"We deserved the right to have beauty in our lives rather than brutality."

The Green & Pleasant Land tells a true story about the lives of working-class people who lived during a time of political and economic catastrophe during the decade leading up to WW2. It’s my Dad’s story about his past but the tale is universal because a life of entitlement is for the few and one of misery or desperation for the many. It’s why the Greatest Generation built the Welfare State following the defeat of Hitler to prevent a return of fascism by ensuring everyone shared in society’s prosperity.

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 story as a template to effect change. It was his final battle to remind people not to make his past their future.

His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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’s almost done. Below are chapter excerpts about his experiences of growing into manhood during an age when fascism was on the rise.

Photo by Abbie Hartley on Unsplash

Chapter Eighteen.

The neighbourhoods of my youth stifled hope because there were too many hungry people, too many overworked people, too many undereducated people and ultimately too many angry people living in them. Their dreams and desires were eaten away first by low wages and then by no wages because the Great Depression made them unemployed.

The working class were a people denied the right to enjoy beauty.

We were forbidden leisure, so as not to have the time to dwell on our lowly place in capitalism’s hierarchy. We could only afford the most cramped and damp living accommodations because it ensured our anger would erupt at those around us rather than above us.

My people- the working class- were promised by Britain’s elites that if we did not rebel against the class system, when our death came the riches of heaven awaited us. If we were meek and obedient on earth, paradise was ours forever more, in death.

Of course, it was a lie. But it kept Britain's working class in check for centuries- outside of a few rebellions, General Strikes and some outright disobedience to the State.

By my twelfth birthday, I had no faith in god and certainly none in Britain or their propaganda about "fair play for all." I knew the system regarded me as a pack mule to be used until I was dead from overwork.

Despite my lack of formal schooling, I was coming into my own intellectually. I was changing physically and entering puberty. I was becoming a man because at 12 years old, I knew I was expected to become a full-time worker at 14.

In 1935, I was able to save some money from my job and purchase a used bicycle. With it, on my only day off Sunday, I’d bike to a quiet spot, outside of town.

Underneath a tree, with a sandwich, a flask of tea, and an apple; I read or let my mind wander. I daydreamed about my future and wondered what would happen to me when I grew older. My imaginings slipped into fantasy and I dreamed I was with the most beautiful woman and living a thrilling life. I dreamed of travel and faraway lands.

I dreamed so much of great voyages and grand discoveries that I set upon visiting the medieval city of York. I was determined to make a pilgrimage to the Minster. I was not travelling to the great church as a religious supplicant. It was something else that led me to York, the promise of being allowed to see beauty in a world disfigured by raw, unadulterated capitalism.

The week before my trip, I studied maps in the library. I plotted my course and the exact time I should leave. I purchased puncture kits for my worn tyres, which I knew would face much abuse on the journey. I bought a new satchel- to hold a raincoat, my thermos, and sandwiches.

When I left King Cross and began my excursion to York, I felt like Charles Lindbergh departing New Jersey to fly solo across the Atlantic. I told no one of my plans for fear they would thwart my desires with impediments and arguments.

My route was planned to avoid Bradford and Leeds. I skirted up a secondary dual-carriageway that had less traffic on them. Before long, I realized my path was through some of the hilliest and bent roads towards the ancient city. My tyres punctured every half hour. I quickly used up my supply of puncture kits.

When rain fell, I took cover underneath an elderly, roadside tree and sipped tea from my thermos and took deep bites from a cheese bun. I began to doubt myself and cursed my arrogance at attempting this stupid venture.

The storm passed and the skies returned to a greyish blue. I folded up my raincoat and stored it back in my bag. I mounted my rickety bike and pushed upwards to the city.

By two o’clock, I approached the great walled city. The spires of the Minster towered before me. They were a fulcrum in the landscape, the tallest structure in a hundred miles, since the 12th century. I pedalled my bike to York’s main gate: Bootham Bar. It was also the ancient entrance to the Roman fortress, built by the Roman 8th legion.

