Bonfire Night 1931- Tales from the Green and Pleasant Land. The Forgotten History of Britain's Working Classes.
Our working class history that created the Welfare State is being erased by neoliberalism which is why the memories, the compassion and they socialism of Harry Leslie Smith needs to be preserved.
Below is a selection from my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land. It is about Bonfire Night 1931 in Bradford.
The Green and Pleasant Land was unfinished at the time of his death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards. The fifth anniversary of Harry Leslie Smith is November 28th, I hope to have the first 50k words of this work ready for you to read.
In the late autumn of 1931, the sun above Bradford hid behind a curtain of soot-stained clouds. Coal was scarce and damp crept into our doss with heavy footsteps. I had holes in my boots and to my nine year old mind, the shortening days made me think winter was a lone wolf waiting in the dales around my city readying itself to pounce. I hated the long darkness of November nights because in the attic where I slept I only had candle light to read the books I borrowed from the library.
Kids like me escaped our Great Depression misery exhausting ourselves by foraging for scrap wood during the days leading up to bonfire night. In marauding gangs, we invaded derelict buildings that were shuttered because of the economic catastrophe. Inside- we scavenged for things to burn, from scrap wood to discarded crates. If we were lucky; we found old factory pulley ropes, that were greased with oil.
We took these ropes out onto the narrow cobbled streets, and with Captain Webb matches, we lit their ends. They smouldered- and glowed bright red like the tip of a cigarette in the dark night air.
We sang childish rhymes about monkeys shitting limes as if they were incantations to the gods of fire. Intoxicated by the ecstasy of play, we spun the hemp tapers around in the air until the frayed bits sparked against the desolate blackness of our poverty strewn existences.
Like Prometheus, I and the others- ran and hollered out our boyish joy that we had the secret of fire in our possession. We forgot hunger, loneliness and sadness in those joyful moments of play.
Back then, happiness was brief because misery was around every corner in our neighbourhood.
I can still smell the musty aroma of burning rope on the nights before the 5th of November. But I also recoil from the pungent memory of sounds that tumbled out from nearby open windows. They were like screams escaping from a circle in Dante's Hell. The howls of women beaten senseless by their husbands drunk from beer and intoxicated from the humiliation of never ending unemployment. I am haunted from the screams I heard escape from the lips of the dying who didn't have the scratch to afford morphine to ease the pain of cancers gnawing at their body like wild dogs tearing apart carrion. The dying growled and yelped like animals mauled by a beast.
But when the fires we lit on the 5th of November burnt high with the scrapes of wood I had helped collect. I concentrated on the raging flames and imagined escaping the warren of my poverty in the faraway future of adulthood.
As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because your help is really NEEDED. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. 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. Even sharing my posts helps the cause. Take Care, John
Thank you, John, for sharing Harry's words. His writing is so evocative we can almost smell the burning rope and hear the screens of the hopeless.
Take care of yourself.
~ hammond