Democracy won't survive neoliberalism, and should we continue on this path- most of us will envy the dead. More chapters from The Green & Pleasant Land

All the excerpts from Harry Leslie Smith's last work, which remained unfinished when he died- are being navigated to a subfolder titled The Green And Pleasant Land.

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. Chapters 1-18 are located in that subfolder- and are not behind a paywall. More will follow over the next few weeks.

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.

The book is an intimate look at poverty. My father learned first-hand how destitution dissolves a family's love for each other with the harshness of acid touching human skin. It's a political testament of outrage about the lost potential of the working class, who then- like now were condemned to a life of hunger, drudgery and poor health.  

The Green & Pleasant Land is an important read, considering the juncture we find ourselves politically and economically.

Society is broken. Democracy does not function as it was intended. It works for the select entitled few. It can't be repaired unless we rebuild a Welfare State fit for the 21st century.

Democracy won't survive neoliberalism, and should we continue on this path- most of us will envy the dead.

It might even be too late to stop our march to authoritarianism. But it is still worth the effort to resist.

If you are financially able to move from a free to a paid subscription and feel it is worth it-please do because it keeps the project running and me housed.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Sixteen:

It was late in the winter of 1932 when my family moved from the doss house on St Andrew's Villa to an outbuilding in the nether region of Sowerby Bridge. We left Bradford as we had come to the city in 1928 with little more than the shirts on our backs.

My sister and I knew what awaited us in Sowerby Bridge was the same poverty and feeling of hopelessness we endured in Bradford. But we were children and had no choice- when it came to our mother's necessity to rely upon her boyfriend, Bill, who promised to keep us fed.

On the day we departed, my sister argued with my mother outside the front steps of the doss house. Alberta wanted to say farewell to our estranged father, who now resided in a room in one of the doss houses across the street from us. My mother said there was no time or point to it because I suspect she hadn't informed my dad of our leaving Bradford.

When we left the street that had been my neighbourhood for two years, I was overcome- with shame over our going.

We were leaving my dad behind for good. We weren't ever going to return for him. He was going to have to make his way alone in this slum as if he were a stranger to us.

After a bus deposited us at Sowerby Bridge, my mother informed us that our new lodgings were at the top of a steep- and winding road far from the town's high street.

The long walk to our new residence seemed more like a march because my mother barked at my sister and me to get a move on and stop dawdling.

The few possessions- we owned Alberta- and I carried in sacks slung on our backs- whilst my mother held onto Matt as he was only two years old.  

The further we moved up the steep hill, the more the houses on each side of the road began to resemble the slum dwellings built near the coal mines that surrounded Barnsley, where I spent my first years of life when my father was employed in the pits.

Atop the hill was a crossroad where we turned right and proceeded to a farmhouse. I thought this was our new lodgings but was quickly informed that this was where our landlord lived. Our new home was an outbuilding located off- to the side of the farmhouse.

The building was smaller than a one- up-one-down tenement but larger- than the room my mother and Bill let at St Andrew's Villas.

At one time, the outbuilding was used to house farm labourers.

Later on, I learned one of the farm workers housed in that outbuilding in the 1920s hung himself on an exposed beam that jutted, like a railway trestle across the kitchen's ceiling.

The outbuilding was dark inside- owing to a lack of windows. There was no gaslighting, so candles were used when night fell.

The walls were damp, and the cement floor was cold- as if it were outdoors. Stone stairs that were long and narrow led upwards to a bedroom I shared with my sister. As there was a perpetual draft inside the building, the candle I used to guide me to bed at night generally blew out before I reached my bed- which was a filthy flock mattress that rested on a floor thick with bugs that made drags in the dust as the scrambled across it.

The view from the narrow window upstairs bedroom was a barren field that contained a few craggy trees bent against a grey sky that dripped down cold, wet rain.

My mother and Bill slept in the parlour because it had a coal fire grate to keep them warm.

