September 1, 1939 or today "Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies;"
It doesn't feel right that it is already September 1st. If I am lucky, decent weather will remain in my part of the country for another six weeks. That's not long, and then the autumn rains will come, and eventually, snow will fall. If it were only the change of seasons, I'd not be as pessimistic as I am today. But with each new day, the West stumbles onwards to its Gethsemane. History and instinct tell me either war or societal collapse is on the horizon. Anyway, the cards are dealt; it always comes up for fascism at the moment, which could be because of the American election coming in November.
Long ago on this day, Europe was plunged into war by Hitler in 1939. The war won against the Nazis in 1945 was supposed to prevent that from happening again. Yet, here we are on the cusp of conflict in Europe, the Mideast and Asia. This time, the wars raging now, and the big ones to come are of our own making. We have become the heart of darkness.
Considering the date, I am republishing the excerpt from The Green and Pleasant Land about- the 1st of September 1939. By the way, the quoted section of today’s tile is from W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939.
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 His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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. I am aiming to have it wrapped up in October. It's arduous but important work and I need to get it right because I will only have one shot at a publisher for this.
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The Green & Pleasant Land
September 1939
Summer 1939 was long, lazy, and filled with abundant sunshine. I didn’t see much sunlight because I worked 12 hours per day as a manager for, Grosvenor’s at their Halifax Arcade location. But when I was free of work, I spent my time aimlessly chasing girls or loafing outside with friends in city parks. My mates and I were unconcerned with the threat of war on the continent. It was far away and my world for the first time felt secure because I was employed. I was a man at sixteen; who was beginning to free himself of a past that included extreme poverty, hunger, homelessness, the dissolution of my family from death and the Great Depression.
I still lacked self-confidence because of my upbringing and spotty education, but I hid it well from others.
I left the sphere of my family's dysfunction without regret. Well perhaps, I had one regret, and that was how my once close relationship with my sister Mary became distant.
She now worked far away in Bradford and developed a circle of friends not to my taste.
I had made an uneasy truce with my mum. A few times, I went to Boothtown Road for a meal or to spend the odd night amidst familiar arguments and discord.
On September 1st, at seven in the morning, I was at work, preparing the food displays for the end-of-week customers. When eight o'clock struck, the store filled with customers who were generally servants for the well-to-do shopping for their masters' lunch and tea. They were an army of subservience with hair wrapped in kerchiefs, while their hands tightly gripped, mesh bags filled with victuals for their employers. Neither the women nor I knew that earlier in the morning, the German army had launched an unyielding assault against Poland. It was still so far away that we were not aware that while we were preparing for our weekend, Stuka bombers tore apart Warsaw or that Nazi panzer divisions had chewed up the Polish cavalry like it was me grinding meat into mince.
It was not until late afternoon that news about the German assault seeped into Halifax and Grosvenor’s. The implications were still uncertain to us. After work, I met up with my mates Roy, Doug, and Eric. We talked about the German invasion but dismissed it as more smoke and shite. We thought the blowhards in government would solve it as they had in the past, through endless talk and endless blather. I was more interested in hearing about a dance coming up the following week in Bradford. It was not until Sunday morning that I learned the true extent of Friday’s invasion. I was at my mother’s, huddled around the radio with her boyfriend Bill Moxon. This time, even my mum was quiet while the Prime Minister explained to an anaesthetized population that we were now at war.
Bill Moxon said, “We’re in the shit now, lad, we are in the shit.”
Outside, I heard neighbours opening their doors as if the cold-water shock of war’s declaration drove them to be with their fellow citizens on the streets.
Within weeks, we were issued national identity cards, which tracked our residences and our movements. Barrage balloons obscured the horizon above, while below, at street level sandbags as tall as hills were positioned around government offices.
War had come, and 18-year-old young men were already signing up for the services. They were being trained for death and combat. I knew the war would not end before my eighteenth birthday, in 1941. I dreaded the notion of becoming a government number pushed out to defend our homeland and ending up maimed or dead.
