The first seven years of my life were equal parts calamity, mayhem and despair because I came from the working class during a Cost of Living Crisis.

Keir Starmer doesn’t want to talk about the working class, the struggling classes and the abandoned classes because to do so makes a lie of every economic policy he wants to put forward to fix Brexit Britain. Harry Leslie Smith knew a thing or two about being from the working class and how easily one could be destroyed when the work dried up. Below is Chapter Eleven from his unpublished Green and Pleasant Land. A memoir of working class life in the early 20th century before the Welfare State. It was a time that should be ancient history but thanks to neoliberalism it will become a lived experience for many in the 21st century.

Chapter Eleven:

The first seven years of my life were equal parts calamity, mayhem and despair.

It was a tumble of events as ferocious as a rock slide deep in the bowels of colliery. My sister Marion- dead from TB. My dad made an invalid from a work injury in the pits. His fruitless search for work across Yorkshire. Our midnight flits one step ahead of the bailiffs.

The intense hunger that made me like so many children of my time, dig through rubbish bins of restaurants for food like stray dogs. My family, mum, dad, me, Alberta and baby brother Matthew, living in one doss rooms across the slums of Bradford.

It was all too much to take in for a bairn. I didn't even notice until it was too late that by autumn 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 because I was forced to work as a beer barrow boy rather than attend to my school lessons. I was overwhelmed by emotional and economic events that were destroying the working class world around me. So, 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 is young, tall, handsome and thick as a plank. 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.

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. It ‘s 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.

 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.

During these past 24 months, I have posted 245 essays, as well as excerpts from the unpublished works of Harry Leslie Smith - along with chapter samples from my book about him. My newsletter has grown from a handful of subscribers to 1200 in that period. Around 10% of you are paid members. I appreciate all of you but ask if you can switch to a paid subscription because your help is NEEDED to keep me housed and Harry Leslie Smith's legacy relevant. But if you can't all is good too because we are sharing the same boat.  Take care, John.

Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. His life's journey was a voyage most of his working-class generation undertook. It began in poverty was consumed by war then in peace was renewed with purpose and kindness by the elimination of want through the creation of the Welfare State. It wasn’t an easy road taken but my dad like his generation knew- socialism was the only path to take.

5 books were written before Harry Leslie Smith died in November 2018. However, there was a large book unfinished at the time of his death which he titled the Green and Pleasant Land. It’s working class Remembrance of things Past as well as a political testament in defence of the Welfare State. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards my father left behind. It is almost ready for publication. If I wasn’t in such a scramble to keep a roof over my head, I think it would have been done by now. But to be fair to myself, I have gotten much done over these last few years despite a worldwide pandemic, and my own severe health limitations including a bad bout of cancer in 2020. Below is a selection from the Green and Pleasant Land where Harry Leslie Smith is a 24 years old and involuntarily repatriated to England from allied occupied Germany as punishment for marrying a German woman.

If you are financially able and willing, please upgrade to a paid subscription because the grind of life has been most difficult on me as of late. I’d like to finish the work I set out with my dad Harry Leslie Smith and complete these cycle of books for him. They have merit and are important considering our current political struggles against fascism and a 1% who seek to return us to a hard scrabble existence that even Dickens couldn’t imagine.