Before the "World's Oldest Rebel" died he wrote a final book about poverty. Chapters 3 & 4

The Harry’s Last Stand project, which I worked on with my Dad, for the last 10 years of his life, was an attempt to use his life story as a template to effect change and remake a Welfare State fit for the 21st century. His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project. I have been working on it, refining it, and editing it to meet my dad’s wishes.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going, and me alive and housed is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can, please subscribe, and if you can’t -it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide.

I have also included a tip jar for those who are so inclined to assist me.

I am navigating all the excerpts from The Green And Pleasant Land to a subfolder on my Harry's Last Stand Substack. It will be easier for readers to find the progression of the last book Harry Leslie Smith worked on before his death in November 2018. I have been editing and shaping it to how my Dad wanted it presented to his readers.

Reading a chapter here or there doesn't give the full breadth of despair and desperation endured by the working class during the Great Depression.

Below is Chapter 3 &4 along with an audio portion of Harry speaking of those times and the present.

The Green & Pleasant Land:

Chapter Three

Grief took 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 her daughter's death. Mum knew and spoke aloud what 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. He didn't wear the emotional accoutrements of mourning. Dad didn't weep or howl because grief had punctured his spirit and deflated his heart. Mum thought my father's reluctance to display emotion over Marion's death was as good as him tugging his 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, 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. For days, I'd lose myself in imaginary treasure hunts with Alberta at a nearby rubbish tip. It was a place strewn with debris from the lives of the working poor: rotting clothes, broken crockery as well as busted furniture heaped in ziggurats. 

We scavenged like Howard Carter for Tutankhamun's tomb, looking for loot that we told ourselves was buried underneath the dead ground that only gave up brass buttons from the 19th century. 

Marion was dead only a few short months when death tried to barge again into our lives. 

This time it came for me. Whooping Cough was my would-be assassin. That sickness left my tiny frame gasping for air, and I came within a whisper of death.

I saw no doctor because there was no money for one. Ancient remedies used by peasants for hundreds of years to combat catarrh kept me alive. Mum shrouded my head with a heavy cloth and made me- breathe in menthol mixed in a bowl of boiling water to ease the congestion in my lungs. My father carried me in his arms and willed me to live with songs and soft words about Christmas that would be soon upon us.

My sickness passed, and death departed our house. Its mission unfulfilled this time. Death wasn't disappointed for long- because up until the NHS was formed in 1948, it had free reign to consume as many bairns as it could stomach from my working class generation.

A daughter dead in October, and a son saved in November, made our Yuletide in 1926 an occasion where funeral and feast danced cheek to cheek.

On that Christmas day, my parents splurged and kept the coal fire in the grate in our cramped parlour- burning from morning until bedtime. The day was joyous with song and merriment. My father played the piano- something he had not done since Marion died. Alberta and I stood beside him and sang well-worn festive jingles with abandon.

Mum prepared our modest holiday feast in a tiny scullery, which was located at the back of the parlour. Our Christmas tea was a small portion of roasted meat that floated on rich gravy that was prevented from flooding off our plates by a mountainous dam of potatoes and parsnips. There was even pudding because Mum baked a jam roll that we washed down with tea- sweet with sugar.

After our meal, I played with my lone gift from Father Christmas; a toy train made in Japan because a British-manufactured toy was too costly for my parents. I sat on a rug woven from the rags of clothes too threadbare to wear and pushed my train across the surrounding stone floor that was icy cold. Near me, my sister admired the doll she was given for Christmas. Alberta and I didn't know it then, but this was the last Christmas when our parents could afford to buy us presents.

At the beginning of the New Year, calamity returned to our house. It came for my dad this time. At fifty-nine, he was no longer up to the job of working at the coalface. Decades beneath the surface, busting rock and coal had broken his body and lungs- he was relocated to surface work.

In his new work, Dad accepted every demeaning command to shovel coal or haul broken equipment away from the mine entrances to preserve his employment. Dad took each order to lift, carry and fetch with good humour because he knew work kept our family out of the poor house. But his body could not keep up with the six-day workweek. The physical demands, the sheer stamina and strength required to work ten hours a day, lifting and dumping scrap was too much for my father. The hernia acquired deep beneath the surface, in the world of black coal, ruptured above ground when he was ordered to haul away heavy metal beams by himself.

He was done for because a manual labourer who can't before manual labour has no utility in a society that reveres capitalism.

Dad was let go from the mine, and my family's fate was sealed. We were destitute because unemployment benefits were insufficient, and women were discouraged from working outside of the home.

When my fourth birthday arrived at the end of February 1927, our family no longer had money to heat our home with coal. Mum enlisted my sister Alberta and me to scoff coal from a slag heap at one of the collieries near our dwelling. My sister and I would head out to the slag heap on blistering frosty winter days after- we breakfasted on watery porridge.

