"In 1935, the books I read at my local library made me aware- poverty wasn't the natural order of things, but instead a perverse and cruel means to control & subjugate ordinary humanity."

Today drops the last of the first 25k words of Harry Leslie Smith’s 80k word unpublished Green & Pleasant Land manuscript which I have been preparing for publication. The entire work should be ready by the end of May,

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

The Green & Pleasant Land is proof ordinary humanity can seize destiny and make a present that is fair to all. 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 life 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 His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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’s almost ready.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. 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.

Chapter 19:

While millions of men in 1934 were desperate to find work, Bill Moxon was intent on losing his job. Arrogantly, he believed employment for men such as him was as abundant as spring daffodils on the Yorkshire Dales. It astounded him when he was fired from the animal rendering plant after he hit a foreman who had disciplined him for clocking in late for his shift.

Naturally, he took his anger out on my mother and attempted to hurt her as if she were the foreman who had fired him for cause.

When Bill became unemployed- we packed up what little we had and left the bleak, dishevelled stone outbuilding that stood on top of the moor above Sowerby Bridge. I wasn't sorry to leave, but I was not hopeful for what awaited me or my family in our new community.

King Cross Road on the outskirts of Halifax was my next known address.

We ended up in King Cross Road in a rented terraced house because Bill Moxon convinced a landlord to let him a small store to open up a butcher shop for the skint.

Our neighbourhood was industrial, and even during the Great Depression, the skies above King Cross were thick with coal smoke belching from chimney stacks that rested like volcanoes on top of the surrounding mills and factories where cloth, carpets and sweets were churned out for Britain and its empire.

From its inception, the butcher shop was a failure. Bill couldn't afford to buy better quality meat to make the type of pies those who still worked demanded. He only sold offal, as well as sausages made from the worst parts of pigs, cows and sheep. Both Bill and the shop were filthy. Bill wore a butcher's smock covered in animal blood and grime. He dumped his rubbish from butchering into a stagnant canal outback that reeked of pollution from the other businesses that used it as a toilet like Bill.

I was enrolled at Bolton Brow School. During my first few months there, the other students made fun of me because my clothes were worn and hung loosely off my skinny, famished body. But I fought back, and during taunts of "One, two, three who is the cock of thee," the bullies learned my fists were hungry for vengeance against those who judged me less than them because of the holes in my trousers.

In the winter of 1934, my shoes began to rot away. I stuffed old newspaper and cardboard into them to keep my feet dry. It didn’t work very well and my feet developed sores from being constantly wet. I felt dejected and believed my life was ruined before it started because my family was too poor to put shoes on my feet. I was resentful that I could not get an education because society favoured wealth before merit. For a few days, I stopped going to school because I didn't want to face harassment from other students over the condition of my shoes.

When the weather improved and I returned to school only Mr Dawson, my maths teacher, demanded an answer for my absence from his class. When I gave him none, he said I must remain behind after his lessons- were finished.

After the other students left, Dawson called me up to the front of the class. He sat behind a thick wooden desk and reached into his upper waistcoat pocket. He produced a silver snuff box. Dawson opened the box. He tapped snuff onto his finger. He deeply inhaled the ground tobacco into his nose and then sneezed.

“Why were you absent from school yesterday and the day before?”

“Not my fault, sir, my shoes.”

I lifted my foot upwards so that he could see the gaping holes plugged haphazardly with leaking newspaper and soggy cardboard.

“Ah,” “That is a dilemma. Go home.” “ But tomorrow, see me again after class."

At the end of lessons, on the following day- I remained when all the other students left. I stood by Dawson's desk while he pulled open the top left-hand drawer and took out a bag. Inside the paper bag was a pair of sturdy, brown shoes.

“Try them on, lad.”

I slipped off my rotting shoes and slid into them. The fit was far from perfect, but they felt warm and durable.

“They are fine.”

“Good, I remember what it was like in the trenches when my boots became worn. Terrible business.”

My mouth opened to thank him, but before I spoke, Dawson interrupted me.

“Not a word to anyone.”

My maths teacher turned his head downwards to his desk and fumbled into his top pocket. Dawson pulled out his snuff-box and repeated the ritual of inhaling the snuff.

**********

Childhood was a luxury for the middle classes during my youth. So within a week of moving to King Cross, I found employment to help "pay my way," as my mother put it so often. A nearby outlet of Jubb's had a help wanted sign placed in their front window for a delivery boy. I went inside and inquired about the position. The manager asked if I could ride a bike and whether I had any issues with heavy lifting.

I told him I was good with both as my previous jobs had given me experience. The manager hired me on the spot, which pleased me because Bill had started needling me that I was unnecessary ballast to the family if I wasn't bringing home a wage.

My delivery boy's job was arduous servitude. I was tasked with loading and delivering groceries stored in a basket mounted on top of the bike’s front tyre. The woven basket was laden with upwards of 60 pounds of groceries.

