"I remember the screams from the dying, in 1931, who were too poor to afford a doctor because there was no public healthcare." Tales from the Green & Pleasant Land.

Hello:

Baring rapid worsening of my lung disease, a return of my cancer or homelessness I will have finished all the edits and piecing together of my dad's unfinished work The Green and Pleasant Land by May. 35k words of the 80k word manuscript is now complete. It’s been a long haul because I have other projects that I must do to try to keep the lights on. But I am pleased I have voyaged this far with the manuscript. Below is a selection from Chapter 14.

1931 was more precarious and desperate than in the previous lean years of hardship faced by, Britain's working classes. The population's mood swung between shell shock to outright panic. The cries from the  populace made hungry because of the Great Depression became shrill and anxious. 

Much- of my time was spent working at the off-license. I fell further and further behind in my schoolwork. I was too tired to study or maintain proper attention in the classroom to absorb what I was being taught- by the authoritarian nuns at my school. Neither the teachers nor my mother cared because the role assigned to me by poverty was to be a child labourer to ensure that my family's hunger didn't lead to starvation. I went from bairn to breadwinner in seven years as if I had been born in the 10th century. 

That year, hopelessness echoed through the laneways and cobbled streets of Yorkshire. There was so much pain ordinary people endured- financial, emotional and physical. It was unimaginable the torment the dying underwent; if they and their families didn't have the means to afford a doctor's care. I still remember the fearful din of those who approached death in 1931 if they were skint and had no means to afford morphine to ease their passage to the grave. Those poor wretches  howled like animals dying at the roadside after being hit by a car. It was inhuman- those sounds. Yet the screams erupted everywhere that year in my neighbourhood.

I was terrified by these horrific shrieks which fell from open windows in my neighbourhood or I heard from behind the shut doors at my doss. They were like the lament the priests, at my school, said the damned made as they burned in eternal hellfire. But this was not some god's punishment against human beings. It was the consequence of unmitigated capitalism, which condemned those too poor to afford medicine and relief, outside of gin, a miserable death.

My mother said; when I questioned her about these noises that it was nothing. "Someone is dying and making a racket about it." But it was something, and it was terrifying to me.

I knew from witnessing Marion's death that if she could die at the age of 10, I too could die at the age of 8. And should I perish- the months and days leading up to it would seem eternal in their agony. The howling coming from people in pain who had no means to alleviate their suffering owing to their poverty could just as well be me or anyone in my family.

Every day and everywhere I walked- this dialect of moaning, yelling, cursing, and pleading the poor used before their end of life was present. 

Sometimes my deliveries of beer led me into the rooms and squats of the dying. Some of them were in horrible shape with festering wounds or bed sores. "Don't mind her, lad. She'll be soon off to a better place. But me- I am stuck here in this sorry place," one customer said after I brought beer into his up-one-one-down.

In 1931, our nation's poor, like in every other capitalist country, lived miserably and died in even greater misery. The unemployed of that year were a defeated army of millions vanquished by capitalism. When the factories, mills, and mines shuttered because Britain's exports dried up, no one came to help those people who had created vast profits for the entitled of our land before 1929. They were simply rubbish for the tip. 

The government of the day- a so-called national one- with Ramsey Macdonald a Labour PM at the helm- let us starve and then let us die. My mother spent that year and every year after that until 1945 cursing Macdonald because he appeased the ruling classes at the expense of the workers. Mum believed that she had wasted her first vote as an emancipated woman when she cast it for a "bunch of bastards that called themselves Labour."

In 1931, at just eight years old, I felt abandoned by my family and by England. I may as well have been a sailor- fallen overboard- who watched his ship steam off into the nothingness of a distant horizon. I was alone and all around me was a wide open sea of poverty that stretched in every direction, past, present or future. 

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