"I was born into working-class poverty on February 25, 1923"

My Dad was born 102 years ago on Tuesday and has been dead for six years and three months. He was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. Were it not for the rise of fascism, today that was delivered to us through the Trojan horse of neoliberalism; my father's life story would be about how the Greatest Generation built a Welfare State after World War Two to save society from the tyranny of capitalism. Instead, it's a story about how succeeding generations betrayed humanity. This enabled fascists to learn from their past mistakes, which will make it harder to defeat in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth.

Because his birthday is so near, I want to return you to his beginning. All that he and his generation experienced began in their early years during the economic deprivations following the Great War and then The Great Depression. Below are Chapters 1-4 from The Green and Pleasant Land.

Beta copies of the Green & Pleasant Land will be available in 2-3 weeks. If you want one, direct message me, and I will make sure you get it.

It's coming to the end of a short month and I will be short on my rent. So, if you are able please tip or become a paid subscriber.

Cheers,

John

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter One:

I was born before dawn on the 25th of February 1923. As my mother laboured to birth me, cold rain fell outside and froze against the window pains of our family’s lodging. From my first breath outside of my mother’s womb until I joined the RAF in 1941; my belly would never be full because I was the bairn of a Yorkshire miner during a post war age of recession and famine.

Working at the coal face was what my folk had done since the Industrial Revolution. Before then, my ancestors mined tin. That was what capitalism dictated; we were good for- brute labour for the profits of the mucks who lived in stately homes. I am sure, in ancient times, those from my blood line dug for the metals that were smelted into bronze.

Were it not for The Great Depression and the Second World War which revolutionised my working-class world, I too would have earned my crust by hacking coal from Yorkshire’s sunless underworld.

1923 was a fearful, unstable, and melancholic time to come into existence. Grief over the dead from the First Great War was still as sharp as broken glass because memories of the war were as fresh as the scent from a grave dug in the morning to someone who strolls a cemetery in the teatime light of evening. A hundred million soldiers, mostly workers from the nations of Europe, were slaughtered in that war, which the entitled said would end all wars. Bollocks.

They died for nothing except the vanity of the monarchs who ruled Europe. They died for nothing except the greed of munition makers, coal barons, steel merchants, uniform makers, ship builders, stockbrokers, and bankers.

When the guns went dumb and the killing stopped, peace took up a sword of pestilence rather than a ploughshare. Over 60 million across the world were slayed by a plague known as the Spanish Flu. The virus was a modern-day Black Death, and it collected the living and put them in their graves with medieval haste. It brought death everywhere in the world, including Yorkshire. Then in 1922; it petered out like a forest fire that burnt down all the trees.

So much death, disease, poverty and despair awaited me once I emerged from the birth canal in February 1923.

It is little wonder why my mother was in labour for hours with me. I just didn’t want to budge from my safe harbour inside her womb. I did not want to meet a world full of threats, harm, and caution. I would not be coaxed out with either gentle words or harsh curses.

But eventually I appeared into this world and let all around me know I wasn’t pleased to have arrived. I hollered at the top of my lungs after a midwife who loved gin and shag cigarettes slapped my arse. I mewled like a runt of the litter for milk from my Mum’s breast because I was underweight.

Being born malnourished was normal for my class in 1923. No matter how hard my dad laboured below in the pits, he never earned enough money to pay the rent and feed his kind. He was capitalism’s beast of burden and treated accordingly.

In the year of my birth, my parents were new settlers to Barnsley. They had come to this spot of Yorkshire because the pits here promised a better wage than up in Wakefield and Barley Hole. Besides, Barnsley was far enough away from my dad’s siblings, who despised my mother and ostracised him for marrying her.

When I was older, and Mum was soured by the hunger created by the Great Depression, she revealed to me my father’s family were a little bit more than colliers. They were “better folk” according to her. My dad, she said in moments of acrimony during the 1930s, had let his family’s pub slip through his hands. “It could have kept us in clover until we all breathed our last.”

