There is only the darkness of fascism if we exclude socialism from our politics.

So much potential, so much happiness, so much living is lost through capitalism's insistence that poverty is necessary for wealth creation. We became the broken eggs for the 1% omelette of excess. People are living the nightmare of lost hope in the 21st century because of neoliberalism's response to COVID-19, the cost of living crisis, the refugee, and the climate crisis. We live in bleak times. France is on the verge of becoming a nation as fascist as it was during the Vichy Repulic under Nazi occupation. Britain on Thursday will replace one incompetent right-wing neoliberal government with a more disciplined right-wing government. There is a genocide occurring in Gaza and a good chance that Israel will be at war in Lebanon within weeks which puts the world on the precipice for World War. And America has entered its Gerontocracy phase of empire where Joe Biden seems as vital as Brezhnev in his final years as Soviet leader.

Before my father died in 2018, he wanted to demonstrate by using the history of his life and working-class contemporaries born in the early 20th century -that without a return to socialist politics fascism and wealth inequality would destroy not just our society but civilisation itself.

His unfinished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project, along with the 5 other books written during those last years of his life, and the one I wrote after his death.

For the last year, I have been refining and editing The Green And Pleasant Land to meet my dad’s wishes. Below are more chapter excerpts from it.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Twenty-Five:

I started my search for full-time work in earnest the day after my trip to Blackpool with Alberta. To better ensure my chance of landing a full-time job, my sister lent me enough money to get kitted out at a used clothing store called Copley's located off of Halifax's High Street.

Initially, I didn't have much luck. I soon discovered a small army of other 14-year-old school leavers with better connections than me were taking all the help-wanted positions.

I was terrified at the prospect of not finding work and being forever in the orbit of my mother and her boyfriend Bill.

My choices of work were already predetermined by my class and the limited education provided by the state.

At fourteen, I could read, write, and do sums. Most importantly my teachers had attempted to indoctrinate me to believe that Britain had an eternal imperial destiny. Lessons about our Empire didn't stick because I despised it, the monarchy and the whole rotten system that held it together. Sadly knowing that you are being oppressed doesn't end the oppression. It just makes you conscious of whose boot is upon your neck.

At first, in misguided optimism, I applied for low-level clerical work in offices and banks. But I was laughed off their premises because I wasn't even a grammar school boy. I was only thought good enough for rough, underpaid labour like I had been doing, as the saying goes since I was in short pants.

There was no hope of becoming a clerk's apprentice in 1930s Britain for someone like me. There was a pecking order, and I was at the bottom of it.

I decided to try my luck finding an employer in Halifax's Arcade because I reasoned I had worked for off-licenses and grocers as a boy so I was suited for it in adulthood.

It wasn't work that appealed to me. But I was a member of the unskilled working class deemed less essential than a pack animal.

I went to the Arcade and noticed Grosvenor's Grocers had a Help Wanted sign on a post beside their booth. So, I went to the counter and talked to the owner about wanting to work for him.

He hired me as a barrow boy to transport meat and cheese from his main shop to the arcade stall throughout the day. When not pushing a cart, I was expected to keep his shop clean by pushing a broom or wiping down the countertops.

Mr Grosvenor was a Quaker but not one of quiet faith. He stressed that all his employees must have a similar commitment to the teachings of Jesus as he and his wife had. Reverence to Jesus was proved through working as hard as one could for the financial betterment of Grosvenor's grocers.

I pretended to agree and politely nodded my head because I was grateful for the work and the chance to show someone I was able, intelligent and determined to do what it took to make a living for myself.

My mother was pleased with the news of my full-time employment, and to show her appreciation upped the cost of my room and board I paid each week from my salary.

My new job and the limited independence it provided me moved me away from the past, from Barnsley, from Bradford and from digging through rubbish bins for my evening tea when the Great Depression was at its worst.

Shortly after I began working at Grosvenor's Alberta told me she was moving out of the house. Alberta had found better employment at a textile mill, in Low Moor, near Bradford. My sister said she wanted to be rid of her life with us. She couldn't stomach another minute living with our mother and Bill.

I was sworn to silence until Alberta found a room to let in Low Moor. She wanted to slip from our house on Boothtown Road as easily as a boat leaves its moorings for calm seas outside the harbour.