As for my friends; Eric knew that being a tool and die-maker, he was considered essential to the war effort and would not be required to don a uniform. Eric tried his best not to upset any managers, as he preferred to remain at his lathe grinding the instruments of war for the Army, Navy, and RAF, rather than hold a gun. Doug Butterworth’s heart was literally not in it for war. He had a slight murmur that left him bedridden for days on end. So he knew he would serve as best he could at home. As for Roy Broadbent, the gentle giant who stood over six feet four inches, he insisted the only choice for him was the Cold Stream Guards.
When my friends asked me what branch I would join. I told them I was not sure.
But I leaned towards serving in the RAF. I couldn’t swim, which made a stint in the Navy seem to me a prescription for death. As for the army, my feet were flat. I remembered too many soldiers from the Great War who shared rooms with us in doss houses, who had been gassed or driven mad by the pounding of artillery for me to have any romantic notion of regimental life.
The atmosphere in Halifax during the first few weeks and months of the war was relaxed. The population was almost in a party mood as this phoney war had altered the city’s drab, nomenclature. It gave the city- a sense of excitement without the preconditions of pain and suffering. We now lived with air raid wardens, blackouts, and sirens that announced phantom bombing raids that never blemished Halifax. Most of us thought it mad that the Luftwaffe would desire to bomb Halifax; how strategic was a drab, mill town? But the British government dictated that all buildings of importance were to be guarded against the Teutonic danger droning above the clouds.
By government decree, Grosvenor's Grocers organized civilian air raid wardens to protect their warehouse against fire and destruction caused by explosives dropped from the sky.
My employer recruited me to be one of Grosvenor’s air raid wardens. I was provided with a gas mask, tin helmet, and buckets of sand to battle against the mighty Nazi Air Force.
For the first year of the war, I did my air raid warden duties three evenings per week at the company's warehouse on the moors overlooking Halifax. I'd scan the skies looking for the airborne armada that never came for Halifax and at dawn return home for a few hours kip before starting my shift at the Arcade.
The war progressed through its phoney stages while I managed the store, played fireman, and wooed girls at dances on Saturday nights.
The war began to envelop us and it was inescapable because it ate the young, old and anyone in its way with an insatiable appetite for death and destruction.
In 1940, my sister married an infantryman who thought the war would be like a brawl outside a pub. He went off to basic training while she remained at Low Moor, working at the mill. He would go to France and find himself at Dunkirk where he waited for rescue while being relentlessly bombed from the air. When he eventually made it back, people who knew him said Charlie was never the same after what he saw at Dunkirk. “It buggered up his his head.”
I thought a lot about shell-shocked Charlie and what happened to him after Dunkirk, whilst I waited for the inevitable letter from the government calling me to do battle for the King and bloody country. In some dreamy moments, I looked at the war as an escape, a diversion from the world of my parents and my ancestors. However, I watched the newsreels and heard the gossip on the street; this war was a deadly business that wanted to leave millions upon millions either dead or broken up.
The people of the British Isles were asked to stand against an enemy who threatened our way of life. The question for me was- did I want to fight and likely die for a country that had forced millions of people into destitution in the 1930s and destroyed my family?
I had no reason in 1940 to sacrifice my life for a country that sacrificed my childhood so that the rich could live an entitled life.
My employer, the Quaker, was bound by his faith to reject every war as unjust and unnecessary. He came to me in 1940 and offered me a bargain. If I became a Quaker; he would stand before the military and attest that my religious beliefs deemed me a conscientious objector, unfit to serve. My employer told me if I did this that when he died, he would leave me partial ownership of his shop as he was childless.
I contemplated his offer, but in the end, I refused it. I was not going to stand before a military hearing and swear it was Jesus and my love for the Almighty who commanded me to refuse the King’s shilling.
After years of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of nuns and priests, I would rather take my chances in the amoral world at war. My odds of surviving the war seemed greater than the blind hypocrisy force-fed to me as a hungry child by a predatory Catholic Church.
In spring, the Low Countries were overrun- and German troops poured into France and battled to the death with Britain’s Expeditionary army. That settled it for me; I knew my fortunes were with the RAF.
In late autumn, I asked my mother if I could return home until I was called to war. She happily agreed. The extra rent money jingled lovingly in her purse. My mother enjoyed boasting to the neighbours about me, her eldest son.
