State
On her first day in Britain, Friede encounters a country still shaped by war, scarcity, and the uneasy beginnings of something new, a social democratic Britain.
Before you is another chapter from The Green & Pleasant Land, which Harry Leslie Smith was working on at the time of his death.
In his absence, I have worked to complete this part of his Last Stand Project that we began together.
Throughout his writings, whether stated explicitly or woven with subtle nuance, the politics of socialism and the human dignity it provides were my Dad’s guiding force. It was an ideal that carried him across the rough streets of hardship and economic injustice.
The Green and Pleasant Land is an important history of working-class life before the Welfare State.
Yet I find immense value in my father’s observations of a Britain in imperial decline, and in the birth of a socialist Britain between 1947 and 1953.
It was a time of great optimism as well as uncertainty.
It was also a time when my father’s generation began to grapple with their traumas from the Great Depression and the war against Hitler.
Neoliberalism has undone much of what is good and decent in society.
Today, it is often easier to identify with the hopelessness of the Great Depression years than with the post-war struggle to build a new society from the ashes of the old.
It is vital that people reclaim their working-class history, because democracy in the 21st century isn’t on the back foot—it’s in the morgue.
We need to build something new, and that will take a political break as profound as 1917 or 1945.
Whether that means repression and authoritarianism or a democratic renaissance is up to us.
March Subscription Offer
For the month of March, I’m offering 40% off an annual subscription because this month has been a harsh reckoning for me.
Before the chapter begins, a moment in transit—Friede’s first encounter with post-war Britain.
Chapter Five: What ya having, luv?
From the RAF base, I travelled with Friede to London on a rusting commuter bus. The interior smelt of burning oil, petrol, and anonymous passengers. Halfway to the city, it began to rain, and hard black drops peppered the bus. Outside, everything looked desolate and far from civilisation.
“In no time, we will be in London,” I said to Friede, who sat squashed beside me on a row of wooden seats at the rear of the vehicle.
Friede nodded, distracted by the landscape she saw from her window, verdant, rural, and orderly. “It’s what I expected.”
“Will it be like this in Yorkshire?” she enquired.
“No, the land outside the cities is untamed.”
“I have never seen a picture of your mother’s home. Is it like my Mutti’s?”
It was a hard question for me to answer. I wanted to say that taking a snap of my mum’s house would break the bloody camera lens.
Instead, I said, “Since forever, my family have been simple workers. Like most people in Britain, we live in a terraced house.”
“I don’t understand,” said Friede.
You’ll see soon enough, I thought with dread.
I muttered, “Capitalism kept us stuck living in the 19th century. Our working class seemed incapable of being revolutionary enough to change our living standards up until we elected Labour in 1945.”
Friede looked uneasy. So I stopped talking politics and jaundiced history. It was all beyond my control anyway. “Just ignore me,” I said. “Things aren’t that dark anymore. Attlee’s in charge and sorting things, or so we are told.”
I began to feel guilty and regretful that I hadn’t been upfront with Friede in Germany about my life in Britain before the war and what awaited us at my mother’s house.
Friede was silent for a while, then she asked, “But it will be alright for us because you have prospects, right? We won’t be living like refugees?”
“No,” I said, “never like refugees, but we need to stay at my mother’s until we can get ourselves sorted.”
As an afterthought, she asked, “Do you think your mother will like me?”
For the moment, I thought it best not to distress her further with any more harsh truths about my mother or Yorkshire.
“My mum isn’t like your mother; mine is rougher around the edges, and so is the neighbourhood she lives in.”
Friede didn’t look altogether satisfied by my lacklustre response, but let it go. The window beside her was thick with condensation, and Friede began to spell out with her finger the word Hamburg. As quickly as she had written out the name of her city, she wiped away her handiwork as if embarrassed.
“Tomorrow, everything will look lovely because it will be sunny,” I said hesitantly. I wasn’t sure if daylight would make anything appear better to Friede. My frank talk about post-war conditions in Britain had disillusioned her.
It was too much information for her to absorb after such a long and difficult journey, and she said she was going to close her eyes and sleep.
When we entered London, she awoke with a fright and asked where we were. I told her we were in the capital and had to change buses to get to our train station. At the terminal, the bus driver opened the boot and pulled out Friede’s luggage. We slowly walked up the rain-spattered street to a city bus that would take us to Euston.
On it, commuters behind us grumbled in short tempered accents. “Get a move on,” someone bellowed behind us.
After we sat down, Friede pulled from her purse a compact mirror, flipped it open, and stared disenchanted at the image.
Friede began to point outside to the shop windows and said, “I would love to go in and see a real London dress shop. Just to look,” she said.
“Next time, luv,” I said thankfully. “There will be plenty of time on another visit, but today we have a train to catch.”
When we arrived at Euston, Friede looked as if she were about to faint. Her face was the colour of chalk.
“I don’t feel very well,” she whispered to me. “Perhaps I am just hungry.”
“There’s a café up ahead. We can get a bite to eat there,” I said.
We walked through dirty glass doors into a room draped in blue smoke from burning pipe tobacco and exhaled cigarette fumes.
Weary commuters sat on hard wooden chairs, slurping tea and eating sticky buns.
We joined the queue. The matron behind the counter was hurried and ill-tempered.
“Oi, get a move on, or your tea will be as cold as the Thames. How about a biscuit, luv? It was baked fresh this morning.”
When our turn came, I called out for two cups of tea with milk and sugar.
Friede looked about ready to collapse. Suddenly, I noticed several pieces of cake sitting underneath a glass container.
They didn’t look good or even appealing. The confection resembled what every train station in London and across the country had sold since Hitler had invaded Poland. It was something only appetising to a nation whose sweet tooth had been numbed by rationing and the scarcity of choice. The cake’s icing looked like industrial paint, and the jam inside like a ruptured intestine.
When I ordered the cake, Friede gasped in revulsion.
On top of the pastry were several bluebottle flies making a meal out of our lunch. They walked across the cakes like men strolling through their own back gardens with a sense of ownership. When the clerk lifted the cake from beneath its glass cover, the flies came along for the ride and settled at the edge of the plate, rubbing their legs together. Friede’s face grew white with disgust. She asked me in a tone loud enough for the woman behind the counter to hear, “Are the flies included in the price of the cake?”
The matron looked confused, then, noticing that the queue behind us had grown longer, she hollered, “So are you having it or not?”
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