“I will be gone by the following Friday.”

Alberta said it with the dreaminess and selfishness of the newly paroled.

On the surface, I pretended to be happy for her. But deep down, I resented her for moving away. Alberta's leaving filled me with dread.

I was gutted by the prospect of her departure from my everyday life.

Together, my sister and I shouldered the same burden and the same memories of years spent fleeing debt and hunting for food. We were the only two who remembered our dad or spoke about our long-dead elder sister Marion.

I also had a creeping uneasiness about what would happen to Alberta once our mother learned about my sister's irrevocable departure for new pastures.

Chapter Twenty-Six:

The following Friday, true to her word, Alberta informed our mother she was moving out. The parting wasn't amicable, and it became acrimonious because years of harsh poverty don't make a family more united. It does the opposite and makes them more resentful of the other members in it.

Extreme poverty- just like extreme wealth makes for dysfunctional, unhappy families and individuals. It generally manifests itself as narcissism in the rich and self-loathing and a lack of confidence in those from poorer families.

Alberta left home on the day our room and board was to be paid to our mother. Weekly payment for our board was a ritual my sister and I had done every week since we became child labourers. Paying for our keep began at the age of seven for me and, for Alberta when she was ten.

My sister would have been pressed into work outside of our home at an earlier age were it not for my mother's need for assistance to do domestic chores in the many temporary lodgings we occupied until evicted for rent arrears.

The extent of my family's poverty and millions of others in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s was so immense that even kids forced into child labour to earn a few pennies to help their parents make the rent was sometimes not enough to keep a roof over their heads.

When our rent was due, my mother always sat in a rocking chair and waited for my sister and me to put our coins into her hands.

Normally I paid first, and then Alberta would follow. But on the day she moved out, my sister delayed her appearance as she tried to build the courage needed- to confront Mum with the news of her departure.

Mum enquired where my sister was. I pretended I didn't know.

Moments later, Alberta walked into our small parlour. She held in her right hand a small bag which contained the little clothing my sister owned.

“What’s this then?” asked my mother suspiciously. “What are you up to?

“Nothing, Mum,”

“Come on then, give me thy wages,” my mother demanded impatiently.

“Can’t, Mum,” Alberta replied defensively, almost meekly.

“Can’t? “Why can’t thee? Why the bloody hell can’t thee?” Mum said with rising anger.

“I am moving out,” Alberta said defiantly.

My mother rose from her chair. She lurched forward to within inches of my sister. She raised her right finger and began wagging it as she ranted.

“Like hell you are… How dare you move out.”

I can do what I want. And there’s no one to stop me. 

“You ungrateful bitch, screamed my mother.

Me, ungrateful?  Since I was four, I have been working like a fucking dog, for you. I was always by your side cleaning, cooking, or stealing food for our tea when Dad was let go from the pits. I was there for you even after you chucked our dad out on his ear and took up with Bill. I stood up for you when Bill tried to beat you after he came home pissed from the pub.

It’s was always, dependable bloody Alberta that's been by your side, I’ve had no bloody life because of you. I’ve gone to bed cold and fucking hungry because of you. I tended to Harry and Matt because you were not fit to help. Look at you now with another wee bugger on your tit.

Our mother panted with rage.

You know nowt about what I’ve done for thee. “Without me, you’d be in the workhouse or on streets.

Your dad, with his high ‘n mighty family; was no bloody help to me or you. Did any of them raise a finger when we were starving?

I’ve got blood on my hands, lass, from scraping and fighting for food for you and your bloody brothers,” Lillian retorted, her anger rising. “And now you come to me and say here’s the thanks; I am moving out. Mark me, Alberta, life will soon have you sorted- well and good.

“Good bloody luck; cause you’re going to need it; nowt is coming your way but misery. Bugger off then, leave your bloody mother, and leave your bloody brothers and good riddance to thee.”

Alberta looked at me and said with a weary smile,

Never mind, Harry When you’re ready, you can come live with me. Take care of yourself because Mam will be no bloody help to you.

My sister was seventeen and thought a better life was there for the taking if she moved out and away from our family. 

Sadly, Mum was right, my sister leaving home didn't emancipate her; it just chained her to a different misery.