My delivery route was 20 miles in circumference and led me all across Halifax and the rural areas surrounding King Cross.

I did my duties energetically and without complaint. Yet it angered me that I was invisible to middle-class children. They didn't see me as anything more than part of the scenery to make their lives less burdensome. Workhorse or work boy, it was all the same to them. Their inherited wealth, father's wages, and grammar school upbringing indoctrinated them into a belief system- where they were the masters and the working class their servants. I despised them and envied their leisure hours denied to the likes of me. While I strained to ride my overladen delivery bike, middle-class kids were off to birthday parties, music lessons or the matinee. Sometimes, these middle-class kids tossed me the same awkward and uncomfortable glance as one would to an animal, overladen with equipment and gear.

After a few months of working as a delivery boy, the manager at Jubb’s expanded my duties to include working behind the counter. My manager liked keeping me at the front of the store as he was having an affair with one of the married female clerks and spent much time with her in the back store room. I caught them having sex on the sugar sacks once too often, but my manager, instead of firing me- gave me the task of designing the store's window display. I became so adept at doing it, that one of my displays took second place in a community-wide competition.

Whilst working at Jubb's, I took up smoking because my manager said it would give me more energy and stop me from being hungry. Every week, I bought Woodbine's for two pennies a packet that held five filter-less cigarettes. At break time, I stood out back, placed a fag on my lips and struck a match. I soaked into my callow lungs the coarse tobacco that made my head dizzy and put to sleep my hunger pangs.

Next door to Jubb’s was a high-end chocolate confectionary shop. Their chocolates were all hand-crafted and presented in rich, beautiful boxes that were out of reach of an ordinary worker. The store’s clientele were mainly affluent housewives, with their well-dressed children in tow. They were ignorant or indifferent to the poverty around them. They certainly perceived me as a non-entity if they encountered me washing down the stoop in front of Jubb's.

With a reputation for excellence, the chocolate shop routinely discarded- entire boxes of chocolate that they deemed unsatisfactory. They were dumped in a bin behind the store they shared with Jubb’s.

Out back, in the rubbish bin, exquisite boxes of chocolate with bows and ribbons wrapped across their tops lay like buried treasure amidst rotting produce. It seemed too good to waste, and many times at the end of my shift, I dove into the rubbish bin to fish out a box of chocolates. The first layers were always covered in mould, but the lower tiers were perfectly edible.

I'd bring these boxes I'd looted from the bin home and shared them with my sister, mother and Bill. We were all gobsmacked by the richness of their taste and how the middle class lived so much better than our bread-and-dripping working-class existence. It was incongruous for us that we were eating chocolate from a box that when new cost as much as a week's rent for us.

Bill Moxon's butcher business plodded along during the first few months of 1934. Much of the time- his shop was empty of customers. He didn't have a great deal of meat to sell and Moxon was an arsehole to most people who walked in looking to buy something. Without clients, Moxon occupied his time by standing outside and kicking as if it was a football- a pig's bladder that was filled with water until it burst. Over a day, he went through at least three pigs' bladders as footballs in between gripping about his lack of clientele.

If it weren't for shady dealings in stolen beef, my mother's boyfriend wouldn't have been able to make the rent on his shop or the one-up-one down on King Cross Road he let for himself, mum, my sister, me and our little brother Matthew.

Moxon's business was not sustainable. He lacked the temperament and capital to be a shop owner. It was only a surprise to Moxon that his shop was shuttered around the time my mother found out she was pregnant with his child.

The news she was pregnant didn't sit well with Bill. He was outraged that the Great Depression had knocked him down and left him out of work and in rent debt because of an ill-conceived foray into owning a small business.

Out of money and schemes, Bill buggered off. One morning, after a night out at the pub, he said to Mum,

"I’m better off without thee.”

When my mother pleaded with him to stay at least for the sake of his child growing within her. He denied paternity to it and called my mother a whore for becoming pregnant. After his outburst, Moxon got up and left.

The morning he left, Mum looked as shell-shocked as in past moments when Moxon hit her for speaking out of turn.

Mum didn't know what to do without Bill because, since 1930, she viewed him as a life raft. Mum had abandoned our father because she believed Bill promised survival for her and us during those times of economic calamity. Mum had damned herself and us by the extreme measures she took to ensure she was with Bill. My sister and I renounced our father to facilitate her relationship with Bill which forever tarnished our psychologies. Our love for our mother was forever poisoned by being implicated in the destruction of our father to save ourselves in the Great Depression. Mum had given everything up to be with Bill and was now ostracised by her family because of it. For Four years she had taken his beatings because he offered in return a meagre salary that paid the rent on shambolic, sub-human housing. It meant nothing to him her sacrifices. Mum was so unimportant to him that Bill abandoned her, pregnant and without income.

