Don't Let My Past Be Your Future- Excerpt

A palate cleanser in these times of reverence for our betters that build the unequal societies we live in.

After October 31, 1929, financial despair and ruin, first crept towards the working classes and then poured in like a flood that would not stop until we were all drowned. Proud men who had once manned the lathes, looms and lorries that kept Britain’s economy strong were let go and shop floors across the country grew quiet like it was an eternal Christmas day. As if they were soldiers defeated in a horrendous battle, men who used to punch a clock-shuffled shell shocked through the streets of our nation, looking for work and hoping that the government had a plan to return them to gainful employment. But they were doomed because as winter blossomed into spring, a million men were now on the dole- each trying to scratch and claw their way out of the poverty unemployment produced.

Persistent hunger lodged with me and my family in the room, my parents let in a grim Bradford doss house. My dad couldn't find work and my mother took to hating my father as she had once loved him. She realised that her loyalty to my dad was driving us to extinction. From that point; my mum began to follow her own set of laws and morals. They were like the rules of the sea that mariners impose when they have been left shipwrecked and clinging to a lifeboat for survival.

As the Great Depression's grip on Bradford and Britain became more formidable, my mum became like an animal caught in a trap who tries to gnaw off its limb to escape. She disappeared for hours and returned home in the night with the loudness of someone that has drunk too much. My father would demand to know where she had been, only to be rebuked by her for his unemployment. After each brief and bitter argument, mum would slip under a pair of dirty coats my parents used as blankets and fall off to sleep angrily cursing my dad, god and anyone who had crossed her path that day. While nearby, my sister and I slept huddled together for warmth dreading the arrival of day.

By sunrise, my parents resumed being belligerent to each other, and rows of extreme animosity were the norm. If my mum noticed that my sister and I were awake, she’d break away from hectoring our dad, to say with the bitterness of acid-

“there’s nowt for your breakfast again because your dad can’t find work. Try the Allen’s downstairs to see if they can lend you both a piece of bread.”

In the brittle Bradford air before school, I hunted for food with my sister to give us the energy to make it through the day. We weren’t alone in this pursuit; the city teemed with street urchins who had grown feral because of the Great Depression. Sometimes we’d return to the Weetabix factory and beg for cereal from the wagon drivers. Many ignored us and looked the other way. So as not to see the desperation on the faces of us kids who plaintively begged for food.

However, there were a few wagon drivers who showed some human compassion, as well as a rag and bone man who befriended me. With hands mucked in grime, he'd share his breakfast with me-a boiled egg and a piece of bread torn from a loaf that he kept underneath his seat.

An empty belly is the loneliest of feelings. It will drive you like a wild animal to do anything to satiate that hunger. In the United States, there have been numerous reports since the crash of 2009 of young teenagers and migrant workers who must sell their bodies to unscrupulous and evil people for a decent meal. You see; despite Obama’s grand words of a better society, most social programs were either eliminated or scaled back by him and the Republican-controlled senate. Now that Donald Trump is President, there is no doubt that poverty amongst children will increase to levels not seen since the Dust Bowl Years which will cause an acceleration of racial tension and civil strife.

I would have done anything for a good cut of meat on my plate; when I starved as a boy. At times the intensity of my hunger drove me to troll the city’s back alleys. I’d dive into rubbish bins of Bradford’s restaurants like a cat wrestling through waste to find a half-eaten fish. But, I was no feline- just a boy of seven whose malnutrition had turned him so wild that I did not think twice about eating the scrapings from an employed man’s plate that he had pushed away the night before because his stomach was full.

We were the abandoned generation, and I fear that same is happening to my grandchildren by the sheer short-sightedness and greed of those who hold seats in parliament.

Excerpt from Harry Leslie Smith's: Don't Let My Past Be Your Future. A palate cleanser during these days of being told monarchy has been a great influence for good on our society.