On the day of my birth, my father was not glad-handed down at his local in our village of Hoyland Common. No one slapped his back or shook his hand in congratulations because; when I was born, Dad was in his late fifties, and Mum was 27 years his junior.

She had foolishly fallen in love with him in 1913. He had the gift of the gab and an optimism that was infectious. My mother attached her wagon to my Dad's destiny nine years before my birth. In 1914, she believed, despite his advanced age; he could guarantee her a secure future. Mum lived until the day of her death feeling cursed by the creed: marry in haste and repent in leisure.

Mum felt my dad had the best prospects of any of her suitors for her future. Dad was the son of miner/ innkeeper for a public house that stood on the fringe of a colliery in the decrepit village of Barley Hole. It was in the nether regions between Sheffield and Barnsley. So, when my granddad died in 1914, my parents assumed my father would become master of the New Inn and his days as a coal miner would be over. My parents married on that expectation.

But my parents’ dreams for financial stability were as hopeful as believing a sandcastle would stand after the eventide comes ashore. Life always has other plans for us rather than happiness and a pocket full of cash.

My father didn’t inherit the publican license after Granddad died. Instead, it transferred over to his uncle Larrat ensuring Dad would die a miner rather than a business owner. The machinations Larrat employed to accomplish this were as pernicious and preposterous as any subplot from a Dickens’ novel or at least that is how it seemed to me when my mother during my youth ranted about our “lost legacy.”

After my grandad died my parents moved on from Barley Hole. All my dad took from the pub was a painted portrait of his father, and an upright piano.

According to Mum, bad luck followed our family with the persistence of a stray dog looking for an owner because of Dad’s tender heart. He wasn’t “tough enough, for this life.” Poor Dad was the toughest of us all . He took the misfortunes that came his way after my birth with stoicism and good humour. Sadly, including me, none of his family recognised his heroism because we were too busy trying to escape our own destruction.

Nine years had passed since the time of my parent’s marriage to my wails of life. The intervening time was a series of disappointments and defeats for my parents. Their relationship in 1923 was shorn of its lustre. Mum was only twenty-eight, but she felt like a broad mare when I was born having already given birth to my two elder sisters, Marion in 1915 and Alberta in 1920. Whereas Dad was in his fifties and his physical strength was in decline. His ability to earn a living to keep us out of the poor house was less certain as he grew older.

The worry, the daily struggle to stretch Dad’s impecunious wages to both make the rent and put food on the table had by the time of my birth worn my mother down to a nub of anger, outrage and cunning. She spent her waking hours caring for her children and outwitting the calamity caused by debt collectors who knocked on our front door demanding the rent be paid.

Trying to keep one step ahead of our debts-tired Mum out. But what exhausted my mother was the row she had with death, who since 1920 had tried to steal my eldest sister Marion away from our family.

Poor Marion, she drew a very short straw when she developed spinal tuberculosis at the age of five. For the poor it was a death sentence because survival depended on better nutrition, more hygienic living conditions and a doctor’s care which was prohibitive owing to healthcare being a cash only service.

Pulmonary TB had already killed my uncle Eddie in 1918 who died from it in an army Sanitorium in Scarborough. So, my mother knew what awaited Marion. Yet, she did everything to forestall my sister’s early reservation with death. But a mother's love for her child isn't a currency that can be exchanged for proper healthcare in a capitalistic society. Your life and the lives of those you love only has only worth if you can pay to save it from disease and injury.

Chapter Two:

My first memories of existence were of sadness, hunger and grief. From the time I began to walk I was estranged from feeling safe or secure. Were it not for my mother’s stubborn determination to see me live into adulthood, persistent malnutrition and common childhood maladies would have killed me long before I had a chance to grow into a man.

