Don't Let My Past Be Your Future. The Barnsley Years

At the age of 94, Harry Leslie Smith reflected on the town, he was born in and the causes for the Brexit vote.

In my old age, I walk with trepidation on Barnsley’s pavement stones, not because my balance is off but out of fear that I am like Lot’s wife looking backwards at things best forgotten. All my kin are dead in this town. Now, they are just mournful shadows whose images are preserved for eternity on photographic paper pressed behind a multitude of pound shop glass frames that are scattered around my home.

Yet, I persist to come and visit Barnsley, like a salmon that must spawn to its birthplace. I don’t know what I hope to find here? My childhood? My innocence? Or perhaps, I am looking to locate the places where the memories were made which now cut so deep into my soul that I can’t exercise them from my consciousness. But in truth, I think I return because I want to find the reasons why Britain is starting to resemble the world of my youth, making us a profoundly troubled and divided today.

All the houses I lived in as a boy, in this town were long ago taken down by the wrecker’s ball when slum clearance was the watchword of national and local government. The only thing that remains from those long ago days is my grandparent’s sturdy two up one down that they first rented in 1901. It’s where they raised their six children to become miners or the wives of miners. It’s located in a neighbourhood that has been marginalised for 200 years and will never see gentrification but still wears its working-class roots with a sturdy, proud defiance.

The last time I came to Barnsley, I returned to the house where a lifetime ago my grandparents lived and died. I peered into its front window because its present-day owners were at work. I looked into a living room that bulged with plush easy chairs and a wide-screen television set that dwarfed the wall and remembered how Spartan this room was in my grandparent’s day.

In my head, I heard the voice of my grandmother admonish me for wanting to dig up old ghosts by coming here. “It’s best to let sleeping dogs, lie because they can’t hurt thee then” she once told me vehemently, when I asked her about the rumours that the child my mum was carrying in the summer of 1930 was not my dad’s but another man’s. Then again my Gran always wanted everything out of sight and out of mind but that was to hide her own dark secrets. Despite her Victorian petticoats, and Sunday church attitudes, my grandmother had spent a lifetime concealing from nosey neighbours that her firstborn son wasn’t my granddad’s but another man’s who she’d had a fling with while my grandfather was a soldier in India.

I still find myself despite my grandmother’s warning, always kicking at the past trying to rouse slumbering history. I guess I hope that when it awakes it will tell me why town’s like Barnsley struggle from one generation to the next to provide decent incomes for their hard-working citizens. If people want to really know why Brexit happened all they have to do is visit Barnsley where all the accoutrements of civilisation have been worn away by the acid rain of austerity and globalisation.

Excerpt from Harry Leslie Smith’s Final Book: Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.