I walked underneath its stone ceiling. I saw the slits cut into the masonry, where archers defended the city in the 1300s. I pushed my bike up through the shambles, where hawkers battled to grab my attention to their stalls filled with- all types of meat, cheese, fruit, and sweets.

They shouted, imploring me to see their fresh produce, the best apples, and the most magnificent pies or jam. The Shambles took me on a long winding, incoherent ascent to the cathedral. Suddenly, out of the shadows of the vendors, the roadway parted and uncovered a wide expanse.

Finally, the second largest medieval cathedral in northern Europe was exposed to me. It stood like a colossus, powerful and silent as the sphinx. The sun draped down and swept around its peak and fell across the stained glass windows. To my left was part of the old Roman road constructed by legionnaires of Caesar Claudius. A thousand years ago, that road would have stretched to London in the south and to Hadrian’s Wall in the north. Above me, the bells pealed, announcing the passing of the quarter hour. I entered the church and pulled open its gargantuan, oak doors.

I had no love of religion. I had no love of the cold-hearted, cruel, impiety of the nuns and the priests encountered at school. I had no affection for my church or my religion. I had no respect for the celibate hypocrites who doled out physical punishments for my alleged imperfections as a Christian. I had no reverence for the superstitious who seemed more interested in their petty prejudices than God or Jesus.

I had no devotion to a Church that employed sadism to subvert its flock into meek obedience. Yet while I walked through the majestic silence of the Minster that stretched back to the Dark Ages in the 600s; the magnetism of faith, this cathedral held over life in Yorkshire for close to 1500 years overwhelmed me emotionally.

Seeing it gave me a respect that bordered on reverence for its workers, the stone masons, the carvers, and the glazers who had toiled in creating such a wondrous place.

I felt awe at the simple and great lives that had passed through this cathedral, held together by a belief in a higher authority I no longer accepted.

I came to York to see the ancient history of my people- their majestic architecture and feel a connection with the great tapestry of life in Northern England.

Looking upwards against the vaulted ceiling and across to the silent saints of the church, an epiphany came over me. I knew I had worth. I knew that despite my poverty, my hunger, my lack of education, and my family's dislocation, my life had a purpose ahead of it. I had the right as a human being, to find happiness and not be a servant to the wealthy.

I spent another hour exploring York and found an inn where I had a half pint of bitter. After, I jumped on my bike for the long journey home. I did not reach home until the lamp lighters had begun their shift and started to light the gas street lamps of my neighbourhood.

When I returned home, I was exhausted and unable to explain to anyone why I had ridden my bike to York.

My mother thought I was daft and Alberta laughed at my folly. But I went to bed and fell into a fitful sleep that night. I dreamed of when I could escape from King Cross, Halifax, and Yorkshire.

I understood, because of that day in York, within me- in all my working-class brethren was a strength to fight for an existence that was purposeful and dignified. We deserved the right to have beauty in our lives rather than brutality. I knew despite the misery of my past and the uncertainty of the present, the future belonged to the working class.

Chapter 19:

Bill Moxon returned to our household after months of being on the lamb from his responsibilities to the son he conceived with my mother. I don't know what possessed him to come back. He just came back and pretended as if he had never been gone.

Bill greeted me when I first saw him after his absence by singing a song he'd learned in the Royal Marines about how sailors better beware of the deep dark sea.

With Bill's return, so came his drinking, his yelling and his penchant for domestic violence. He was an unhappy man who intended to make everyone near him as glum as him.

Bill's routine of drinking and brawling with my mother ensured I stayed away from our house unless it was for a meal or to kip down.

When I wasn't at work, school or finding books to read at the library, I began to attend meetings at the local Mechanic's Institute, where journalists, writers and advocates gave lectures on the rights of workers, domestic politics and the disintegration of democracy on the European continent.