The slums that my family had lived in before this were dismal places. But at least they were in urban settings, where I could find comfort in the company of other children who were just as poor as my family. Living here- in this outbuilding- on a hill atop Sowerby Bridge- I was isolated.

My mother was also alone and totally dependent on Bill for food and support. She soon learned Bill withdrew affection and material support with the capriciousness of a dictator because his character was malicious and violent.

Chapter Seventeen:

I understood how to survive in the city slums of Bradford, but Sowerby Bridge was a different story. My heart was desolate from living in that farmer's outbuilding in the hills above the village.

There wasn't enough food, warmth or love to engender hope in me that everything would be all right.

Nothing was at hand to divert me from the glumness of our Great Depression existence. Cinemas and libraries were a fair distance from our farming neighbourhood. And, the wireless, in 1933- was an entertainment for better-paid folk than Bill.

I only had my imagination to keep myself hopeful that something better might come to my life than the day in and day out of existing on the margins.

Sometimes, I told myself stories where my dad came and rescued my sister and me after he was awarded a legacy from a wealthy deceased relative. They were idle daydreams as fragile as soap bubbles that burst before me each time I remembered my father was skinter than us and lived hand to mouth in a Bradford doss house.

I viewed my new surroundings and people with distrust and uncertainty- including the farmer who rented us the outbuilding. He was gruff and had a long, shaggy white beard that made him look like a biblical patriarch in suspenders. He seemed to me like all of our landlords-- someone to keep well away from.

But one day, while he worked his field- he spied Alberta and me dragging our feet in the dirt. He told us to go into his barn and jump from the rafters onto his haystacks.

"It's like landing on a featherbed."

Shortly after we had settled into the outbuilding, my mother found Alberta and me employment in the village. It was as she said to pay our way. Alberta was put to work in the kitchen of a more prosperous farmer than our current landlord.

Sometimes- my sister scoffed the leftover food or pudding to add to our meagre diet that still consisted too often of boiled, mashed or fried potatoes, despite Bill's promise of butchered animals from his job at the nearby rendering plant.

Mum convinced a local coal delivery company to take me on.

"He may look scrawny, but my lad's as tough as nails."

At first, the owner was unimpressed with my potential. Eventually, he was won over to hire me from a combination of my mother's hectoring and his thrift.

A nine-year-old shifting a hundredweight coal sacks to village homeowners and the surrounding environs was cheaper than paying an adult's wage for another man to assist his one-person operation.

The owner delivered coal with a horse and wagon that I loaded at the start of my shift and unloaded during our route around Sowerby Bridge.

The coal sacks were heavy to lift and keep balanced on my child's shoulders. The owner didn't notice or care that I struggled to haul these coal sacks from the roadway to his customers' houses.

The amount of time to do these feats of strength was his complaint against me.

"What took you so long?

Only his horse seemed to care that my body was being broken into bits for the work.

After each of my deliveries, the horse whinnied and clomped his hoof as if to show solidarity with my struggle to perform tasks more suited to a grown-up

When not at work, I attended a village school, where one teacher taught all the different grades. He was a petty, middle-aged man with flakes of dandruff that ran down his jacket, who spent more time thrashing his students than teaching them. His broad Yorkshire accent rolled out lessons and homilies- about King and Country to school children too hungry to learn from a good teacher, let alone a mediocre one like himself. He humiliated his pupils with sarcasm and the strap.

In 1933, the man who owned the coal delivery company decided I wasn't worth the few shillings he paid me because "times were tough, all around."

My mother's boyfriend took my loss of unemployment as an indication of sloth.

"Lad just doesn't want to work."

Bill insisted that- I must get less food for my breakfast and tea because I wasn't earning it.

"If you want to eat more- get another job."

The hunger hurt me more than his lack of love or compassion. Fortunately, Alberta began to provide me food from the larder of her employer to make up for my reduced rations at home.

But I knew I needed to find work and fast, which didn't prove to be difficult. I was only a decade old but was three years into being a child labourer. I was street-wise enough to know- there'd be someone willing to exploit me- for little pay if I asked around.

