"I was seven years old when I became a child labourer."

Harry Leslie Smith became a child Labourer in 1930. It impeded his education, and harmed his self confidence. But that experience of being “Put in the Shuck” as he described it, never stole his sense of compassion or empathy. My dad died five years ago this month at 95. Neoliberalism and a decadent media class aren’t interested in preserving working class memories because they question present injustices. It was the aim of the Harry Last Stand project to combat the efforts of the entitled to erase those memories from society’s conscience. I continue the work my dad and I set out to do in 2009 after the death of my brother Peter.

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. The fifth anniversary of Harry Leslie Smith death is November 28th, I hope to have the first 50k words of this work ready for you to read. Below is him remembering the first few months of child labour and how it began to alter his psychology.

I was seven years old when I became a child labourer. I didn't have a childhood before then, so it shouldn't have come as a shock to me that my parents, unable to earn a living during the Great Depression, needed me to work like an adult to keep us all alive.

One morning, when the money from the poor relief had run out early, and there was no food for breakfast. My mum looked at me and said it was all in my hands to make sure this never happened again to us.

She told me I needed to work like a man now, or the family would starve, be homeless and end up in the Poor House. During our talk, she wept & cursed Ramsey Macdonald, whom she called a lying Labour bastard.

Mum grabbed my hand and said the off-licence down the road was looking for help. She said I should go immediately and alone. I was to speak clearly and tell the owner I would work longer and harder than anyone else in the neighbourhood.

I did as I was told. I went to the off licence and approached the owner behind the counter. I told him I was looking for work. He laughed and gave me a disdainful glare. I told him that my dad was once a miner, but injury had robbed him of employment.

I was hired. But I didn't get the job from pity or a sense of charity. It was cold-hearted capitalism that hired children in the 1930s to do adult labour because it was less expensive for the employer.

I worked for him every day after school into late into the night and a half-day on Saturdays. I scrubbed floors and stacked shelves on an empty stomach after doing a full day at school. The owner like how I could work for next to nothing because my family was famished. He promoted me in short time to beer barrow boy.

I was tasked to deliver crates of beer to local customers. I weighed no more than seventy pounds, and I stood less than five feet. But I pushed a steel-wheeled handcart, wide enough to fit five crates of beer containing nine, one half-pint bottles. It was arduous work for a seven-year-old, and I was threatened with lost wages for broken or stolen bottles.

My tiny legs and arms hurt after pushing the barrow for a few hours each day. I manoeuvred my wares up and down the narrow industrial streets of our neighbourhood. It was a great humiliation for my father to watch me return from work and place my wages into the family’s piggy bank.

My tips, however, I hid from my parents. With those pennies, I bought treats for my sister and myself. At bedtime, my sister and I rushed upstairs to our cold attic room, where under coats for blankets, we shared a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, cut into enough pieces to last us the week.

 There was now little time for lessons and homework because my work at the off-license took precedence. I was angered by this because even a seven-year-old knows when they have been enslaved by economic circumstances. I also felt dumb because the more I worked, the more I fell behind in my schoolwork.

I started skipping school because I was ashamed to not have done my homework and hated the teasing from those who didn't need to work to help pay the rent.

I spent most of my days loitering or daydreaming in the city centre of Bradford. I walked myself to distraction. Sometimes, I met my father on the High Street in a similar state of truancy. If he had a penny, he'd give it to me sheepishly.

 “Be on your way lad. Make sure your Mum is none the wiser of our encounter.”

We then went our own way lost, in daydreams and terrors.

On Saturday's after work if I had enough tip money, I'd take my sister Alberta to the Thruppeny Rush at the local movie theatre.

 We watched the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. For a few pence, my sister and I disappeared into a celluloid dream for an hour. At the Odeon, everything was funny and ended with a smile or a kiss. At the pictures, everything was different from our way of life and those who occupied our doss house.

The cinema was a place of refuge for a small boy like me. Movies and serials let me fantasize and drift away into a world filled with adventure and rewards. On the giant screen, sadness was overcome with laughter, the villain vanquished and justice was always delivered.

But none of that existed in my world. In my doss house reality it was the opposite. There was hunger, unfathomable melancholy. There was anger by adults betrayed by a society that only benefited the rich. Or worse those who had no fight left in them and resigned themselves to a a miserable death on the dole living in slums.

The movies for me were a temporary escape that melted like film against a match- the moment I got back into the door of St Andrew's Villas.

 Once after I returned home from the pictures elated by the fun I had it was slapped out of me by my mother's intent to humiliate me.

I came into the common room of the doss. My father sat in the corner, pipe in mouth, staring forlornly at a wall. In another corner of the sitting room, my Mum sat breastfeeding my brother Matt. Irritated by my entrance or my calls for attention, my mother pulled out her engorged breast from Matt’s wet lips and pumped her milk across my face. It ran down my cheeks as if I was sobbing cream.

Mum laughed and with deranged cruelty said sarcastically, “He looked hungry too!”

 I dashed from the room and hurried up to my attic refuge. Upstairs, alone and angry, I cried because I knew how far my life was from the movie fantasies I watched at the cinema.