When we arrived at the base of the slag heap- that was piled high with the jetsam of the mine below. It looked to my four-year-old eyes like an ominous black mountain that had risen from the depths of hell because sections of it smouldered and smoked from bits of coal igniting through friction. My sister and I along, with other children with unemployed dads, ascended the mountain of slag like Sherpas going up Mount Everest.

With my tiny legs, I crawled up to its summit. At the top, I scrambled to fill my bucket with jagged pieces of substandard coal. Day in, and day out, I climbed those heaps of slag at the mouth of the colliery to fill my bucket with broken lumps of coal to keep our house warm and our oven working.

When done, I walked home; my clothes and face were covered in coal dust like I had worked a shift down in the pits below that are as deep and black as the ocean where no sunlight can penetrate.

1927 was the year my family floated in the wreckage caused by my father's unemployment. We subsisted on poor relief and midnight flits. Our welcome in Barnsley was at an end. My mother's family had nowt for us because they were mining folk too, living within a penny of their own ruin. As for my father's family, they had banished him from their hearts when he married my mother. A sister of his lived in Barnsley and owned a pub with her husband, but she refused all pleas from my father for assistance.

By 1928, my family stood like millions of other working-class families on the threshold of the Great Depression. Like them, we didn't know what was coming for us. But we were even less prepared than most working-class people for the economic maelstrom that gathered strength on the horizon. The General Strike, followed by Dad's unemployment, meant; there was no cushion for us or minuscule reserves to draw upon. Everything was used up to survive my father's year of joblessness. Only the strong and unsentimental would survive the last years of the 1920s and the first of the 1930s.

At the start of 1928, my parents skipped out on their debts and fled Barnsley for Bradford with Alberta and me in tow. The bus that delivered us there stank of passengers who couldn’t afford a trip to the public baths and subsisted on fried potatoes and onions. Bradford didn’t promise my family much outside of the slim chance we might keep our heads above water rather than drown in poverty. It all depended on if Dad was able to find work in a larger city.

We now existed to survive- nothing more and nothing less.

Chapter Four

In the Winter of 1928, my family were like migratory beasts of the plain because we never rested. We just kept moving in search of safety and food, always fearful of calamities coming for us at each corner we took. So, we upped sticks for Bradford in the damp dusk of February with not much more than the shirts on our backs because Barnsley was our yesterday.

As we fled, Alberta and I questioned our mother about why we had to leave but were hushed by her. 

"This is not a concern for children. Forget Barnsley."

Dad was more sentimental than Mum. He couldn't forget or let go of things, no matter how; superfluous they were to our present circumstances. He took to our new life- mementoes from his past that, in our changed surroundings, pricked him with the sharpness of a thorn. On our journey to Bradford, he carried a portrait of his dad and some books of poetry and history tied together with string.

"Why did you bring that rubbish.”

Mum barked as we struggled onto a bus where all the hard wooden seats were already occupied.

In response, Dad said nothing because he had no defence except a belief that things would get brighter for us. Mum refused to let it go.

"You would have taken the bloody piano if it weren't down at the pawn shop to pay for the bus tickets."

Mum secured lodgings for us at a doss house near where the university is now located. But in the 1920s, the neighbourhood was a febrile slum. A dosshouse was the last refuge for people before homelessness or the workhouse. Our rent was cheaper than other tenants because mum- took on the dubious responsibility of collecting rent from the other lodgers who, like us, were skint.

Marion's death, Dad's unemployment and her surviving children's hunger hardened Mum's heart to the trials and travails of strangers, which made her an excellent rent collector for the absentee landlord. On the surface, to strangers, she was friendly enough if it got her something. However, underneath Mum's smiles and jokes were sharp daggers ready to plunge into anyone who threatened our survival.

In Edwardian times the doss house we now inhabited was for a prosperous family. But wealth, hope and prosperity had long ago jogged on from that house and the surrounding neighbourhood. By the time of our arrival, it was a run-down three-storied eyesore. Its foundation had subsided in the ground and gave the house the appearance of a ship taking on water from a gash in its hull.

The other tenants were Irish navvies who slept four to a room on hard cots and sang lewd songs before bed. In other rooms, there were shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War who screamed in their sleep when their dreams led them back, to the Somme and Ypres. The rest of the lodgings were taken up by indigent pensioners and us. We rented a small room on the second floor, and in it, we were expected to do our sleeping, eating, and fretting. The privy was outside, and a key near the front door granted one entrance to a bog that made me wince from the foul odours emanating from its hole that seemed as deep as a mine shaft.