Jubb's Grocers fit that bill. They were located- in the village and needed a boy to do their dog's work because the old one had moved on to greener pastures. I was hired because of my ability to lift heavy objects and take their shit without much backtalk. I worked for them after school until late at night and then for twelve hours on Saturdays. I stocked their shelves, swept floors and ran deliveries for them while- in moments of both work and rest, hatched plots to run away from my mother, Bill and Sowerby Bridge.

Chapter 18:

I hated most during those Sowerby Bridge years the hours after school and work were done, but sleep wasn't ready to steal me away from the company of my mother and Bill.

Our existence in Sowerby Bridge had made Mum and Bill no better than two enraged scorpions stuck in a sealed bottle who fought an endless battle to the death.

Weekends were the worst because my mother and Bill drank to forget how little control they had over their lives. They had no money and little prospect for a better future because both were almost forty, which, in working-class years, was washed up.

In 1932, Bill became more resentful about his relationship with my mother, who in turn became more resentful that she was dependent on a man who didn't want to be with her.

Naturally, things between my mother and Bill always became- worse on weekends because they attempted to forget the loathsomeness of reality by visiting the pub.

My sister called Weekends in Sowerby Bridge "The Bill and Lillian Show," because there was high drama, lots of shouting and broken crockery before and after they visited the village pub.

From Friday tea time- to Sunday bedtime, they verbally vomited forth their distrust and paranoia about each other. Bill’s general lament was to accuse my mother of entrapping him with bastard children.

“You caught me, Lil, with lies, a mountain of lies, nothing but rubbish from yer gob. You and your useless children are nowt but trouble for me.”

Plates were smashed, glasses tossed, and drawers emptied of their contents. Many Saturday and Sunday mornings, Alberta and I surveyed a kitchen of broken glass, up-turned chairs, and shattered dreams and hopes.

Our cement kitchen floor resembled a beach after an ocean tempest- drags the wreckage of a ship onto land.

Within time, Bill and my mother destroyed or damaged every cup, saucer, and glass in their mutual war of attrition. We were left to drink from empty jam jars as we had no money to replace the broken crockery.

Their verbal and emotional violence against each other frightened both me and my sister. We knew our little lives were hostage to their regrets, their drunkenness, and their violence to themselves.

It was like being forever in a trench, suffering heavy bombardment from enemy guns. Silence moved to shrill voices, tears to accusations, love to vitriol, and contempt.

While Bill and my mother fought each other, my sister and I tended to our little brother, whose first years were nurtured by us- who were also just children.

Bill and Mum stormed and fumed at each other from weekend to weekend and season to season.

Then, one weekend, their yelling and threats against each other crossed over an unmarked border that separated verbal abuse from physical assault. After an evening of pouring the little money they had- away in a narrow, smoky pub in Sowerby Bridge- they came home with a stomach full of beer and resentment that exploded into a vicious confrontation.

My sister and I were jarred from sleep when Bill hollered profanities at our mother. Suddenly, we heard our mother scream in pain because Bill had started to beat her with his fists.

Alberta and I fell over ourselves- to get downstairs and protect our mother from Bill.

Downstairs, we found Mum on the ground being kicked by Bill.

My sister and I pounced onto Bill Moxon’s back. Our young fists beat his back. We pulled his hair and bit his shoulder. Bill yelled for us to get off him- or else he would start clobbering us.

We didn't stop even when he began to hit us while we rode on his back.

We held onto his back and shoulders until Mum escaped his boot that kicked her in the face.

Moments later, Mum was up and on her feet with blackened eyes. Blood dripped from her lips.

“That’s enough, Bill.

Alberta, Harry, get off him. Stop this now.”

We did. Then my sister and I cried. Emotionally, I may as well have been the bits of crockery shattered and unrecognizable on the floor.  I was busted up inside from violence, the lack of stability in my life and the ugliness of people who were forced to live hopeless lives.

I wept because I still remembered a better time, before the famine, before the economy collapsed, and our father was sacrificed.