After Alberta left my mother returned to her chair and rocked angrily back and forth, nearby Bill Junior wailed from hunger.

When Bill returned home from work that night, we dipped fried bread into fried eggs for our tea and ate without conversation.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

After Alberta moved out, I knew my time living with my mother, my brothers, and Bill was soon ending.

I wanted to leave home as quickly as I could and not look back. Nothing that happened from my birth in 1923 to 1937 made me think I was better off with my family than on my own.

The brutality of the Great Depression strangled any possibility that my family developed into an empathetic tribe for each other.

During my teenage years, I harshly blamed my mother for our family's destruction. I harboured resentment towards her because I saw my mother as the one who not only exiled my dad to living rough but had made my sister and me- accessories to this betrayal of him.

Shamed by my past, I developed anger and disgust for my Northern poverty. I despised myself because I believed others thought I sounded uneducated and unsophisticated because of my broad accent.

Actors and actresses on the screen all spoke with the diction of the South or with the voices of Americans. I was determined to forge a path for myself out of poverty. If my country refused to provide me the educational skills to do it, I'd find another way to get ahead.

I couldn't afford to go to school to improve my education. But I could afford the tuition to take elocution lessons at The Athenaeum Working Man’s Academy in Halifax. I was young enough and foolish enough to believe a posh accent would give me the velocity to escape the gravitational pull of my hard scrabble existence.

I thought having a "better" accent; one that didn't sound like it came from Barnsley and the rough streets of Bradford was my best chance to escape the destiny of a working-class lad who lacked family connections to enter a trade.

The Athenaeum was a cooperative learning centre for languages, pronunciation, diction, and self-improvement. The school was established by a collective of utopian cloth cutters in the 1890s to advance education for downtrodden young people.

The classes occurred in the evenings because those who enrolled at the Athenium were full-time workers. There were about nine of us in the class, and all the other students were at least four years older than me.

The other students were children of mill supervisors, greengrocers, or low-level clerks in banking and insurance.

The course consisted of breathing exercises, singing, warbling and endless repetition of phrases. The instructor manhandled my jaw as I repeated nursery rhymes. I was made to repeat the sounds of vowels and consonants while a metronome beat back and forth on the teacher's desk. I spent weeks at it. When alone, I recited poetry, read from newspapers or imitated dialogue from movies, I'd seen at the cinema.

I tried to erase how my ancestors and, folk were taught to speak and communicate for centuries. It was this mad and desperate hope that by altering the pattern of my speech I could erase the shame of eating from rubbish bins to keep alive as a boy.

Gradually, my speech pattern developed to a more neutral accent, which resembled the ‘neither from here nor there’ county. My workmates at Grosvenor's thought I was taking the piss out of them with my newly developed speech pattern. The owner with his profound reverence for God and self-improvement, applauded my efforts.

As my speaking voice became less my own, I became bolder. I was able to conceal- if only for brief moments, my poor education and my impoverished upbringing.

Near Christmas of that year, I met Alberta for lunch. She was amused at my futile attempts to erase my identity. To her, I was like so many from my class who had attempted this deception before. She called me Icarus at that lunch because she remembered the ancient myths of Greece our dad taught us when we lived with him in the attic of that Bradford Doss on St Andrew’s Villas. 

"The bloody toffs, are going to burn your wings to cinders." 

Alberta knew- having been disappointed by life more than me because she was older, that you can change your diction but never your history. You drag around the baggage from your past wherever you end up.

Chapter Twenty-Eight:

From 1937 until 1941, when I volunteered for the RAF, my workday mornings always began at 5:30 AM. At that hour, my mother woke our house like a sergeant major. She banged on pots and screamed. "Wakey, Wakey."

Downstairs in the kitchen, I drank strong tea with milk and sugar because in full-time work- my wages allowed me that simple luxury. To appease my appetite, I smoked half a cigarette for my breakfast. I saved the other half for my walk to Grosvenor's main shop- which was located near Halifax's town centre.

When I arrived at work, my task was to load a barrow with giant blocks of cheese cut from their wheels. Along with the cheese, I loaded the barrow with butter, bacon and shoulders of smoked pork, which needed to be delivered to Grosvenor's other shop at the Arcade on Commercial Street.

