"Wars are conducted for the rich and powerful and fought by the poor and hopeless."

When you started reading these excerpts from Harry Leslie Smith’s Green And Pleasant Land the year was 1923 and now many chapters later it is 1938 and war looms close enough that astute people then could hear its heavy breath.

The last book of my dad unfinished at his death is a memoir, history and confession about the lives of working-class people who lived during a time of political and economic extremities.

From their sufferings, these unemployed miners, and mill workers, along with the rest of ordinary Britain made a better world for themselves and others by constructing a Welfare State, where all could share in a nation’s prosperity. Most of what they built is either gone, sold to hedge funds- or abandoned like Machu Picchu at the behest of a neoliberal political class and their high priests, the corporate news media.

It's Election Day in Britain, and by all projections, a Labour Party, who under Keir Starmer abandoned socialism and its support for ordinary workers will become a government with a majority so large it may as well be a dictatorship for the interests of the 1%. Britain is transitioning from one shit reality to the next. I fear this government may even be worse than the Tories because Labour is going to be given a blank cheque by the news media and business to stifle any and all dissent to their further privatisation of the NHS.

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 His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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. It should be ready for a publisher by the end of this month.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can please subscribe and if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. Below is another chapter selection from the Green & Pleasant Land.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Twenty-Nine:

For many including me, 1938 was a year of uncertainty. The political and social atmosphere was a brewing storm because fascism was preparing to collide with titanic force against democracy.   

The Spanish Civil War was in its second year of conflict. Xenophobia and antisemitism were normalised in Europe and North America. Militarism and authoritarianism gained traction within European political circles as a solution to the chaos in society.

Japan was fighting a barbarous war with China, whilst Hitler was gearing up for total war against Europe. The carnage and atrocities from Guernica to Nanking were played out on newsreels and the tabloids. Oswald Mosely collected Britain's disaffected to join his mob of Black Shirts who styled themselves on Hitler's anti-Semitic street fighters.

In Halifax, I rarely saw a Black Shirt. That didn't mean there weren't fascists and anti-Semites in the city- just that they were biding their time until they believed it was acceptable to brandish their hatred in public.

To liberals in the middle class; they probably sensed society was coming apart at the seams in 1938. But to us in the working class; it had already.

I turned fifteen that year but didn't feel optimistic about my future because the world was going to shit and I knew the first ones dragged down in its fiery crash would be poor folk.

If those times had been peaceful, I would have felt hopeful. Things were going well for me as long as I stuck to my working-class lane.  I could afford to eat and purchase clothes which made me feel as if I belonged to the working class.

I could afford to socialise, go to the pictures and also find time to read books.

I'd been promoted at work and was now an assistant manager at Grosvenor's, which didn't pay much more than when I was their barrow boy. But it did enrich my feelings of self-worth.

I even obtained work for my mother's Boyfriend Bill, who now was employed at Grosvenor's as a butcher. His primary job was making mince in a bathtub above the shop. He liked working up there because he didn't mix well with others. Alone with a bathtub full of mince his temper only exploded if the owner's cat snuck into the room and attempted to devour the mince.

With money Bill made as a butcher, he saved up enough to purchase a used wireless radio that operated on a wet battery that needed to be charged in a shop every few days.

It took a central position in our parlour. Bill wanted the radio to listen to football or cricket while smoking a shag cigarette that fouled the room in blue smoke.

When I got the chance, I listened to the news because the owner of Grosvenor's was a pacifist, and he was concerned by events in Hitler's Germany.

"Storm clouds of war are coming lad. You best think of how you can stay out of the carnage."

He advised me to learn about the "events of the day."

Before 1938, Bill stayed clear of politics or world events. He preferred not to get cluttered up by knowledge. Yet Bill was astute enough to know Hitler was no good. During the Munich crisis in September of that year, Bill listened intently to the wireless. He was spellbound by the notion there could be another war.

After each BBC news bulletin from Munich Bill grumbled to me,

“No good will come by this. Fritz is a right bastard, You best decide now which branch of the service you will be joining at 18. Because this war will be long and bloody.

I didn't know if war was coming. But I didn't relish its possibility.

If there was a war, the soldiers would be promised better lives and better living conditions after the battle was won. The same promises were made to the men returning from the Great War, in 1918.

Those men never got their land fit for heroes. As a child, I saw many war veterans living in run-down doss houses with my family. Legless, armless, and or homeless; they were no more victorious than the German soldiers. Talking to those Great War veterans when I was a child; I learned wars were conducted for the rich and powerful and fought by the poor and hopeless.

So I certainly did not want to end up in a war because of Hitler, nor because of Czechoslovakia or because those in charge destroyed the economy and society through their greedy corruption.

In late September 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned to Britain from his peace talks with Hitler in Munich. He waved a piece of paper to the newsreel cameras and proclaimed peace in our times. When Bill and I heard the announcement on the wireless my mother's boyfriend was quiet for a moment. Then looked at me and said.

"We scrapped out of that by the hair of our chinny, chin, chin.  But a banging big bloody war is coming lad.

His discussion ended as abruptly as it began because my mother told both of us to get off our arses and clean the fireplace grate. That day ended another began. The routine of living continued as if peace was a promise of forever. But a year later, war started in earnest and the world was awash in blood and death as if it was 1914.

Summer 1939 was long, lazy, and filled with abundant sunshine. I didn’t see much sunlight because I worked 12 hours a 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. Sometimes, I went to Boothtown Road for a meal or to wallow in 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. While we prepared for our weekend, Stuka bombers tore apart Warsaw whilst Nazi panzer divisions 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. This war wasn't to be sorted 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 said 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 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 scanned the skies and looked for the airborne armada that never came for Halifax. But when dawn came returned 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 made millions destitute 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 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'd rather take my chances in the amoral world at war. My odds of surviving the war seemed better 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. 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.”

Chapter Thirty:

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 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 tall, 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 the North African desert campaign.

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.

Christmas 1940, I spent at Doug Butterworth’s home because I couldn’t stomach my mother’s antics over the holidays. I reasoned this might well 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 clothes, and a deep, porcelain bathtub. The attendant placed a plug into the bath. He turned the taps on and waited until the bathtub filled with warm water, then departed.

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 Alberta, 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. I inhaled the smoke from 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, that had been 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…”

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