Thanksgiving or the need for cheer before the austere gloom from a winter of discontent.

Chapter Five. "Who is the cock of thee."

It is Thanksgiving in the USA.  There is a wonderment to a thanksgiving dinner. It contains all the elements of life: nostalgia, dysfunction, love, enmity, humour, lust, spite, and moments of intense caring for other human beings.  My dad liked festive dinners, whether it be Christmas or celebrations of other special events because he didn’t have any while growing up.

The feast for Bradford’s catholic poor was held in a gymnasium owned by the Saint Vincent De Paul Society. When we were inside, a nun gathered us in prayer. We, the destitute, the unloved and the unlucky, gave thanks to the ever-watchful Jesus. Silently, I prayed that the nuns were in a forgiving mood this day. I did not want my ear pulled or my backside bruised by their love for discipline in the name of the Lord.

We sat on long bench tables and ate our Christmas meal which consisted of stringy poultry, spuds, and pudding. The gravy was thin, and the food tasted of lost hope.

 A priest with a tubercular cough wearing a dingy Father Christmas suit arrived after the meal. He presented each of us with an orange and a pair of socks. The priest was impatient and irritable with us because he enjoyed drinking more than children.

At home, I found my father upstairs in the attic. It was cold because there was no coal fire up there.

“Happy Christmas, lad, sorry there weren’t much for thee and thy sister. Next year, hey son, next year…” The Green and Pleasant Land

My dad understood the reasons for Thanksgiving feasts because if you were lucky, it was a chance for at least one paltry occasion per year to feel sated with food, companionship, and love. For the poor and almost poor these feasts are  fleeting and so fast gone. They disappear from us  like our lives. But they are  necessary to keep hope alive especially when a winter of austerity awaits too many of us.

In the 21st century where capitalism is now  unbridled, a Thanksgiving feast or Christmas dinner is the same as it was for the peasant in the Middle Ages. It is a moment to celebrate that we live to die on another day. It’s just that day for many of us looms closer and closer like a car tailgating us on an empty roadway.

There are over 36 million who are classified as poor by the American census bureau. But I’d double that number or triple it because if you work two jobs and need food stamps to get by, you are poor like it was in the 1930s. There are millions of dead from Covid around the world that shouldn’t be and wouldn’t be were it not for the fascists that control many of our economies now. Let’s be honest with ourselves fascism won in the USA, the UK, in many parts of Europe, and it is winning in Canada. Capitalism’s trajectory was always going to be fascism because when you celebrate profit without the responsibility of fairly sharing it, you create authoritarian states controlled by those few who own most of the capital.

My dad knew this,

Poverty persists, lingers, and haunts the streets of my youth with its eternal hand of inequality, shortening the lives of many in this great city. Too many are still in need of affordable housing, but this is not unique to Bradford it is as ubiquitous as the rain because every town and city in our nation aches from austerity. None of this will change if Governments in London listen to the siren song of hedge funds and the 1% who fight our nation’s need for more tax revenues from our most affluent citizens and corporations. Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future

It's why my dad was thankful for the Welfare State. It allowed him to have a life that was denied to so many from his generation and the generations before him.

He never stopped asking the question, until the very end of his time,  “Did I do good?” He asked this because my dad had  survivor’s guilt. It is  something I share with him as I am the last of my kind now.

But those questions about his purpose and utility became less frequent as he came closer to his end. By November 24th, his mind began to wander down a pathway of delirium that he rarely was able to escape from. His delirium was exacerbated by sharing an ICU room with a patient who was allowed a tv but strangely not a headset.

This patient’s viewing pleasures seeped into my dad’s consciousness. In the early hours of the morning of November 24, 2018; the ICU nurses' station phoned me to say my dad thought the war was on. 

1:09 AM · Nov 24, 2018

Had to rush to the hospital. Harry was highly agitated and confused. He's calm now and sleeping. I will sleep in the chair beside him.

2:30 AM-Nov 24, 2018

It took me so long to calm him down and convince him that he didn’t need to “man the guns against enemies overhead.”

I talked to my dad so gently throughout that morning, but he was so hungry that it contributed to his loss of reason.

“Fuck it. I am knackered, you groaned.” Then you drifted into a sleep agitated by the tremors and jerks. It was side effects from a strong inhaled steroid medication that your doctors hoped would eradicate the phlegm congealing in your lungs and suffocating you.

Minutes later, you woke choking. “Do you want me to vacuum the gob caught in the back of your throat?” You nodded yes. So, using a small suction device attached to the side of your bed, I removed sputum that you couldn't swallow or spit out.

Suddenly, you threw off your blankets and cried hoarsely, “Get me out of here.” “I can’t,” I responded. “Let me eat something or kill me for Christ’s sake. You’re an arsehole, you know that.” “Just a bit of bread and butter for your old man, eh.” “What can it hurt, son?” You began banging your table and chanting, “fish and chips, chips and fish.” It hurt because I knew eighty-five years ago, in a doss house in the grimmest part of Bradford, you made the same passioned plea for “fish and chips, to your mum. But there was nowt for your tea because your dad was unemployed.

“Water,” you pleaded with me. The best I could do was apply a small sponge that was damp with ginger ale to your lips, tongue, and sides of your mouth. You sucked on it. The action reminded me of when a wounded bird takes nutrients from an eyedropper. It reminded me all too much of when Peter was dying in 2009, and even a ventilator couldn’t keep his lungs breathing. He was also denied water, by his doctors, except if it was on a dampened sponge.

I caressed your head. I knew this ten-year-long road we’ve been on is coming to its end. Death is stealing you from me, and I will be alone. I Stood With Harry

His blood pressure was low- so my dad's body temperature plummeted. He was becoming as cold as death.

2:40 PM · Nov 24, 2018

Being wrapped up in an inflatable blanket which is warmed by a hot air fan because Harry's temp has dropped, he says "I feel like a pig in a blanket."

I had one of those blankets on the first night right after my cancer operation in 2020 because my blood pressure was low like my father’s had been two years previous.

During that stay in the hospital for my cancer operation, because I have only known people I love to die in a hospital, I wondered if my time was up. Sardonically, I thought if I did die, I would end up dumped in a plague pit.

 It was understandable Covid was raging, the world was in lockdown, and the hospital I was in looked like something out of the movie Contagion. I think, unlike my dad- when I die, I won’t brawl with it like a Barnsley lad crying out in a schoolyard, "One, Two, Three, who is the cock of thee.”

But you, dad, were angry at death when it came. If you could, you would have fought the grim reaper off with the broken end of a beer bottle. That is how you fought your mum’s boyfriend after you witnessed him strike her. You were ten years old, malnourished, “skin on bone,” as you said, from a diet of bread and drippings. But that didn’t stop you from standing up to a bully. There was no bullshit to you. You jumped into the fray when an underdog was being attacked. But death had you in his grasp, and he wasn’t going to let you go because you were five years short of a hundred. You were too old and too sick to fight death. I Stood With Harry

6:15 AM · Nov 24, 2018

6:15 here. I will leave soon and grab 2 hours of sleep and be back. As far as I can see, he slept for 4 hours

Thank you for reading this. As Elon Musk is running Twitter- I have no idea how long the platform can survive. It is why I put together on substack the Tweets from the week my father lay dying in a hospital in November 2018. I want to preserve all those thousands of tweets made on the Harry’s Last Stand account because they speak of a time and a place when we could have stopped fascism. It is his history, my history and your history in many ways too. Your solidarity with me as a subscriber to my substack is so appreciated.

Take care, John.