"I urge you with all my heart and the terrible memories of my Great Depression Childhood, Don't Make My Past Your Future."

Harry Leslie Smith

February 25, 1923-November 28, 2018

“I am going out of this World Fighting.”

Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. His life's journey was the odyssey that most of his working-class generation endured: poverty, war and then renewal with the creation of the Welfare State.

The Green and Pleasant Land was unfinished at the time of my dad’s death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards my father left behind. The fifth anniversary of Harry Leslie Smith's death is November 28th, I hope to have the first 50k words of this work ready for you to read. by then.

Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me.

The Green & Pleasant Land:

Chapter Four

In the Winter of 1928, my family were like migratory beasts of the plain because we never rested. We just kept moving in search of safety and food, always fearful of calamities coming for us at each corner we took. So, we upped sticks for Bradford in the damp dusk of February with not much more than the shirts on our backs because Barnsley was our yesterday.

As we fled, Alberta and I questioned our mother about why we had to leave but were hushed by her. "This is not a concern for children. Forget Barnsley."

Dad was more sentimental than Mum. He couldn't forget or let go of things, no matter how; superfluous they were to our present circumstances. He took to our new life- mementoes from his past that, in our changed surroundings, pricked him with the sharpness of a thorn. On our journey to Bradford, he carried a portrait of his dad and some books of poetry and history tied together with string.

"Why did you bring that rubbish,” Mum barked as we struggled onto a bus where all the hard wooden seats were already occupied.

In response, Dad said nothing because he had no defence except a belief that things would get brighter for us. Mum refused to let it go.

"You would have taken the bloody piano if it weren't down at pawn shop to pay for the bus tickets."

Mum secured lodgings for us at a doss house near where the university is now located. But in the 1920s, the neighbourhood was a febrile slum. A dosshouse was the last refuge for people before homelessness or the workhouse. Our rent was cheaper than other tenants because mum- took on the dubious responsibility of collecting rent from the other lodgers who, like us, were skint.

Marion's death, Dad's unemployment and her surviving children's hunger hardened Mum's heart to the trials and travails of strangers, which made her an excellent rent collector for the absentee landlord. On the surface, to strangers, she was friendly enough if it got her something. However, underneath Mum's smiles and jokes were sharp daggers ready to plunge into anyone who threatened our survival.

In Edwardian times the doss house we now inhabited was for a prosperous family. But wealth, hope and prosperity had long ago jogged on from that house and the surrounding neighbourhood. By the time of our arrival, it was a run-down three-storied eyesore. Its foundation had subsided in the ground and gave the house the appearance of a ship taking on water from a gash in its hull.

The other tenants were Irish navvies who slept four to a room on hard cots and sang lewd songs before bed. In other rooms, there were shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War who screamed in their sleep when their dreams led them back, to the Somme and Ypres. The rest of the lodgings were taken up by indigent pensioners and us. We rented a small room on the second floor, and in it, we were expected to do our sleeping, eating, and fretting. The privy was outside, and a key near the front door granted one entrance to a bog that made me wince from the foul odours emanating from its hole that seemed as deep as a mine shaft.

The navvies in our doss were tough men who built and repaired the roads around Bradford. They knew how to drink, how to swear and how to brawl. But they were always kind to me, and my sister and they were like butter on toast in my mum's hands because she flirted with them- while Dad became increasingly an insignificant shadow on the wall of our lives.

My father withdrew into himself. He couldn’t tolerate his helplessness as we fell further into rough circumstances. Each morning, following breakfast, to avoid unpleasant questions or demands from Mum, Dad made ready to leave the doss by putting on a worker’s cap and short coat as if preparing to leave for work.

Dad never got out of the door without my mother piercing him with sarcasm.

"Lord Muck, where are you going? There’s work to be done around this house.”

“Out for a walk,” was his standard response, and then Dad vanished until teatime.

“It must be nice to live the life of the idle, bloody rich and have time to stroll about town.”

I knew, Dad, was doing more than larking about. He was looking for work because he confessed this to me sometimes when bidding me goodnight at bedtime. But there wasn't any on offer for a man who looked and was past his prime.

