Begin The Revolution Even If We Don't See The Harvest
An Excerpt from The Green and Pleasant Land
Intro
This Sub stack is, in part, an odyssey through the hostile Badlands of capitalism as experienced by those I loved most, my family. People should not be alone in their joy or sorrow, because living well or living harshly is always a collective experience.
If a working-class revolution in the 1940s could build the Welfare State, then something similar, adapted to our digital age is still possible. It will be harder. Work today is splintered, where once vast swaths of labour could be unionised and mobilised. Now we live in a surveillance state, where dissent is punished swiftly and without mercy. But it’s not hopeless. This struggle may not bear fruit until long after we are gone. But we must begin.
Today’s excerpt from The Green and Pleasant Land is one small part of that larger story. I’ll have more new writing to share before the end of the month, and I’m also preparing the beta version of the book to send out, hopefully Monday.
Since COVID, cancer, and poverty entered my life, I’ve lived in isolation. Yet I don’t find it lonely. As long as I’m connected to you through this Sub stack I feel part of humanity in the best of ways.
Enjoy the excerpt below, and thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and help keep these stories alive, there’s a tip jar below. It’s entirely optional, but deeply appreciated.
Chapter Nine: Barnsley
During the dog days of August 1930, Mum was in her eighth month of pregnancy.
She was short-tempered with Dad and blamed him for the Great Depression, as if he had crashed the banks of the world in October 1929 by injuring himself in the pits. Mum was in a constant rage that was never quenched, no matter how many times she exploded with invective against Dad for the injustice of our poverty.
Hungry, angry, and pregnant, Mum was a beast best avoided.
So, I did not complain when I was packed off to spend the remainder of the summer in Barnsley with my grandparents.
Alberta was not sent with me because, being ten, she was considered old enough to work as a part-time laundress. It provided my family with the extra pennies it needed to afford bread for our nightly tea.
Mum walked with me to the station, where a bus to Barnsley awaited. I carried a sack with a change of clothes.
“Uncle Harold will meet you where the bus drops you off and walk you to Grandma Dean’s house.”
As promised, Uncle Harold met me at Hoyland Common’s bus stop near where my grandparents lived.
Harold was thirty, thin as a rail, and sarcastic. He carried a nervous energy that seemed to spark off him like static electricity. He spoke to me as he did to adults: in short, brutally sarcastic sentences.
My uncle was married to Ida, whom he adored because she softened the harsh edges of his personality. He, Ida, and my Uncle Ted lived with my grandparents.
Harold did not hide his detestation of my mother. At each street corner, Harold called Mum a “whore, bitch” or something equally offensive.
My grandparents lived on Beaumont Street in a two-bedroom tenement house. It had a ginnel leading onto a back plot where a privy and small vegetable garden were located.
When I arrived, my 73-year-old Granddad, Walter Dean, was fast asleep on a chair in the parlour.
Before retirement, he had been first a soldier for Queen Victoria and then a miner in the pits around Barnsley, where he set the fuses to blast apart the coal face.
When he served in the army, Granddad never saw battle, but you would never have known it from how he talked about life in the Artillery. He spent ten years in India in the 1890s. He was an oppressed working-class soldier who, in turn, oppressed others in Britain’s pursuit of Imperial and economic domination across the world.
When he came home, he left with no trade and became a miner like the rest of his folk. He didn’t think much of me because I didn’t care for the medals he earned by taking the Queen’s shilling, when he showed them to me one night before bedtime.
Like Harold, my Granddad didn’t much like my mother either. From a child’s perspective, he resembled a gruff walrus who laboured to stand. He believed in monarchy, empire, and the class system, which he proudly guarded from its bottom rung.
My grandmother, Mary Ellen, also held strong opinions on my mother, generally negative. She always wore petticoats and a heavy wool dress that swept the floor around her as she walked. She never raised her hand or voice in my direction, nor did she hug me. My grandmother was aloof, set in her ways, but that didn’t bother me.
Before we ate, grace was said because my grandmother insisted upon it. Those were the last words spoken until our meal was finished.
I was relieved that my grandparents avoided speaking with me. It was better than being asked unpleasant questions about my parents and Mum’s pregnancy.