I was twelve when I started attending these lectures. Despite being young, I didn't feel out of place. These talks were filled with working-class folk, all with dirt underneath their fingernails, who desired to learn more about the causes of their poverty and oppression. Cups of tea were offered along with comradeship in those rooms that were thick with tobacco smoke.

People went to these lectures hoping to find insight into how things could be made- better for themselves and fellow travellers who walked through the misery of the Great Depression.

I felt welcomed at these talks but also woefully ignorant. My education was interrupted so often by poverty that I didn't understand much from these discussions except that storm clouds of war and totalitarianism were approaching.

By 1936, the warnings against Hitler and Mussolini were available to anyone who- chose to listen to them.

The middle class refused to heed the warnings because they were too busy enjoying their creature comforts. Another thing also stopped the middle class from understanding the threat of fascism to democracy. Their conservative politics didn't allow them to see Hitler as anything more than a politician for good governance.

The working classes knew that the tectonic plates of alternate ideologies were converging towards war. Trade unions had been kept informed by union officials in Germany about the repression of socialists and the persecution of Jewish citizens.

At the age of thirteen, I became aware of Mussolini's genocidal attack against Ethiopia because they were widely reported in the newspapers and in the news reels. I hated the dictator and had enormous empathy for the Ethiopian people who were slaughtered or enslaved by fascist Italy.

The signs were all there that war was coming again for the young and innocent. It was coming to snatch and drag them to the underworld of death. It was only a matter of time despite Newspapers like the Daily Mail poisoning the minds of British readers with overt antisemitism and support of Hitler's fascism.

Even Bill understood early on "That Hitler is going to put us in the shit," which he exclaimed every time he returned from the outdoor bog with a tatty Daily Mirror under his arm.

Things were changing, and war was brewing. Fascism had taken root in Europe. But Britain was incapable of responding as its own ruling classes had an affinity for them. Anyone with a modicum of self-reflection in 1936 understood the future was precarious. It was blood in the water for the fascist because society was in upheaval, from the economic collapse.

On the day the King died that year, my school announced his passing to the pupils and staff at an assembly which included prayers and respectful silence. Some of the teachers even cried.

But, that evening- I and other kids- paraded down the streets and sang at the top of our voices,

"God save our gracious King, God save our Noble King. Send him to heaven in a corned beef tin."

Old worlds were dying, and new ones were being born.

My grandfather died that year too, but he was not sent to heaven in a corn beef tin.

Grandad didn't die like the King- attended by doctors and servants while waiting for death in the comfort of a warm bed. My granddad died in immense pain from an intestinal cancer that ate away at his stomach with the ferociousness of wolves tearing apart a trapped deer. I saw him before he died because my mother forced me to.

The last time I laid eyes on him, I was seven. It was when I was sent to stay with my grandparents because my mother was in her final weeks of pregnancy, with Matt, the child produced from her love affair with the Irish navvy.

Cancer had changed my grandfather considerably since I last saw him. He didn't look as I remembered him as someone who got his grub before all others in the family were allowed a share of the evening meal.

He lay on a cot in the middle of my grandparent's parlour because he couldn't walk up the stairs to his bedroom. There was a strong smell of bodily waste and sweat in the room. Underneath a sheet, my granddad lay- shrunken, defenceless and in agony. My grandfather didn't speak to me when I said hello to him. All his strength was reserved for cursing his pain and death coming to take him.

One of my uncles said they were waiting for morphine that they paid for with a whip around at the miner's hall.

"It'll send him off without the fuss."

Afterwards, my grandmother fetched me a Tizer's pop from the cold cellar wearing petticoats- as if she was still living during the reign of Queen Victoria.

When Grandad died, my mother went to his funeral, naturally without Bill. However, that didn't stop my grandmother from calling her an adulterer when they said hello to each other. My sister and I didn't attend our grandfather's funeral because we couldn't afford to lose a day's pay.

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 you can join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. Tip are also welcome. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it's all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John