No matter how ill I became as a bairn, it was my mother, who kept the fire of life burning inside of me. At 18 months, I developed a prolapsed rectum from malnutrition that caused a portion of my intestines to slip out of my backside. Later in life, when I questioned her erratic mothering skills, Mum roared, “ You wouldn’t have been alive today if I hadn’t shoved your bowels back up your arsehole when you were a sickly lad. I told death to bugger off and you now thank me like this?”

To her lasting regret, Mum was not able to say the same about Marion because my sister didn't survive her childhood. Marion couldn’t be fixed like I was by shoving my guts back into me. TB wasn’t cured by brute force. For Marion to survive her form of TB, she needed care in a sanatorium- and that was beyond my parent’s fiscal resources.

While I was becoming aware as a toddler of the world around me, Marion at the age of nine became aware that she was dying.

Marion died by inches at the beginning of 1926 and then when autumn approached, the TB wrapped around her spine like an Anaconda.. She became bedridden and lost her ability to speak.

To ease my parents’ burden of care, Dad’s trade union donated a wicker landau for my sister. She would use it as her bed because it was more comfortable than a flock mattress. The landau had thin rubber wheels, which allowed Marion to be taken outside to enjoy Barnsley’s infrequent days of sun. When Mum pushed Marion down the street with me by her side, I’d watch the wheels turn and hear their mournful squeak that sounded like cries of pity for its occupant.

Most often, Marion's time before death was spent- marooned in our dingy parlour- imprisoned on her landau. Sometimes, I sat on the floor near Marion and told her nonsense stories that she responded to with groans of pain or thrashing her hands against the side of the landau. For eating, bathing, dressing, and going to the bathroom, Marion was now totally dependent on my mother’s care. It exhausted my mother and made her impatient with others, including me because I was underfoot when Mum needed to give all her attention to my dying sister.

The streets where people like my family lived were angry because they had been cheated by their political leaders who promised a "Land fit for Heroes," after the Great War in 1918. But eight years on, wages for miners hadn't gone up but instead were clawed back. Other workers felt a similar pinch from their employers who wanted more hours worked for less pay. Rent and food were unaffordable for workers and the quality of life for most was a dismal struggle from sunup to sundown to not be chucked out the street because of rent arrears.

By May 1926, the working class could take no more. In solidarity with the miners, who were fighting the coal barons for better pay and conditions, Britain's trade unions called for a General Strike. It was a collective fight by organised labour to settle wage demands and working conditions for all workers.

The General Strike terrified Britain’s establishment because they feared the country was about to fall down into a rabbit hole of revolution.

Winston Churchill made speeches in parliament about the strikers and portrayed them as communist revolutionaries out to topple democracy. Strikers were described in newspapers as if they were insurgents or a rabble mob that wanted to storm Buckingham Palace. The prose triggered the middle class as it reminded them how, only a few years previous, Russian revolutionaries had stormed Imperial Russia’s Winter Palace in 1917, overturning that monarchy.

Right-wing newspapers turned working-class aspirations for fair wages, affordable housing, and the right to time off into a communist plot by Lenin to make the United Kingdom another Soviet Union. Naturally, the middle class accepted this propaganda as gospel because the worker was not thought of as human on equal footing with a homeowner. To them, we were an inferior species whose purpose was to serve capitalism. We were supposed to be their maids, dig their coal or forge their steel. We were background players in their lives, extras in their real-life silent picture extravaganza.

The General Strike began with militant optimism, and in less than a fortnight; it was crushed by the government, its press, and middle-class animosity. Only the miners’ union refused to budge or break in the face of the intimidation thrown at them by the government and the press. While other workers returned to their employment, the miners’ union held firm with the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute off the day.”

It was heroic but in vain that the miners’ held their picket line after other trade unions had been beaten into surrender. For their fight for better pay, the miners, their families, and the communities they lived in were destroyed and starved into submission by the Coal Barons who refused to negotiate with the miner's union. The Coal Barons had a stockpile of coal and compliant miners who were not union members to supply Britain’s economy with the fuel it needed to keep running for as long as the strike continued. They had time on their side whilst the strikers did not because strike pay did not pay the rent or the food bill.

