"Life is more than a budget holiday in Spain or a new car on tick; it's about creating legacies that can outlive your natural life."

“I am going out of this World Fighting.”

In the last 10 years of Harry Leslie Smith’s life 5 books were published, hundreds of essays penned, podcasts produced, hundreds of speeches made across the globe, and tens of thousands of miles traversed on my dad’s quest to not make his past our future. I was my father’s comrade and partner during that odyssey where sometimes my role was Sancho Panza, and other times Don Quixote.

This Tuesday, he’s been dead for 5 years but his message that the working class was a tide that raised all boats in 1945 with the creation of the Welfare State continues. Democracy or what is left of it in 2023 is doomed to whither into authoritarianism without a functioning and expansive social safety net.

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 a voyage 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. If I get 10 paid yearly subscriptions by the 30th, my rent is covered for next month.

Chapter Seven: The Green & Pleasant Land

The separation from my mother was worse than if she had died. To me, her leaving seemed a voluntary decision. 

Dad pretended his wife was on holiday- and we must make do without her for a brief time. How long that time was a changing schedule with him because he didn't know if she was ever coming back at all. Sometimes, it was "Your mum will be home tomorrow"- other times, "She'll be home next week." None of us knew if her plans would ever include us, again.

My sister Alberta wise beyond her 10 years and as fierce as a lioness, thought it best after our mum left that I was toughened up. My sister tried to be a surrogate mother to me and an emotional crutch for my dad. It was a horrible burden for a little girl to be forced to bear.

Every night, whilst we snuggled together for warmth at bedtime underneath blankets of old coats, Alberta made plans for us. She'd devise schemes to scoff food from neighbours or where to find something eatable amongst the rubbish in the bins behind Bradford's restaurants on the city's high street. Alberta taught me the ways of a street urchin to ensure I'd always find food to eat. It was strange mothering because Alberta taught me what to look for when we scampered through the rubbish bins outback of restaurants. She instructed me on how to judge like a diamond merchant can spot flaws in a cut gem; what half-eaten chop was rancid and what was fresh enough to eat without becoming sick. She mothered me with affection, harsh words, and sometimes even slaps to keep me alive. We laughed together, stole food together, and during our childhood supported each other emotionally because the adults in our lives were incapable of giving much back because the world had been so unspeakably cruel to them.

She was good at convincing lodgers who were famished themselves to share their bread and drippings with us. My sister taught me to sing songs like Danny Boy to ensure that we paid for what we were given.

 When my mother left us, The Great Depression was in its second year, and industries of the north: coal, steel, and textiles, were in a state of collapse. Like falling fruit to the ground, Yorkshire, in 1930, withered and rotted. Britain's unemployment rate exploded to 2.5 million workers, who were allotted a dole for fifteen weeks. It was substandard government assistance; afterwards, they went hungry, or their kids learned to rummage through the rubbish bins of their towns as I did.

In Bradford and other Northern towns and villages, the effects of malnutrition began to creep across every street corner. Rickets, TB, and death from starvation were not freak occurrences but living experiences for the working class. Disease was rife in all the towns across the poverty-racked North. Early death was considered normal for the working class because healthcare was private.

Alberta and I, followed by other children, chanted down squalid streets blanketed in want and hopelessness-

“Mother, Mother, take me home from the convalescent home.

I’ve been here a month or two, and now I’d like to die near you.”

When my mother left, it was as if every day was sunless. I didn't confide in anyone, my fears, and my terrors outside of Alberta. I knew not to trust others because them knowing my mother had done a runner would put my sister and me in further jeopardy.

Neither I nor Alberta told the nuns our mum had gone for a prolonged naughty weekend. As for the priest at confession, we kept schtum because my greatest fear wasn't an eternity in hellfire for lying to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but having the state put my sister and me into a foundling home.

My family had slipped beneath the waves and were lost because not the government, society, not even more affluent members from my dad's side of the family were prepared to rescue us. We were transient players on this mortal coil destined to be ground into nothingness by the pestle of capitalism and the greedy hands that turned it.

That year when I reached my seventh year of life, I had neither the time, the skill set or a full belly to do my schoolwork. I fell behind the rest of my classmates in arithmetic, history, and grammar. The nuns were unforgiving to those who did not know their assigned lessons. Despite my mother's threats earlier on in the term to punish those who punished me, I was slapped, strapped, or humiliated with harsh words of "dummy, stupid" and "imbecile" by nuns whose stomachs bulged impregnated from over-proportioned meals provided by the alms of Bradford's poor catholic brethren.

And then one day, Mum returned as if she had never been gone from us. She came back into our lives as if she just popped down to the shops for a loaf of bread. She wanted our reaction to her return to be as if it was a working-class, Winter Tale. But it wasn't a fairy tale made right but another chapter in our family’s nightmare.

There, absent for so long, was Mum standing at the entrance to our room in the doss house. She wore a floral dress that sparkled against the decades of grime and grease on our walls. She held a pineapple in one hand as if she had just arrived home from Captain Cooke’s expedition to the South Seas. In the other, my mum carried “authentic Irish soda bread.”

My father looked at her, his mouth agape, speechless at her return and the condition she returned to us in. She was changed. Soon, we would learn how changed you had become down south by O’Sullivan’s doing.

That night Mum made our tea and confessed as we silently ate the soda bread dipped into a weak meatless broth that she was pregnant. My father was more distant than normal at that meal and for days onward as he was processing in his 19th-century brain his cuckolding. As for the pineapple, my mother never offered it to us to eat. Instead, my mum showed it around to the other lodgers to demonstrate the wonders and oddities available to the residents of London.

This month marks the 5th anniversary of my dad's death. It also marks the second anniversary of my Harry's Last Stand newsletter going live. During these past 24 months, I have posted 245 essays, as well as excerpts from the unpublished works of Harry Leslie Smith - along with chapter samples from my book about him. My newsletter has grown from a handful of subscribers to 1200 in that period. Around 10% of you are paid members. I appreciate all of you but ask if you can switch to a paid subscription because your help is NEEDED to keep me housed and Harry Leslie Smith's legacy relevant. But if you can't all is good too because we are sharing the same boat.  Take care, John.