It was a beast of burden work, but I did it with youthful enthusiasm. On those mornings, I wielded my freight like an acrobat from road to pavement and back to road. I dodged with alacrity the shop girls, clerks and those with expensive suits who crowded my route.

When I arrived at the arcade, I unloaded my wares. Afterwards, I worked behind the meat counter and took customers' orders.

For six days a week, I worked 12 to 13 hours per day and believed myself lucky because I remember the long, lean years when my dad was unemployed.

At fourteen years old, whether my life was long or short; a destiny spread out before me as it had spread out before to all those in my family, living and dead. I was to be a pack animal for capitalism. In 1937, it horrified me and depressed me that my class predefined my future.

It was hard to express openly my opposition to this because, to the people I knew, it was expected and something to be endured. To want more than adequate wages to live a substandard life was considered getting above one's station. Britain's working classes were militant about getting the essentials for life. But they were cowed; when it came to demanding a life with as many pleasant experiences as the middle classes.

As best as I could, I tried not to think about what awaited me in my 20s or 30s if the politics of Britain didn't change.

Instead that year I developed friendships with three young men from backgrounds similar to mine. During the times, when I was working or reading books at the library I spent it with them because they were easy-going and like me wanted to forget the hunger from childhood caused by the Great Depression.  .

Eric Whitely was a year older than me and an apprentice engineer. Eric was all-modern, quick-witted, and boastful. But he was also a Labour Party member and believed in worker solidarity. He grew a wispy-haired moustache that- with his thin terrier face made him look like someone on the take. It was make-believe but he liked to cultivate that impression so that others would see him as more worldly than Halifax permitted. Eric introduced me to Roy Broadbent, who lived with his mother and elderly aunt.

Broadbent worked at Macintoshes making sweets and did so until the 1980s- never once being promoted to a different job position in his forty-eight years of employment there.

Roy- like me- lacked a father in his life but his dad left his life through death rather than cold-blooded reasons of survival. His mother coddled him and by all accounts, he had a very easy Great Depression. But Roy made up for that because of the action he saw as a member of the Cold Stream Guards during the Second World War.

Eric’s father was very much alive and was a lamplighter. In the tea time light of Halifax, on my way home from Grosvenor's, I'd see Eric's father igniting the gas lamps with a large staff. If he spotted me, he'd bid me good evening and tell me to stay out of trouble.

On Saturday nights, Roy dressed as he imagined, from the cinema, an American gangster would be decked out.  Roy would wear a fedora hat and sported wing-tipped shoes. Eric called him “boss” in mock deference. Roy's personality was the furthest thing from being a boss. The moment when Roy opened his mouth or extended his hand, it was obvious; his character was soft and kind. He was incapable of malice except for the sin of vanity.

The final element in my trinity of mates was Doug Butterworth. He lived near King Cross with his mother, brother, and sister. I loved Doug the most because of his family. His mother always let me kip at their house if I had rowed with my mother.

It was the first time in my life that I felt accepted as an equal, and these friends never judged my dodgy background. So, I kept quiet about my more socialist beliefs because it felt safer to have friends than strong opinions that I didn't have the means to act upon.

After work on weekends, my friends and I would meet up in a pub and nurse a half pint until it was time to go to the cinema or the dance hall. At the pub despite the Spanish Civil War being on all the newsreels in 1937 and something that interested me, my friends and I never discussed it. Instead, we talked about football or the girls we fancied.

After the pub, if there was no movie to our liking, we went to a dance hall where jazz musicians played swing music from America. I didn't know how to dance there had been no time or money to learn. So when I was at the dance hall while Roy and Eric found girls to dance with, I circled the dance floor's perimeter. If I saw a stray, partner-less girl, I'd chat them up and inquire if after the dance; they wanted company on their way home.

If I was lucky, a girl accepted my advances and on the way home stopped at People's Park. There we'd kiss or or grope each other in furtive and futile attempts at sex. There was more failure than success as I was petrified about getting my partner pregnant. I had witnessed, too many times, love wrung out of adults from the cruelties of trying to keep themselves and their kids fed in times of economic catastrophe.

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 am offering a 20% reduction in a yearly subscription to ensure my prescriptions can be purchased today. One new subscriber covers that cost. 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