Poverty in Youth is a Trauma That Dogs you for a Lifetime. The Green & Pleasant Land

It’s the 24th and today and would have been my Dad’s brother’s 94th birthday. MAtt died in 2014 at the age of 84. In many ways Matt never recovered from the trauma he experienced during the Great Depression. My father and him were very different men which might be because they had different fathers. Although I believe it was because my dad was saved by mother’s love and loyalty. That love grounded my father and gave him the emotional security to be an introspective and empathetic man. My Dad and his brother were alike in one aspect, they both needed to escape their past.

Below is the chapter from the Green and Pleasant Land that describes the day 94 years ago Matt was born in a slum in Bradford.

 The Green & 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.

It is a brilliant read and an important history of working-class life- during a time before the Welfare State. It is so important now that people own their working-class history because democracy in the 21st century has become more about giving the good life to its top-income earners at the expense of everyone else.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. 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. So many of us lose so much time on the important work that must be done because of the mad scramble to pay the rent and feed oneself during an economic crisis not seen since the 1930.

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The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter Eleven:

Acrimony was ripe for picking during the last few weeks of Mum's pregnancy in September 1930. My parents harvested the bitter fruits of their failed marriage and served my sister and me a daily feast of their loathing for each other.

On the 24th of September, my mother went into labour, and Alberta fetched the midwife. I stayed with my mother, who moaned in birthing pain whilst lying on a filthy flock mattress until the midwife arrived.

During Mum's labour; Dad, Alberta and I were marooned in the kitchen. Dad sat stoned-faced on a stool that faced an empty stove.

Dad only broke his silence once during that day. It was after he grew irritated with me when accidentally during horseplay I hit my sister. "Good men never hit women."

After hours of listening to my mother curse the midwife and the midwife curse my mother back, all of us- finally, heard the screams of a young life arriving into this world.

The midwife yelled for us to come and see the new addition to the family. Dad did not leave his stool.

But my sister and I came to our mother and marvelled at our baby brother.

My mother named him Matthew after his biological father, ensuring my dad would reject him outright.

Not long after Matt’s birth, our unhappy family did a midnight flit from Chesham Street because of rent arrears and ended up in a miserable slum called St Andrew's Villas. The new neighbourhood was fraught with itinerant labourers, unemployed mill workers, former soldiers from the Great War and struggling pensioners.

My parents paid a reduced rent under the agreement; we cleaned the common areas, including the outdoor privy, which stank as if it had been in use since the Doomsday Book.

As in Chesum Street, the other doss house neighbours were led to believe our dad was our granddad. It was a necessary deception in my mother's scheme to find another man to provide for us. My dad went along with it reluctantly. But I was shamed not only by my dad's surrender to his debasement but also by my acceptance of it when I started calling him "Grandad" in public.

St Andrew's Villa had a common room where I became acquainted with the other tenants. Once they had been workers, drawn salaries, and had pride in their accomplishments. But the Great Depression ground their self-worth into factory floor waste. Some were accepting of this fate, exile from the working world whilst others were angry about it. Mr Brown was one of the angry ones.

Brown had been a soldier in the Great War, and he was pissed off that the land fit for heroes had turned out to be bollocks. There were a few other veterans of World War One, who lived under our roof, and they looked to Brown for leadership and guidance. He knew what to say when shell shock overcame them. He went to their rooms when they screamed at night, "GAS, GAS,” or cried for a dead comrade blown to nothing from artillery.

Brown was a chain smoker and the brand he smoked advertised itself as World Famous. To prove it, inside each packet of cigarettes, they placed a national flag printed on a silk card from a country that sold their brand.

Each time, Brown opened a fresh packet of cigarettes he'd give me the silk card inside.

At bedtime, while my baby brother cried and my parents quarrelled; I'd stare at the flags on those silk cards and wonder what those countries looked like and whether kids were as poor there as I was in Bradford.

                 **********************

The first seven years of my life were just one episode of calamity and despair. It was a tumble of events, not of my making. I was a child who if I wanted to survive had to grow up quickly to defend myself in a world gone feral from economic collapse.  

I was weaned on death, grief, homelessness, hunger, familial discord and parents shamed by their inability to survive in the inhospitable financial climate of the 1930s.  

It was too much to absorb emotionally for me at seven. Yet all that I experienced and witnessed during those formative years of development grew in me, wrapped around my heart as if were a tumour of dysfunction.

It was all too much to take in for a bairn what I had lived through. I didn't even notice until it was too late that by the autumn of 1930, my dad had only months left to be in my life. He was being turned into a ghost and I was helping it happen because I didn't fight for him. I chose, perhaps not openly but subconsciously food on my plate before loyalty to him in my heart. I was overwhelmed then with hunger and despondency. I failed to notice that my mother's machinations to replace my dad with someone who could feed us were finally ready to be harvested.

Bill Moxon was trouble for my family- the moment he took a room in the doss where we lived in St Andrew's Villas.

He was a cowman who worked on a dairy farm- located a few miles outside of Bradford.

My mother developed an affinity for Bill because he was young, tall, handsome and thick as a plank. all the things my dad was not. Mum knew how to appeal to his vanity and pretend she was subservient to him. He was putty in my mother's hands and too dumb to know- he was being cast as the new breadwinner for our family.

No one in the doss gossiped about her affair with Bill because they were under the impression told to them by us that my dad was our grandfather.

In their minds, why shouldn't a "young widow," have a bit of comfort during these "troubling times."

I don't think even Bill Moxon was aware of the ruse my mother had constructed to side line my father to find a man- who could feed her and her children.

My father, however, did know, and it humiliated him. He had borne so many indignities since he had become disabled from his mining accident in 1928. He took much of it in stride. But, after two years of enduring unemployment, homelessness, seeing his children starve, and me being pressed into child labour, my dad's last straw was being ordered by my mother to take lodgings in the doss house attic.

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He asked why, and my mother said, "Bill is moving in with me because you aren't a man anymore."

Mum also let my sister and I know we'd be sharing that damp, lightless attic with our father. According to my mother, it was to keep Dad company but it was because Bill couldn't stand children. If Moxon had his way, my brother Matt would have joined us. But he was still being breastfed, so stayed with them.

After my mum told my dad his fate. He walked away from my mother and went down to the common room to be alone.

After some time, my mother asked my sister and me to check on our father. We went to the common room, opened the door and found him sitting quietly on a chair with his pipe clenched between his teeth.

I called him. But he didn't answer.

Then- while standing at the top of the stairs, my mother called to him. She said that it was best he went to bed. Her voice triggered him, and a roar of outrage exploded from his mouth.

“I am betrayed; I am cheated.”

Dad charged up the stairs. He held a small knife in his hand used to clean his pipe. Its base was shaped like a miner's boot and that last memento from my father’s working life down in the pits. The blade would have had trouble causing a paper cut, let alone wounding someone. But at that moment, my Dad did want to physically hurt my mother and cut her for the thousands of wounds he thought he had endured as her husband. When he reached the top of the stairs, he lunged at my mother.

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Mum easily overpowered my father and pushed him to the floor. Dad remained there for a long while and sobbed quietly, his anger spent.

The commotion stirred the other tenants, and their doors crept ajar.

The next morning, my mother sent me to the butcher to get two ounces of roast beef. “For your father.”

At tea time, my father cut slivers of the meat and shared them with my sister and me while my mother fed Matt and tried to pretend that nothing had happened to our family.

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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