The Green & Pleasant Land is almost ready to be sent to a publisher. It’s the unfinished work my Dad laboured on before his death in 2018 . I have spent the last year bringing to life from his notes, drafts and index cards.
The book is an intimate look at poverty. My father learned first-hand how destitution dissolves a family's love for each other with the harshness of acid touching human skin. It's a political testament of outrage about the lost potential of the working class, who then- like now were chained to lives of hungry drudgery.
The Green & Pleasant Land is an important to read at this juncture in our history. Society is broken. Democracy does not function as it was intended. The system is not a for and by-the-people institution anymore. It works for the select entitled few. It can't be repaired, unless we rebuild a Welfare State fit for the 21st century. Democracy won't survive neoliberalism, and should we continue on this path- most of us will envy the dead.
It might even be too late to stop our march to authoritarianism. But it is still worth the effort to resist.
Chapter One:
I was born in a Barnsley slum on February 25th during the economically bleak winter of 1923. My working-class family were on a first name basis with poverty and hunger, so my beginnings weren’t auspicious but damning. The start to my impecunious rough and ready life was the way it was for the working class during the first quarter of the 20th century, and had been for the centuries previous. From my first breath of life outside of the womb and all subsequent breaths during childhood; my belly would never be full because I was the bairn of a Yorkshire miner during a glut in the price of coal.
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.
Had The Great Depression and the Second World War not 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 tea time light of evening. A hundred million soldiers, mostly workers from the nations of Europe, were slaughtered in that war, that the entitled said would end all wars. Bollocks.
They died for nothing except the vanity of the monarchs who ruled Europe during that era and the greed of their munition makers. The coal barons, steel merchants, uniform makers, ship builders, stock brokers, and bankers all made a pretty penny helping to crank the handle of the meat grinder called the Western Front
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.
It is little wonder why my mother was in labour with me for hours. 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 during the early morning hours while a freezing rainstorm pelted the window of my parent’s dingy front parlour.
I 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 marry 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 by neighbours 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 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 Dicken’s 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 fifty’s 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 outwitting the calamities that knocked on our front door which were generally debt collectors 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. It was a death sentence for the poor those from the middle classes generally survived their encounter with this form of tuberculosis. The poor never died and we were poor. 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.
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I can't wait for the publication of the book. I am old enough to understand exactly the conditions that are explained with in it. It is not just history, its a reminder of what we should ALL be fighting against.
You remember, as my parents did, how life has been. But it could be a whole lot worse (the Tufton Street Tory ambition). We have to resist the slide to fascism, which of course is the strong arm of capitalism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "Hitler is the anti-Christ. Therefore, we must go on with our work and eliminate him whether he is successful or not". That same applies to fascism and its cheerleaders today.