During the strike, miners went into deep rent arrears or were evicted from their rented housing. We were starved into submission and then into surrender like rebels on the losing side of a civil war. My mother was compelled to take my sisters and me to soup kitchens for our daily meals because there was no money left to pay for groceries.

As the strike dragged on for months, Marion's TB grew worse because of our limited food supply. Death was coming for her. My father and mother knew she'd soon be dead. It's why I was told, “Play near Marion because she won’t be with us for long.”

In early autumn- the miners' determination to continue the strike began to die. The coal barons had starved them out and broken them without mercy. Just before the strike ended- my dad took me to one of their pickets. I don't know the reason. It might have been as simple as not having a carer for me because my mother was busy tending to Marion. Or it might have been something more profound like my father- wanting to imprint me with an image of working-class courage in the face of insurmountable oppression. Whatever the reason, I remember my visit to his picket line as a lesson taught to me. All human beings must have the right to a decent, fulfilling life.

At the picket, Dad let me ride on his shoulders while he stood with his comrades to fight for fair wages and better working conditions. On Dad’s shoulders, I felt happy and safe in the company of him and his mates who fought a fair fight for our kind.

Not long after my trip to the picket line and my triumphant ride on my father’s shoulders, the miners’ union capitulated to the Coal Barons. They surrendered to the owners of the pits as if they were a defeated army and were treated with no more mercy than Germany was during the drafting of the Versailles Treaty.

When miners returned to work in the pits, their work hours increased to Victorian times whilst their wages were cut in half. The General Strike proved to the working class that Britain had sacrificed its young in the Great War for nothing more than to maintain and perpetuate the wealth of the few families who controlled our nation’s economy.

October 1926 was a month of incredible brutality: Marion was dying, my family was starving, and the miners' general strike collapsed in humiliating surrender. It was feudalistic what happened to my family and our mining community that year. We were just meat for capitalism’s economic grinder.

At the beginning of October, Mum knew she couldn’t care for Marion any longer. Death was coming hard and quick for my sister. There was nothing left to be done for her at home, and since my parents didn’t have middle-class wealth, Marion couldn’t be taken into the care of a hospital that charged for health services. There was no alternative for Marion’s end-of-life care. She had to be committed to our local workhouse because it had a small infirmary where the working class and the indigent were provided with limited healthcare services. Generally, it was only laudanum to make one's end of life less torturous.

One morning in early October, Dad, with the help of a neighbour, lifted Marion, who rested on her wicker bed onto the back of a coal wagon drawn by a lone horse. After Marion was put on the wagon, my mother climbed up to accompany her to the workhouse. The horse and wagon forlornly pulled away from our front stoop and moved slowly down the street towards the workhouse.

There was no funeral for Marion. My parents could not afford the cost of burial because they were destitute from fighting the General Strike. Instead, she was dumped in a pauper's pit and shared her grave with the indigent of our community.

It was bitterly ironic that the month and year Marion died- A. A. Milne’s first Winnie the Pooh book was published and sold in shops.

Marion was dead, and the General Strike was crushed by the entitled but middle-class kid in 1926- slept well because their bedtime stories were filled with tales about "Pooh Corner- an idealistic wood that was easy for them to imagine because they weren't hungry, cold, or their families too poor to afford a doctor should they fall ill.

Chapter Three

Grief took lodgings in our house after Marion died- and it was not stoic or solemn. It was as bitter as tea made with vinegar. Rage steeped in my mother's heart over her daughter's death. Mum knew and spoke aloud what Dad kept to himself.

"She was snatched from us because we are poor."

No one could console my mother during those first weeks of mourning, least of all her husband.

Dad seemed to my mum too tepid in his hurt over Marion's passing. He didn't wear the emotional accoutrements of mourning. Dad didn't weep or howl because grief had punctured his spirit and deflated his heart. Mum thought my father's reluctance to display emotion over Marion's death was as good as him tugging his forelock at death like a servant to its master.