While my father marched along the rough, unforgiving pavement of Bradford streets, my mother kept order in the doss by ensuring the other residents paid their rent on time. Now, there was more vinegar than honey coursing through Mum's heart. But on occasions, Mum had a great capacity for kindness and forgiveness. The lead on her compassion was short as every day was a battle against economic rapids that led to either the workhouse or premature death.

For a while, Mum attempted to protect a young man down on his luck who shared digs with a couple of navies. He was shy and not good at surviving. Mum stood up for him when the other navvies took the piss.

But he had a bedwetting problem, and it became chronic. At first, my mother let his bedwetting pass without rebuke because his rent was paid on time. Unfortunately, the young man pissed his bed on one too many occasions. Complaints were made by other occupants in his room because the smell from his soiled clothing and bedding was so strong that it overpowered the cloying stench of unwashed humanity who resided in the house.

My mother tossed the poor beggar out on his ear like he was a cat in the wrong house. When he pleaded for his possessions; she returned to his former bedroom and from an open window hurled his meagre belongings, along with the piss-stained flock mattress, to the pavement where he stood below.

As books and clothes dropped to the ground, my mother swore at him and warned him never to return.

“Oi piss pants, bugger off home to your mam and stay out of my bloody way or I’ll give you such a bollocking, you’ll have a reason to wet the bed.”

There was always noise in the doss. Doors slammed, people farted and belched, cursed, wept, and even laughed into hysteria. Dad was the only one who was quiet about his fate. He was exhausted by his daily walking and search for work.

In the evening, after our tea of porridge or boiled potatoes, he sat on a stool by our fireplace grate empty of coal- and chewed on a pipe starved of tobacco.

On the wall above Dad was the elegant portrait of my granddad, the publican who, in the painting, sported a giant handlebar moustache and wore the accoutrements of modest prosperity.

On that grimy wall stained from years of smoke and cooking fumes whose paint was flecked in the colour of grit, the portrait of my grandad stared down at us as an incongruous image of propriety. If I upset her, my sister would say in mockery, “Look up, granddad is cross with thee."

Most evenings Mum absented herself from our quarters until it was time to sleep. She preferred being downstairs in the common room in the company of the navvies. There, she flirted, joked, and schemed for a way; she and her children could escape our plunge into poverty. Dad, by this time, was not included in Mum's escape plans because he was a dead weight to her. She now looked for a means to jettison him from our lives.

If Dad knew he was being erased from our existence, he didn't protest or let on. Dad continued, as he had done through all our trials in Barnsley, with stoic optimism and making amends for our shabby existence as best he could with the limited resources available.

On occasion he allowed me to leaf through one of the few things he still owned and cherished- Harmsworth's History of the World in eight volumes. These books were bound in leather, embossed with gold leaf, and stood in a neat row on top of an old and wobbling table.

When I was allowed to open them, I saw magnificent illustrations, exact drawings of faraway places and unheard-of kingdoms. I lost myself in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I dreamed I was before the mighty Pyramids of Egypt and forgot the noise of tenants below or the brash orders from my mother that seeped up through the floorboards. I was not there anymore because my imagination had taken me to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which soared seventy-five feet above the ground, flush with a bounty of flowers. Other times, I was at the Temple of Diana, or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus because the pictures and words in those history books made me feel a million miles from the doss house and our cramped room.

After one of my excursions through the ancient lands found in the books of Harmworth's Histories, my dad said-“One day, lad, you will go out into the world and see some fantastic, magical places; I never saw.”

"Can we go together?"

He did not respond. Dad just put his pipe bereft of tobacco between his lips sucked on it, and remembered when he could afford to smoke.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help. I got sick with a mild infection last month. Even being slightly ill put me financially behind and my rent is due next week. I know how bad it was recovering from cancer during covid but then I had some savings. If I get another major illness, I will sink like a stone.

So, if you can subscribe to a paid membership, thank you. I appreciate the loyalty of each subscriber. You have allowed me to build a community.

Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1200 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

So, if you can please subscribe. It is appreciated by me and it ensures the work of Harry's Last Stand has a working beachhead.