The morning following the attack on Mum, Bill greeted us unshaven and hung-over, even contrite.

His shame over physically harming Mum never lasted longer than the time it took to get from Sunday to Friday night. Hitting Mum became as routine to Bill as his bathing in a tin tub every Saturday morning. 

Chapter 19:

While millions of men in 1934 were desperate to find work, Bill Moxon was intent on losing his job. Arrogantly, he believed employment for men such as him was as abundant as spring daffodils on the Yorkshire Dales. Bill was chucked from the meat rendering plant when he hit his foreman over a minor slight. Naturally, he took his anger out on my mother and attempted to hurt her as if she were the foreman who had fired him for cause.

When Bill became unemployed- we packed up what little we had and left the bleak, dishevelled stone outbuilding that stood on top of the moor above Sowerby Bridge. I wasn't sorry to leave, but I was not hopeful for what awaited me or my family.

King Cross Road on the outskirts of Halifax was my next known address. The neighbourhood was industrial, and even during the Great Depression, the skies above King Cross were thick with coal smoke belching from chimney stacks that rested like volcanoes on top of the surrounding mills and factories where cloth, carpets and sweets were churned out for Britain and its empire.

We ended up in King Cross Road because Bill Moxon convinced a landlord to let him a small store to open up a butcher shop for the skint.

From its inception, the butcher shop was a failure. Bill couldn't afford to buy better quality meat to make the type of pies those who still worked demanded.  He only sold offal, as well as sausages made from the worst parts of pigs, cows and sheep. Both Bill and the shop were filthy. Bill wore a butcher's smock covered in animal blood and grime. He dumped his rubbish from butchering into a stagnant canal outback that reeked of pollution from the other businesses that used it as a toilet like Bill.

I was enrolled at Bolton Brow School. During my first few months there, the other students made fun of me because my clothes were worn and hung loosely from my skinny, famished body. But I fought back, and during taunts of

"One, two, three, who is cock of thee."

The bullies learned my fists were hungry for vengeance against those who judged me less than them because of the holes in my trousers.

In the winter of 1934, my shoes began to rot away. The soles were broken, So, I stuffed old newspaper and cardboard in them to keep my feet dry. It didn’t work well, and my feet developed sores from being constantly wet. I felt dejected and ashamed. For a few days, I stopped going to school My life was ruined before it started because my family was too poor to put shoes on my feet. I was resentful that I could not get an education because society favoured wealth before merit.

When the weather improved, I returned to school. Only Mr Dawson, my maths teacher, demanded an answer for my absence from his class. When I gave him none, he said I must remain behind after his lessons- were finished.

After the other students left, Dawson called me up to the front of the class. He sat behind a thick wooden desk and reached into his upper waistcoat pocket. He produced a silver snuff box. Dawson opened the box. He tapped snuff onto his finger. He deeply inhaled the ground tobacco into his nose and then sneezed.

“Why were you absent from school yesterday and the day before?”

“Not my fault, sir, my shoes.”

I lifted my foot upwards so that he could see the gaping holes plugged haphazardly with leaking newspaper and soggy cardboard.

“Ah,” “That is a dilemma. Go home.” “ But see me again after class tomorrow.

At the end of lessons, on the following day- I remained when all the other students left. I stood by Dawson's desk while he pulled open the top left-hand drawer and took out a bag. Inside the paper bag was a pair of sturdy, brown shoes.

“Try them on, lad.”

I slipped off my rotting shoes and slid into them. The fit was far from perfect, but they felt warm and durable.

“They are fine.”

“Good, I remember what it was like in the trenches when my boots became worn. Terrible business.”

My mouth opened to thank him, but before I spoke, Dawson interrupted me.

“Not a word to anyone.”

My maths teacher turned his head downwards to his desk and fumbled into his top pocket. Dawson pulled out his snuff-box and repeated the ritual of inhaling the snuff.

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 am offering a 20% reduction in a yearly subscription to ensure my prescriptions can be purchased today. One new subscriber covers that cost. 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