2025 feels like an alternate history, as if the things that matter to our lives were decided without our knowledge or consent. It has become a ‘take it or leave it’ reality. Except we can leave it—if ordinary people unite and resist together with one goal: to defeat the billionaires and the fascists who rule our destinies. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be far easier than living in this dystopia.
Much of my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, his history of working-class life from 1923–1945, holds to that theme: the good that happens when ordinary people band together because they have had enough of being fodder for war or profit for the few.
Chapter Twenty-Nine in The Green and Pleasant Land may be the last chapter I present here before sending the manuscript to the publishers. It is a powerful chapter about how war often arrives quietly at first, creeping into ordinary lives before revealing its full, destructive force. For my father’s generation, the 1940s meant that destruction, fear, and sacrifice became the new normal. This chapter offers a glimpse of those early days. It’s about the year before my father was called up to serve, and how everything was being reshaped by the war, from work, relationships, social behaviour and ideological beliefs.
(It’s always appreciated)
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Green And Pleasant Land
Bit by bit, my generation sank into the mire of war. Destruction and death became a normal part of everyday life.
My friend Roy departed Halifax for training with the Coldstream Guards at the beginning of 1940. Roy asked if, should something happen to him, I would ensure his mother was all right.
I said I would do my best. Then, I joked that he could return the favour if I didn’t come home from the war by caring for my mother.
“I’d rather you had asked me to care for a box of snakes.”
During our last pint together, I let him speak reverently about the King and Country. I didn’t bother to argue with Roy about the perfidy of patriotism. None of us knew who would be left standing after it was done.
Unlike Roy, I could still find no reason in my heart or head to die for Britain. It had sacrificed my childhood to ensure the entitled lives of the rich went on uninterrupted by the economic crisis following the 1929 Bank Crash. I wasn’t alone in this thinking.
Initially, there wasn’t much enthusiasm among the working class for the war. It’s hard to appreciate “democracy” or the need to defend it if you barely make ends meet, can’t afford to own property, or retire in old age and live out your last years with some dignity.
Secretly, I wished the war would end long before my eighteenth birthday, so I wouldn’t have to register for military service.
However, the war was progressing at such a rapid pace that it even caught up with Alberta.
“Her Charlie,” the man she’d been dating for a few months, got her pregnant. He tried to do a runner by joining the army. But Mum found out and marched down to the base where he was stationed and had it out with him.
Charlie married Alberta that April. It was a registry ceremony in Bradford. My mother attended, but I didn’t because it was a workday. Dad wasn’t invited because my family still stuck to the lie that he had died long ago.
When Mum returned from the service, she said her new son-in-law was trouble for Alberta.
“There is something off about him, even if he wore army togs.”
Not long after Charlie was evacuated from the shores of Dunkirk, the Blitz began, bringing the Second World War home to Britain. Up North, it had still seemed like a newsreel war for most. Then by autumn, the war slammed into Yorkshire with the force of an angry gale blowing in off the coast.
The sky above me was clear and crisp. It was full of stars, but the moon was absent. I thought it would be like all of my previous shifts on the moors, where, in the morning, my logbook report statement would read,
“No enemy activity over section.”
It wasn’t to be that night.
In the distance, I heard an explosion and then saw a flash erupt in Halifax several miles away.
Above me, the drone of a lone aircraft flying away was audible.
I didn’t know what would happen next. I was scared and excited by the event. I worried that more Luftwaffe bombers were nearby, ready to hit the heart of Halifax. If there was another raid that night, I didn’t know if my friends or my family would be hurt or killed in it. I was also scared that perhaps the Luftwaffe was on its way to attack me, standing guard alone at the Grosvenor’s food warehouse.
I wanted to leave my post but knew I couldn’t. I craved a cigarette but was afraid to break the blackout and perhaps signal to the Luftwaffe that there was a target below asking to be bombed.
At dawn, I anxiously rode my bike to work. There, I learned how deadly the night was for Halifax. Eleven people on Hanson Lane were killed by a hundred-pound bomb dropped by a Heinkel.
A week later, Sheffield was bombed as heavily as London. Over one terrible night, the steelworks were obliterated and over 600 civilians were killed. I asked my civil defence leader if I could be sent to Sheffield to help with rescue efforts, but was told to remain in Halifax because another, larger air attack might be imminent.
Attitudes among the working class began to shift when Labour joined Churchill’s National Government in 1940, giving many a sense of a seat at the table. The mood of “we were all in it together” would later be reinforced in 1941, when William Beveridge, a Liberal Lord, was commissioned to produce a report outlining what Britain should look like economically and socially after the war.
Labour politicians and left-wing tabloids hinted that the forthcoming Beveridge Report could become Britain’s blueprint for a modern welfare state, promising to eliminate poverty. Although it wouldn’t be presented to Parliament until 1942, talk of post-war reform helped bolster working-class support for the war. The idea that defeating Hitler might secure a future free of want for themselves and their loved ones gave ordinary workers something tangible to fight for, alongside the contributions of American Lend-Lease.
