"Fascism saw it as blood in the water because society was in upheaval, from economic collapse."

As I write this, it is Saturday morning. Outside, rain is falling. It's not coming down with any gentleness. There is a cold harshness to it that reminds me more of autumn than summer. It's a long weekend here because the 1st is Canada Day. It's also rent day for millions like me. I fear its arrival- because this time- I if I can’t make my obligations to my landlord. It will open up a whole can of worms that won't be pleasant to face at 60.

But until then, the show goes on. This Substack and your support have been a lifesaver.

It has over 2100 subscribers and a little over 200 paid subscribers, which is a good 10% ratio. I need to get it to 400 before I can breathe a sigh of relief. I don't know if I will get there. But either figuratively or literally, I'll die trying.

Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green & Pleasant Land tells a true story about the lives of working-class people who lived during a time of political and economic extremities. From their sufferings, these unemployed miners- and mill workers, along with the rest of ordinary Britain- made a better world for themselves and others by constructing a Welfare State where all shared in the nation’s prosperity.

The Harry’s Last Stand project, which I worked on with my Dad for the last 10 years of his life- was an attempt to use his story as a template to effect change.

His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project. I have been working on it, refining it, and editing it to meet my dad’s wishes. It should be ready for a publisher in late July. I don't rush this because it needs to be the best way possible for my dad's sake.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy- and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So- if you can, please subscribe, and if you can’t. It is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. Below is a chapter selection that deals with the rise of Hitler as Harry becomes a teenager.

The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter twenty-three:

Bill Moxon returned to our household after months of being on the lamb from his responsibilities to the son he conceived with my mother. I don't know what possessed him to come back. He just came back and pretended as if he had never been gone.

Bill greeted me when I first saw him after his absence by singing a song he'd learned in the Royal Marines about how sailors better beware of the deep dark sea.

With Bill's return, so came his drinking, his yelling and his penchant for domestic violence. He was an unhappy man who intended to make everyone near him as glum as him.

Bill's routine of drinking and brawling with my mother ensured I stayed away from our house unless it was for a meal or to kip down.

When I wasn't at work, school or finding books to read at the library, I began to attend meetings at the local Mechanic's Institute, where journalists, writers and advocates gave lectures on the rights of workers, domestic politics and the disintegration of democracy on the European continent.

I was twelve when I started attending these lectures. Despite being young, I didn't feel out of place. These talks were filled with working-class folk, all with dirt underneath their fingernails, who desired to learn more about the causes of their poverty and oppression. Cups of tea were offered along with comradeship in those rooms that were thick with tobacco smoke.

People went to these lectures hoping to find insight into how things could be made- better for themselves and fellow travellers who walked through the misery of the Great Depression.

I felt welcomed at these talks but also woefully ignorant. My education was interrupted so often by poverty that I didn't understand much from these discussions except that storm clouds of war and totalitarianism were approaching.

By 1936, the warnings against Hitler and Mussolini were available to anyone who- chose to listen to them.

The middle class refused to heed the warnings because they were too busy enjoying their creature comforts. Another thing also stopped the middle class from understanding the threat of fascism to democracy. Their conservative politics didn't allow them to see Hitler as anything more than a politician for good governance. 

The working classes knew that the tectonic plates of alternate ideologies were converging towards war. Trade unions had been kept informed by union officials in Germany about the repression of socialists and the persecution of Jewish citizens.

Even Bill understood early on "That Hitler is going to put us in the shit," which he exclaimed once to me after he returned from the outdoor bog with a tatty Daily Mirror under his arm.

At the age of thirteen, I became aware of Mussolini's genocidal attack against Ethiopia because they were widely reported in the newspapers and in the news reels. I hated the dictator and had enormous empathy for the Ethiopian people who were slaughtered or enslaved by fascist Italy.

The signs were all there that war was coming again for the young and innocent. It was coming to snatch and drag them to the underworld of death. It was only a matter of time despite Newspapers like the Daily Mail poisoning the minds of British readers with overt antisemitism and support of Hitler's fascism. 

Things were changing, and war was brewing. Fascism had taken root in Europe. But Britain was incapable of responding as its own ruling classes had an affinity for them. Anyone with a modicum of self-reflection in 1936 understood the future was precarious. It was blood in the water for the fascist because society was in upheaval, from the economic collapse.

On the day the King died that year, my school announced his passing to the pupils and staff at an assembly which included prayers and respectful silence. Some of the teachers even cried. 

But, that evening- I and other kids- paraded down the streets and sang at the top of our voices, "God save our gracious King, God save our Noble King. Send him to heaven in a corned beef tin." Old worlds were dying, and new ones were being born.

My grandfather died that year too, but he was not sent to heaven in a corn beef tin.

Grandad didn't die like the King- attended by doctors and servants while waiting for death in the comfort of a warm bed. My granddad died in immense pain from an intestinal cancer that ate away at his stomach with the ferociousness of wolves tearing apart a trapped deer. I saw him before he died because my mother forced me to.

The last time I laid eyes on him, I was seven. It was when I was sent to stay with my grandparents because my mother was in her final weeks of pregnancy, with Matt, the child produced from her love affair with the Irish navvy.

Cancer had changed my grandfather considerably since I last saw him. He didn't look as I remembered him as someone who got his grub before all others in the family were allowed a share of the evening meal. 