“That’s right, Luv, he’s a manager at Grosvenor’s. My lad is no fool. He’s a brave one too. 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 to knock on their doors.”
In December 1940, just before Christmas- I took a bus to the RAF recruitment centre in Huddersfield. I arrived at the drab Recruitment Office on the city’s high street. The regional headquarters was filled with banks of typewrites and sallow men in woollen uniforms. I showed the duty sergeant my resident ID and proclaimed loudly that I was volunteering for the RAF. I was ushered into another room, where I filled out a brief questionnaire about my education, my occupation, my residence, and my religion. I wrote: Left school at 14, Grocer’s Assistant, Roman Catholic. I was five feet four inches, and 130 pounds. The RAF gladly took me as a volunteer. There was little else they could choose from as our island was being strangled to death in the Atlantic and in Africa. It was scarcely- six months before I took the King's shilling that France fell and surrendered to Hitler. All of continental Europe was either in the hands of the Nazis or the Soviets, who had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. The war effort needed anyone who could walk into a recruiting centre and sign their life away on the dotted line.
In 1940, I spent my Christmas at Doug Butterworth’s home because I couldn’t stomach my mother’s antics over the holidays. I reasoned this might be my last Christmas, and I might as well enjoy it with a real family. Over Christmas, I briefly saw Mary. I brought her a present of fresh meat from Grosvenor’s.
The New Year passed without excitement, and after the holidays, my employer begged me to reconsider my moral opinion on the war. “Stay with us and be a conscientious objector,” he argued. Why should I not be spared? Why should I not be given God’s grace of both a long life and a white smock serving the overflow of Halifax? I politely declined. I only asked that he keep my job open for me when all this war nonsense ended.
My birthday was a quiet affair. Roy had already left to join the Cold Stream Guards, and Butterworth was ill again and had taken to his bed with a quivering heart. I did not want to spend my last birthday, perhaps my last days on Earth with Eric. His fast talk about the money he was making in selective war service sickened me.
Instead, I decided to indulge myself- with a visit to the public baths located at the top of Boothtown Road. I arrived and paid an attendant 50p. It was a privilege to soak in a warm bath rather than a tin tub filled with tepid water in a kitchen. A female attendant led me along a narrow passageway until she found an unoccupied room. Inside the narrow, wood-lined space was a hanger for one’s clothes, and a deep, porcelain, bathtub. The attendant placed a plug into the bath. She turned the taps on until the bath was filled with warm water. When finished, she closed the door behind her. I undressed and submerged myself in the clean hot water. I was empty of thoughts or cares until the water grew cold, and it was time to dry myself, dress, and depart.
Afterwards, I spent some hours with Mary, who had come down to Halifax to bid me farewell. We did not talk much. We sipped our ale. We held each other’s hands on the table. We looked into each other’s faces, seeing if we could read our past upon them. She joked and bantered more than me because I was withdrawn and frightened about what tomorrow would bring.
There was no one and nothing which 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 went to the kitchen. My mother was sitting alone, warming herself 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 me a large slice of fresh bread. There was a generous lather of butter and jam on it.
“Go on, tuck in. Well, lad, this is it. Keep your head down, Harry. Don’t do anything daft because life is short, my boy, life is short.”
I hugged her with mixed emotions. I mumbled farewell and made my way to the train station.
The train platform was deserted and I waited alone for my train to Padgate, The day was cold, damp, and grey. Sweet smoke from the McIntosh Toffee factory fell like drizzle across the station. I reached into my overcoat and found a near-empty packet of cigarettes. I placed one in my mouth and furiously struck a match, inhaling the harsh tobacco.
In the distance, I heard the whistle of the train. I smelled the coal burning off its engine. I breathed in the coal dug from the pits of Barnsley, Elsecar, and Barley Hole. I tasted it in my mouth, around my teeth, and on my tongue. It was the soot of my father, my grandfather, and all my ancestors who laboured beneath the ground. As the train drew its way into the belly of the station, another passenger approached the platform. He was a man in his fifties, long past the time for war, and he was whistling the tune, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…”
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