Mum was being unfair because Dad wasn't lukewarm in his sorrow over Marion's death. Dad's grief was silent and rheumatic with self-recrimination as he blamed himself for Marion's spiral into death.

My Dad realised hunger induced by participating in the General Strike was a factor in Marion's death from TB. He was the family's breadwinner who failed to put food on our table because the General Strike brought famine to our community and every other mining community across the land.

For the rest of his life, Dad never rid himself of the erroneous notion that he was responsible for Marion's death and the tragedies that befell our family rather than capitalism, which considered us no better than replaceable livestock.

My sister and I were too young to grieve for Marion. She was here and then gone. To where I did not know? Marion was just absent from our home.

Soon enough, I would understand death and its permanence. I would get to know it, and it would call me by my first name. On too many occasions, Death breathed down my neck over the next twenty years because poverty and war are mortality's best mates.

However, during that autumn of 1926, I absented myself from the harshness of sorrow by escaping into play with my sister. In the daytime my sister and I strolled through the streets of Barnsley and fell in with other children at play. For days, I'd lose myself in imaginary treasure hunts with Alberta at a nearby rubbish tip. It was a place strewn with debris from the lives of the working poor: rotting clothes, broken crockery, and busted furniture heaped in ziggurats.

We scavenged looking for loot that we told ourselves was buried underneath the dead ground. But all we ever found were brass buttons.

Marion was dead only a few short months when death tried to barge again into our lives.

This time it came for me. Whooping Cough was my would-be assassin. That sickness left my tiny frame gasping for air, and I came within a whisper of death.

I saw no doctor because there was no money for one. Ancient remedies used by peasants for hundreds of years to combat catarrh kept me alive. Mum shrouded my head with a heavy cloth and made me- breathe in menthol mixed in a bowl of boiling water to ease the congestion in my lungs. My father carried me in his arms and willed me to live with songs and soft words about Christmas that would be soon upon us.

My sickness passed, and death departed our house without its appetite sated. Death however, was not to go hungry for long. The family who lived in the adjoining one up one down lost their daughter to scarlet fever around the time I recovered from Whooping Cough.. Medicine under the thumb of capitalism killed more of my generation than Hitler did. It was only the foundation of the NHS in 1948 that stopped the slaughter of sick people who couldn’t afford medical care.

.A daughter died in October, and a son saved in November made our Yuletide in 1926 an occasion where funerals and feast danced cheek to cheek.

On that Christmas day, my parents splurged and kept the coal fire in the grate in our cramped parlour- burning from morning until bedtime. The day was joyous with song and merriment. My father played the piano- something he had not done since Marion died. Alberta and I stood beside him and sang well-worn festive jingles with abandon.

Mum prepared our modest holiday feast in a tiny scullery, which was located at the back of the parlour. Our Christmas tea was a small portion of roasted meat that floated on rich gravy that was prevented from flooding off our plates by a mountainous dam of potatoes and parsnips. There was even pudding because Mum baked a jam roll that we washed down with tea- sweet with sugar.

After our meal, I played with my lone gift from Father Christmas; a toy train made in Japan because a British-manufactured toy was too costly for my parents. I sat on a rug woven from the rags of clothes too threadbare to wear and pushed my train across the surrounding stone floor that was icy cold. Near me, my sister admired the doll she was given for Christmas. Alberta and I didn't know it then, but this was the last Christmas when our parents could afford to buy us presents.

At the beginning of the New Year, calamity returned to our house. It came for my dad this time. At fifty-nine, he was no longer up to the job of working at the coalface. Decades beneath the surface, busting rock and coal had broken his body and lungs- he was relocated to surface work.