He lay on a cot in the middle of my grandparent's parlour because he couldn't walk up the stairs to his bedroom.  There was a strong smell of bodily waste and sweat in the room. Underneath a sheet, my granddad lay- shrunken, defenceless and in agony. My grandfather didn't speak to me when I said hello to him. All his strength was reserved for cursing his pain and death coming to take him. 

One of my uncles said they were waiting for morphine that they paid for with a whip around at the miner's hall.

"It'll send him off without the fuss."

Afterwards, my grandmother fetched me a Tizer's pop from the cold cellar wearing petticoats- as if she was still living during the reign of Queen Victoria.

When Grandad died, my mother went to his funeral, naturally without Bill. However, that didn't stop my grandmother from calling her an adulterer when they said hello to each other. My sister and I didn't attend our grandfather's funeral because we couldn't afford to lose a day's pay.

:

Chapter Twenty-Four

In the late spring of 1937, I was fourteen, and because I was working class- not considered good enough for higher education. As long as Britain's elites governed the country for their benefit when my school days ended, my future was supposed to be like my past. Capitalism first exploited me as a child labourer- and as a teenager, they now expected to continue that exploitation into adulthood until I was dead. It was a life sentence of drudgery. This knowledge filled me with dread, anger and despair at how my existence was insignificant except as a beast of burden.

Around the time I left school, my family upped sticks from King Cross for rent arrears and moved to Boothtown Road in Halifax. It was a change of address but not of living conditions. It was a cramped and noisy house where my sister Alberta, my two brothers, my mother and her boyfriend Bill never had a moment alone. We grated up to each other with impatience and short tempers. The long years of economic turmoil had rubbed away common courtesy.  There was a stroppiness to our interactions. Mine were made worse because my emotions were unkempt from puberty.

But there was something else about my ill temper that no one in our house grasped. My anger was because I understood my life was being ground down by a system that benefitted the few at the expense of the many. I didn't articulate it well but I knew I was being used. 

Alberta who was 17, and accepting of her job in a mill didn't comprehend that I could be out of sorts because I believed it was wrong of society to not reward the working classes with fair wages and the right to proper leisure time for their labour. To her, the idea I believed I deserved more schooling was mad thinking. All she wanted then was a man who would love her, marry her and allow her to move out from our mother's roof. 

Despite a deep heart and strong belief in fighting for the underdog, Alberta didn't put much stock in books, ideas or anything much deeper than a breezy romance playing at the cinema. Alberta had become resigned to the ever-thus world the working class was expected to shoulder.

But she loved me with all her marrow. Alberta was insistent about making a big deal over my school leaving as if it was a rite of passage rather than a one-way fair to a dead-end job in a dead-end, mill town. I loved her so much for that desire in her to see me happy even if she didn't understand my urge to demand more for our people, the poor and disposed. 

Alberta's gift for finishing school was a day trip to Blackpool to mark my transition from boy to man in working-class Yorkshire.

There was something magical and mythical about Blackpool to the working class of my generation.

It was a city filled with diversion and amusement where, throughout long summer nights, the town was set ablaze with its illuminations. It was a destination where romance was found while riding the Ferris Wheel and sharing a piece of Blackpool rock.

It was an adventure to go there because- outside of my parents taking our family on a day trip to Southport in 1928. I'd never been on a holiday excursion.

We went on a Sunday by train and sat in a third-class carriage where we smoked cigarettes. I pretended we were on a train to Dover, where a ferry could take me to France to escape a future of brute labour waiting for me.

When we arrived at Blackpool, Alberta and I found a cheap fish and chip shop and shared a meal of battered cod and chips. In the distance, from where we sat, there was a giant Ferris wheel. And I heard coming from it the clamour of people enjoying their moment at Blackpool.

Looking out towards the water, I observed tiny breakers riding up against the shore while seagulls shrieked in the sky above.

We strolled towards Blackpool Tower, built in the 1890s as an homage to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. At its base- was a giant building that housed a circus, zoo, and aquarium. We gained admittance for a couple of pence and immediately found the animal enclosure, where we laughed at the monkeys. The lions in their cage looked proud and indifferent to our requests to prove they were the Kings of the Jungle by roaring.

In a quiet moment, Alberta said.

“Not a bad life eh, Harry? For the lion that is… all he has got to do is look fierce and tough. Scare the shite out of people. But at tea time, he knows a man will come along and throw- a nice bit of meat his way. Like roast beef or a leg of lamb, we wouldn’t even see on Sunday. For that big pole cat’s supper- I’d roar, snarl and bark.”

Soon after, my sister and I went to the top of the tower and stared out at the water in the distance. It made me yearn to escape England.

Alberta sensed my thoughts.

“One day, Harry, and never you mind, one day- you will get out.”

"We," I corrected her. 

"Aye.”

Alberta said in a non-committal tone. My sister knew what tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, was about to hand out to her.

"It's time to go down. Not much to see up here that I like."

After we descended the tower, we ended up at the dodgems- where my sister and I chased each other around the ring. For the briefest moments, I felt how I imagined teenagers from the middle class lived- without a care in the world.

Alberta and I didn't talk much on the train ride home to Halifax. We were tired from the day, and our hours of carefree leisure were almost up.  Silently, we stared out from the train window and watched darkness rapidly descend across our world and Yorkshire. We were in separate struggles to locate a life worth living after sharing the wrath of the Great Depression.   

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is

7 to make July’s payment and with 2 days left to go its an SOS. 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 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