The navvies in our doss were tough men who built and repaired the roads around Bradford. They knew how to drink, how to swear and how to brawl. But they were always kind to me, and my sister and they were like butter on toast in my mum's hands because she flirted with them- while Dad became increasingly an insignificant shadow on the wall of our lives.

My father withdrew into himself. He couldn’t tolerate his helplessness as we fell further into rough circumstances. Each morning, following breakfast, to avoid unpleasant questions or demands from Mum, Dad made ready to leave the doss by putting on a worker’s cap and short coat as if preparing to leave for work.

Dad never got out of the door without my mother piercing him with sarcasm.

"Lord Muck, where are you going? There’s work to be done around this house.”

“Out for a walk,” was his standard response, and then Dad vanished until teatime.

“It must be nice to live the life of the idle, bloody rich and have time to stroll about town.”

I knew, Dad, was doing more than larking about. He was looking for work because he confessed this to me sometimes when bidding me goodnight at bedtime. But there wasn't any on offer for a man who looked and was past his prime.

While my father marched along the rough, unforgiving pavement of Bradford streets, my mother kept order in the doss by ensuring the other residents paid their rent on time. Now, there was more vinegar than honey coursing through Mum's heart. But on occasions, Mum had a great capacity for kindness and forgiveness. The lead on her compassion was short as every day was a battle against economic rapids that led to either the workhouse or premature death.

For a while, Mum attempted to protect a young man down on his luck who shared digs with a couple of navies. He was shy and not good at surviving. Mum stood up for him when the other navvies took the piss.

But he had a bedwetting problem, and it became chronic. At first, my mother let his bedwetting pass without rebuke because his rent was paid on time. Unfortunately, the young man pissed his bed on one too many occasions. Complaints were made by other occupants in his room because the smell from his soiled clothing and bedding was so strong that it overpowered the cloying stench of unwashed humanity who resided in the house.

My mother tossed the poor beggar out on his ear like he was a cat in the wrong house. When he pleaded for his possessions; she returned to his former bedroom and from an open window hurled his meagre belongings, along with the piss-stained flock mattress, to the pavement where he stood below.

As books and clothes dropped to the ground, my mother swore at him and warned him never to return.

“Oi piss pants, bugger off home to your mam and stay out of my bloody way or I’ll give you such a bollocking, you’ll have a reason to wet the bed.”

There was always noise in the doss. Doors slammed, people farted and belched, cursed, wept, and even laughed into hysteria. Dad was the only one who was quiet about his fate. He was exhausted by his daily walking and search for work.

In the evening, after our tea of porridge or boiled potatoes, he sat on a stool by our fireplace grate empty of coal- and chewed on a pipe starved of tobacco.

On the wall above Dad was the elegant portrait of my granddad, the publican who, in the painting, sported a giant handlebar moustache and wore the accoutrements of modest prosperity.

On that grimy wall stained from years of smoke and cooking fumes whose paint was flecked in the colour of grit, the portrait of my grandad stared down at us as an incongruous image of propriety. If I upset her, my sister would say in mockery,

“Look up, granddad is cross with thee."

Most evenings Mum absented herself from our quarters until it was time to sleep. She preferred being downstairs in the common room in the company of the navvies. There, she flirted, joked, and schemed for a way; she and her children could escape our plunge into poverty. Dad, by this time, was not included in Mum's escape plans because he was a dead weight to her. She now looked for a means to jettison him from our lives.

If Dad knew he was being erased from our existence, he didn't protest or let on. Dad continued, as he had done through all our trials in Barnsley, with stoic optimism and making amends for our shabby existence as best he could with the limited resources available.

On occasion he allowed me to leaf through one of the few things he still owned and cherished- Harmsworth's History of the World in eight volumes. These books were bound in leather, embossed with gold leaf, and stood in a neat row on top of an old and wobbling table.

When I was allowed to open them, I saw magnificent illustrations, exact drawings of faraway places and unheard-of kingdoms. I lost myself in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I dreamed I was before the mighty Pyramids of Egypt and forgot the noise of tenants below or the brash orders from my mother that seeped up through the floorboards. I was not there anymore because my imagination had taken me to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which soared seventy-five feet above the ground, flush with a bounty of flowers. Other times, I was at the Temple of Diana, or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus because the pictures and words in those history books made me feel a million miles from the doss house and our cramped room.

After one of my excursions through the ancient lands found in the books of Harmworth's Histories, my dad said-

“One day, lad, you will go out into the world and see some fantastic, magical places; I never saw.”

"Can we go together?"

He did not respond. Dad just put his pipe bereft of tobacco between his lips sucked on it, and remembered when he could afford to smoke.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way. Today is the last day before the 1st and I am still a bit short..

A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 8 to make June’s payment. But with 3 days to go, it is getting tight.
Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John