In his new work, Dad accepted every demeaning command to shovel coal or haul broken equipment away from the mine entrances to preserve his employment. Dad took each order to lift, carry and fetch with good humour because he knew work kept our family out of the poor house. But his body could not keep up with the six-day workweek. The physical demands, the sheer stamina and strength required to work ten hours a day, lifting and dumping scrap was too much for my father. The hernia acquired deep beneath the surface, in the world of black coal, ruptured above ground when he was ordered to haul away heavy metal beams by himself.

He was done for- because a manual labourer who can't before manual labour has no utility in a society that reveres capitalism. Dad was let go from the mine, and my family's fate was sealed. We were destitute because unemployment benefits were insufficient, and women were discouraged from working outside of the home.

When my fourth birthday arrived at the end of February 1927, our family couldn't afford the price of coal to heat our home. Mum enlisted my sister Alberta and me to scoff coal from a slag heap at one of the collieries near our dwelling. My sister and I would head out to the slag heap on blistering frosty winter days after- we breakfasted on watery porridge.

When we arrived at the base of the slag heap, it looked to my four-year-old eyes like an ominous black mountain that had risen from the depths of hell because sections of it smouldered and smoked from bits of coal igniting through friction. My sister and I ascended the mountain of slag like Sherpas going up Mount Everest. Other children of unemployed dads joined our scavenging for coal to heat their homes.

With my tiny legs, I crawled up to its summit. At the top, I scrambled to fill my bucket with jagged pieces of substandard coal. Day in, and day out, I climbed those heaps of slag at the mouth of the colliery to fill my bucket with broken lumps of coal to keep our house warm and our oven working.

When done, I walked home; my clothes and face were covered in coal dust like I had worked a shift down in the pits below that are as deep and black as the ocean where no sunlight can penetrate.

1927 was the year my family floated in the wreckage caused by my father's unemployment. We existed on poor relief and did midnight flits to keep one step ahead of our debts. Our welcome in Barnsley was at an end.

My mother's family had nowt for us because they were mining folk too, living within a penny of their own ruin. As for my father's family, they had banished him from their hearts when he married my mother. A sister of his lived in Barnsley and owned a pub with her husband, but she refused all pleas from my father for assistance.

By 1928, my family stood like millions of other working-class families on the threshold of the Great Depression. Like them, we didn't know what was coming for us. But we were even less prepared than most working-class people for the economic maelstrom that gathered strength on the horizon. The General Strike, followed by Dad's unemployment, meant; there was no cushion for us or minuscule reserves to draw upon. Everything was used up to survive my father's year of joblessness. Only the strong and unsentimental would survive the last years of the 1920s and the first of the 1930s.

At the start of 1928, my parents skipped out on their debts and fled Barnsley for Bradford with Alberta and me in tow. The bus that delivered us there stank of passengers who couldn’t afford a trip to the public baths and subsisted on fried potatoes and onions. Bradford didn’t promise my family much outside of the slim chance we might keep our heads above water rather than drown in poverty. It all depended on whether my dad could find work in a larger city.

We existed to survive- nothing more and nothing less.

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 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 were useless to our survival. 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 at a 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 doss house 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 inhabited was owned by a prosperous family. But wealth and hope 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 tenants were Irish navvies who slept four to a room on hard cots and sang lewd songs before bed, and 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 Alberta.

They were like butter on toast in my Mum's hands because she flirted with them- while Dad increasingly became 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 was nothing 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.

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. Mum returned to his former bedroom and hurled his meagre belongings out from an open window followed by the piss-stained flock mattress, to the pavement below.

As books and clothes dropped, 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 thy 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 sternly down at us and the dire poverty we lived in. 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 company of the navvies who hung about and drank beer in a common room. 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.

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.

Sometimes, he allowed me to leaf through one of the few things he still owned- an eight-volume, Harmsworth's History of the World. 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 into the world and see some fantastic, magical places- that I never saw.”

"Can we go together?"

He did not respond. Dad just put his pipe bereft of tobacco between his lips and sucked on it as if to conjure the memory of when he could afford to smoke.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. 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.