With Bill gone Mum warned us,

"There's nowt in the cupboard. There's nowt left but the workhouse for thee- if I don't fix this.

My mother's warnings that the workhouse was in my future- if our luck didn't change, terrified me. My sister seemed less anxious by threats of the poor house because she was in full-time work at a mill. It did not pay much as she was only 14. But Alberta knew she could afford a room somewhere. Alberta attempted to assure me that, in time, we'd come out safe on our journey through poverty. I wasn't convinced. In my fear of being sent to a workhouse, I began to despise my mother. I blamed Mum for leaving herself and her children vulnerable because I was not mature enough to understand- working-class women had few options when it came to surviving.

Without Bill, Mum found respite, or courage, from life without a breadwinner through drink. At the time, I thought it was cowardice and escapism- that drove her down to the pub. I believed she was wasting what little money we had on selfish pleasure, and I openly castigated her for it.

Later, I learned her trips to the pub were a drastic action to keep us together and housed as a family. On occasions, Mum sold herself for rent to men looking for sex. It was not an uncommon thing for working-class women in the 1930s.

Having to exchange sex for money took its toll on my mother's emotional balance. During the day, she suffered from panic attacks, which at the time I thought were simply high dramatics and cries for attention. I didn't know then our housing was paid through letting men shag her against the rough walls of ginnels near the pubs of King Cross.

There were many times when my sister and I hauled our mother from between bins outside our house when she came home blind drunk from the pub. We'd drag our mother indoors and hoped that no neighbour had witnessed her fall or spied us transporting Mum into the house drunk and lifeless. Mum would sleep it off and wake in the morning bitterly angry at herself for scraping rock bottom.

In January 1935, a few weeks before her pregnancy was due, Mum told us she was leaving King Cross. "I am going to find Bill and fetch him back to us."

Mum left for Bradford to look for Bill with money scoffed from my piggy bank. She busted it open with a butter knife held in a hand overcome by desperation.

"You'll be right as rain- because you can make more of it."

She took our baby brother Matt with her and deposited him at her sister Alice the only sibling that still talked to her.

Chapter 20:

My mother found Bill in Bradford living in our old neighbourhood of St Andrew's Villa. He had returned to work as a “pig man” at a nearby farm and wanted nothing to do with my mother. He told her to go home to King Cross. Instead, she took a room in one of the doss houses that littered the street and gave birth to her new child there on January 13th 1935. Her only plan was to shame him into fatherhood.

Moxon was initially unmoved by the child or Lillian’s demands for recognition of his new son. My mum lived off the charity of her sister Alice. She even received some help from my dad who still lived in a doss on that street. He gave her what little he had despite his abandonment by her.

Mum didn't leave Bradford until Bill agreed to register the child and accept it as coming from his blood and bone. He only did so on the proviso the child be called like him William.

When Mum returned to King's Cross after a three-month absence with her son "Bill Junior, " she acted as if she had only stepped out for a pint of milk and not abandoned her other children to fend for themselves for 90 days.

Her "Come and say hello to your new brother, filled me with revulsion Bill Junior was another mouth to feed. He was not like Matt, who I saw as my brother, blameless for his condition. Irrationally, I saw Bill Jr. and my mother as conspirators in our family’s unravelling. I was never able to accept the child as anything but an impediment and an intrusion into my life. I was not kindly possessed to having more responsibility thrust upon me, with this desperate child, in this desperate household.

Fortunately, I had found a means to escape the cries of a new-born and my mother's cries for assistance at the library in King Cross. It became my real school, my comfort, and my escape from the greyness and the emotional hunger in my life. On my off time, I trudged over to the library, which was housed in a Victorian building near our house.

I perused the shelves of books filled with strange titles. I grabbed novels that caught my fancy and indulged my mind and my imagination. With Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable, I suffered Jean Valijean's torments, indignities and poverty- and compared it to my own sorry state. In The Count of Monte Cristo, I witnessed injustice and the fight to right the wrongs of birth and legacy.

For the price of a library card that costed a few pennies, I was transported across the world and sat at the feet of great thinkers, poets, playwrights, novelists, historians and political advocates for change.

I spent any moment I wasn't working or at school enraptured in the poems of Wordsworth,, the plays of Shakespeare or discovered by reading books like the Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the Communist Manifesto that the ordinary worker was a commodity abused and exploited by the rich.

I was comforted, strengthened, befriended and revolutionised by books, whose ideas spoke to me. They eased my loneliness and gave me courage and resolve. They gave me hope that there was a world outside my hunger, my poverty, and my family waiting to welcome me.

The books I read in 1935 and afterwards were doing something else for me; they were politicising me. I began to formulate in my childish mind that the circumstances of my poverty weren't the fault of my shortcomings or my parents but because society was rigged to favour an entrenched entitled class. Books- made me aware that poverty wasn't the natural order of things but a perverse and cruel means to control and subjugate ordinary humanity.

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. Take Care, John