On my eighteenth birthday in 1941, a letter arrived from the government notifying me I would be called up for military service before my nineteenth birthday. Or I could volunteer before 31 December 1941 and choose which branch of the military to join. I didn’t know what I would do. However, in June, after Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Stalin by invading Russia, it seemed impossible to avoid being drawn into the war. Now, no young person could escape the war, willingly or unwillingly. But there was an out I was offered.
During the autumn, Mr Grosvenor suggested an alternative to volunteering. Grosvenor was a Quaker, bound by his faith to reject all wars as unjust. He advised:
“Become a Quaker like me.”
He promised to vouch for my conversion and to attest before a military board that I was unfit to serve. He also promised that I would inherit partial ownership of his shop because I was “like a son to him.” I considered the offer, but ultimately declined. I didn’t believe in God, but I did know that fascism was an evil my generation must extinguish. Also, I wanted so much to change the trajectory my life was taking. Going to war seemed the only option.
Within months, newspaper headlines on chalkboards in front of shops reported deadly Luftwaffe raids on Britain, the encirclement of Leningrad, and the fall of Kiev. We were not winning the war, and things were bleak. Then, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December changed everything. With the US now in the war, the mood in Britain shifted slightly towards optimism — perhaps we might survive to see peace return to our lives.
In December 1941, just before Christmas, I took a bus to the RAF recruitment centre in Huddersfield. The drab office on the high street was filled with banks of typewriters and sallow men in woollen uniforms. I showed the duty sergeant my identity card and declared I was volunteering for the RAF.
I was ushered into another room to complete a brief questionnaire about my education, occupation, residence, and religion.
I wrote: left school at 14, grocer’s assistant manager, Roman Catholic. I was five feet four inches tall and 130 pounds. I was soldier material. But the RAF gladly accepted me. There was little choice, as our island was under siege in the Atlantic and North Africa.
With all of continental Europe in Nazi hands, the war effort needed anyone who could walk into a recruiting centre and enlist. I was told to report to RAF Padgate the first week of January for square-bashing.
When I returned home, and for all of Christmas week, my mother refused to stop boasting to neighbours and shop clerks about my enlistment:
“My lad is a brave one. He went and joined the RAF. You know, the never-so-few lot, not like the rest of the lazy sods around here waiting for Hitler to come knocking on their doors.”
My last Christmas as a civilian was a quiet affair. Alberta stayed in Bradford because Charlie had recently gone AWOL from the army. He wasn’t yet listed as a deserter, and Alberta hoped he would return home and then surrender to the military police.
The day before I left for RAF induction and square-bashing, I indulged myself with a visit to the public baths at the top of Boothtown Road. I paid the attendant five pence (5d). It was a privilege to soak in a warm bath rather than a tin tub of tepid water at home. She led me along a narrow passage to an unoccupied, wood-lined room, which contained a hanger for clothes and a deep porcelain bathtub.
The attendant placed the plug, turned on the taps, and waited until the bathtub filled with warm water before departing. I undressed and submerged myself, empty of thoughts or cares, until the water cooled and it was time to dry off, dress, and leave.
Afterwards, I spent a few hours with Alberta, who had come down to Halifax to bid me farewell. We didn’t talk much, sipping our ale and holding hands across the table. We searched each other’s faces, trying to read our shared past. She joked and bantered more than I did; I was withdrawn, frightened of what tomorrow would bring.
No one and nothing could ease my sense of apartness from the civilian world. When it was time for my sister to leave, she kissed me.
“Come back safe, Harry, just come back.”
The following morning, I awoke with a jittery feeling, like it was a school morning. I dressed warmly and found my mother sitting alone by the oven. Bill had already gone to work, and Matt and Junior were at school. She made me a cup of tea and cut a large slice of fresh bread, generously spread with butter and jam.
“Go on, tuck in. Well, lad, this is it. Keep your head down, Harry. Don’t do anything daft — life is short.”
I hugged her with mixed emotions, mumbled farewell, and made my way to the train station.
The train platform was deserted, and I waited alone. The day was cold, damp, and grey. Sweet smoke from the Mackintosh’s Toffee factory drifted like drizzle across the station. I found a near-empty packet of cigarettes in my overcoat, lit one, and inhaled the harsh smoke.
In the distance, I heard the train whistle and smelled the coal burning from its engine. I tasted it on my tongue, in my mouth, and around my teeth — coal dug from the pits of Barnsley, Elsecar, and Barley Hole. As the train drew into the station, another passenger approached, a man in his fifties, long past his time for war, whistling:
“Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.”
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A Legacy Nearly Complete
Over the past 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.
The manuscript is now done, save for a few edits. It traces his life from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.
I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. We saw that yesterday when European Leaders grovelled around Trump at the White House at the fait accompli summit on Ukraine’s future. The fight for a better tomorrow for us will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.
Take care,
John
Always excellent