My Uncle Ted was the friendliest towards me. During one of my first conversations with him, he told me about the hand-painted wooden caravan he had obtained by winning a card game.
“When I am done, my time down in the pits, I will buy a horse and travel across Yorkshire in my caravan and live like a vagabond. I never want to see a day of darkness again after I leave these mines for good.”
Decades later, Ted made good on his word. When he retired from the mines in the 1950s, he took to the open roads in summer and autumn with his horse-drawn caravan to attend Test matches around Yorkshire.
During his annual holiday, Ted tended the vegetable patch behind my grandparents’ house. In the mornings, I saw him carefully and solicitously weeding the small garden.
Ted did not speak much, and when he did, everything was in short syllables:
“Mind this”
“Yer alright there.”
But it was spoken from a calm river inside him, which relaxed me.
Ted could not abide Mum.
“We are chalk and cheese.”
He also didn’t get along with Harold. But outside of his wife, Ida, Harold didn’t get along with anyone.
Harold’s relationship with my grandmother was tense because he liked gambling. On some days, the two of them went at each other like two wasps trapped in an empty jam jar.
When either my uncle or grandma begged my granddad to intercede in their squabbling, he laughed at them and responded:
“Time down in the mines made me wise. You won’t find me daft enough to get between two swinging picks.”
Wisely, I followed my grandfather’s dictum and avoided them when they fought.
However, one day their argument was over me. Harold sensed I was bored and wanted to take me with him on a trip to Sheffield.
“It’s bad enough that young Harry picked up Bradford’s vices, and now you want him to learn about Sheffield’s.”
My uncle said the trip was for legitimate purposes and that I deserved a chance to have a holiday away from her.
With my grandmother’s mixed blessings, I travelled by bus to Sheffield with Harold. The bus made numerous stops, including the village where my dad’s family still lived.
“Your dad’s kin kip down over there. Not that I give a toss about them.”
I looked out the window and asked, “Why not?”
Harold grunted and said,
“Their blood runs with ice, except for your dad. He’s an alright bloke.”
At Sheffield, Harold told me not to be a nuisance or to ask questions when he went about his errands. A few hours later, we were in a pub where we stood by the bar. Harold ordered himself a whisky and asked the innkeeper about a drink for me. After deliberation, they settled on an orange squash and gin.
The afternoon passed with my uncle sipping whisky and me orange squash laced with gin whilst I listened to Harold talk about the thrill of horse racing. On the bus ride home, Harold and I snoozed in a drunken stupor.
Harold’s wife, Ida, worked as a bookkeeper on a large industrial farm and lodged there on weekdays. She was revered in the family because she had a trade that needed brains rather than brawn.
Tragically, she died young, from lung cancer and left Harold a widower for 50 years.
Ida gave me the means to learn one of the most valuable skills a poor lad in the 1930s could acquire: the knowledge of how to ride a bike.
She lent me her bike. It gave me the freedom to roam far from the troubles of adults around me. The only instructions from Ida were to get on the bike and pedal as fast as my legs would allow me.
I scraped my legs at each fall and quickly learned that riding a bike was harder than it looked. By my second day, I was able to stay upright and steady for longer.
Many attempts and aborted take-offs followed. But gradually, I developed my wings and stayed aloft for longer periods.
I was ready to discover the hills and dales surrounding my grandparents’ house. I spent my mornings and afternoons riding this bike. I was free of the burdens of hunger. I was away from my parents’ despair and disintegrating marriage.
On this bike, I felt I could pedal faster than the storm clouds of the Great Depression all around me.
As with all things in my early life, these sheltered moments of calm were brief. The summer wound its way through my grandparents’ house until one morning, Uncle Harold said:
“Time to go, lad.”
I returned to Bradford, where my sister patiently waited for me at the bus station. Silently, we walked home because I was afraid to ask if things were worse with my mother and father.
As we made our way home, the city looked tubercular, and the inhabitants ashen from their long bout of unemployment. The closer we got to our neighbourhood, the more desperate and forsaken people appeared. There were even children so destitute that they begged on the street.
Alberta grabbed me by the arm:
“Hurry up and don’t stare at the poor sods or else they are going to steal what little luck we still own.”
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