Do we get out of this alive, intact and with a democracy that functions for all its citizens rather than its top income earners?

It's the first of December, and rain falls instead of snow. Strange days. But not so strange, if you consider the world has been where we are now in a before time. If history can exist after our age, they will dub 2023 as a time of counter-revolution where we allowed the 1% to set the political clocks back to the 1930s and authoritarianism. Do we get out of this alive, intact and with a democracy that functions for all its citizens rather than its top income earners? I am pessimistic. But that I inherited from my German mother who, after growing up during the darkness of Nazism, thought it best to think the worst of people. My dad, however, was imbued with the optimism of a character in one of Dicken's novels. He was a man who could despair but also fought to survive if only to snatch some joy from the miserably short lives we live.

Below is Chapter 10 from his unpublished The Green and Pleasant Land, a history, memoir, polemic and prose poem about working-class life before the Welfare State. I hope you enjoy it. The other nine chapters are still free- on this stack until late Saturday. If you can convert to a paid subscription, all of this- keeping my head above water at 60 with a handful of comorbidities is a bit of a struggle but worth it somehow.

The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter 10:

Mum was in her eighth month of pregnancy during the dog days of August in 1930. The weather was sultry, and our neighbourhood stank of people's sweat and under washed clothing.

Our threadbare squat on Chesum Street was unbearable from the heat of the sun and the burning rage that exploded out from my mother's mouth to my dad for the injustice of our poverty.

She was short-tempered with Dad because instead of finding fault with capitalism for causing the Great Depression, he was made to blame for our personal destruction.

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, which provided extra pennies to afford bread for the nightly tea of drippings.

In a few months, and to my great despair, I was also destined to be pressed into child labour to prevent my family from becoming utterly destitute.

Mum walked with me to the station, where a bus to Barnsley awaited. I carried a sack packed with a change of clothes.

My mother barked at the bus driver, the correct stop for him to let me off at.

"Uncle Harold will meet you where the bus drops you off and walk you to Grandma Dean’s house.”

My uncle Harold, as promised, was there waiting for me when my bus reached Hoyland Common, near where my grandparents lived.

Harold was thirty-years-old and thin from nervous energy rather than malnutrition like I was. He spoke to me as he did to adults in short, brutally sarcastic sentences. Harold 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 from me his detestation of my mother.

 At each street corner, Harold called Mum a whore, bitch or something else 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 was located.

When I arrived, my 73-year-old Granddad, Walter Dean was fast asleep on a chair in the parlour.

He was retired, but before old age allowed him to slumber his last days away, he was a miner and a soldier for Queen Victoria.

He never saw battle, but you would have never known that from how he talked about life in the Artillery.

He served in India in the 1890s. He was an oppressed working-class soldier who oppressed others in Britain's pursuit of Imperial and economic domination- across the world.

Grandad spent ten years in India and departed the military, with no trade to enhance his earning potential on civvy street to make life easier for himself, his wife and seven children.

He didn't think much of me because I didn't think much of 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 like my mother much either.

From a child’s perspective, he resembled a gruff walrus who laboured to stand. He believed in monarchy, empire and the class system, where he was proudly at the bottom of it.

My grandmother, Mary Ellen, like my grandad, held strong opinions on my mother, which were 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.

What was more important than love at that time in my life was food and that was plentiful in my grandparents' household. That I didn't need to hunt for my tea by scavenging through restaurant rubbish bins seemed miraculous.

There were three meals a day for me to eat was a novelty to be savoured.

During those weeks I spent at my grandparents' house in the summer of 1930, Uncle Ted was the one whose company I enjoyed the most. He possessed a gentle quietness, which I found appealing coming from a household filled with- so much hidden noise and anger.

Later on, when Ted retired from the pits, in the 1950s, he took to the open roads in summer and autumn with a horse-drawn caravan won in a card game.

Ted was in charge of tending to the vegetable patch behind my grandparents' house. In the mornings I'd find my uncle carefully and solicitously weeding the garden.

He let me eat ripened fruit from the small plot, which I savoured, remembering how in June; I stole apples from fruit mongers.

Ted did not speak much, and when he did, everything was in short syllables, “mind this” or “yer alright there.”

But it was spoken from a calm river inside him, which relaxed me.

 Harold's wife Ida worked as a bookkeeper on a large industrial farm and lodged there on weekdays. She was revered in the family as its intellectual because she had a trade that used its brain rather than brawn. Tragically, she died young and left Harold a widower for 50 years before he died in 2004, hateful of everyone in the world for scoffing love from underneath him.

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.

Ida lent me her bike and, with it, gave me the freedom to roam far from the troubles of adults around me.

The only instructions from Ida was to get on the bike and pedal as fast as my legs would allow me. But my feet reached the thick wooden pedals. The first day on it I suffered, scrapes, bangs and bitter disappointment that riding a bike was harder than it looked.

By the second day, I was able to keep on the bike and keep it steady for longer periods.

Many attempts and many aborted take-offs would ensue. But gradually, I developed my wings. I was able to pedal and remained balanced and aloft for longer periods.

I was ready to discover the hills and dales surrounding my grandparent’s house. I’d spend my mornings and afternoons riding this bike. I was free of the burdens of hunger. I was away from my parents' despair and hunger for better lives.

I was free of my own sense of shame because of our poverty. On this bike, 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 winded its way through my grandparent’s house on Beaumont Street until one morning, it all ended with a "Time to go, lad," from Uncle Harold.

 I returned to Bradford, where my sister patiently waited for me at the bus station. We walked home in silence because I was afraid to ask if things were worse with my mother and father.

Summer had turned into fall.. Breadlines increased as the dole dried up. The working class, particularly my mother hurled invective at Prime Minister Ramsey Macdonald and his betrayal of the people by signing off on Tory austerity.

More workers were sent home from their jobs because the politicians refused to support reconstruction projects or stimulate the economy. Now, it was time for the real famine to commence in Britain.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. The selection you just read was from my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land. It was unfinished at the time of his death. I’ve been I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards. 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. Take Care, John