"We wanted something more than a bread and drippings democracy."

What we have been living through since the start of the Covid Pandemic in 2020 is history at its most dangerous and tumultuous since the 1930s. It may prove to be a more deadly manifestation of authoritarian politics in the history of humanity. All bets are off because, in 2025, we lack a coherent and universal political surge towards socialism to counterbalance the appeal of fascism.

Before my father died in 2018, he spent the previous decade using the history of his life and working-class contemporaries as a political canvas to paint the dangers of unfettered capitalism for humanity and democracy. He correctly predicted 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.

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. It is almost done and baring sickness or homelessness will be completed by his 102nd birthday on February 25th.

I have also included a tip jar for those, who are inclined to assist me in this project. It's the end of the month, so it is always a scramble to make sure there is enough money in place to cover, the next month's rent.

Take care,

John

Chapter Thirty-One:

The sky was the colour of coal or milky tea; every morning, I was woken at RAF Padgate by a Warrant Officer who barked.

"Wakey, Wakey."

The call to arise was jarring after my first night's sleep in the Nissen Hut, but eventually,I grew used to it, the longer I remained.

My first breakfast in the Air Force was a greasy fry-up with unlimited mugs of strongly brewed tea.

Afterwards, we marched to a hut where our problem-solving aptitude was tested. I was ordered to sit with others from my squad on a long wooden bench with a table in front of it.

Each of us was given a series of puzzles to complete. I connected blocks and then moved on to putting together jigsaw puzzles.

I arranged, attached, and connected these asymmetrical designs whilst being timed. It was not difficult.

Others, however, handled this assignment as if bones from a human skeleton were placed before them- and then were asked to put the old bones back as a human being in under three minutes.

When done, we departed for another room where our ability to decipher Morse code was tested.

A cacophony of noises, scratches, beeps and blips was played over a loudspeaker.

“That, lads, is a dash. The short blip is a dot. Simple isn’t it? One long sound, one short sound, and we are making music.

“Now, I will replay it and want you to count the dashes and dots.”

My confidence deflated, and I had an uneasy feeling I was about to fail. I dreaded the notion that these new people, including Robbie, might make me the butt of their jokes.

I was given a pencil and a piece of paper where, at the top left of the foolscap, I wrote- dashes and on the right- dots.

I placed the tight black headset on over my ears.

At first, everything moved at an indecipherable speed. My brain comprehended nothing of what was being transmitted.

Then suddenly, each impulse sounded like an echo, distinct and unique. I was able to distinguish between a dash and a dot.

When the quiz was terminated, the warrant officer said.

"Wait outside."

After ten minutes of shuffling and nervous jokes, the warrant officer appeared and called out the names of those who had passed. I was the last one to be called, but I had passed. There was no one I could tell. However, after failing so many school tests because of hunger or exhaustion from being a child labourer, I was chuffed by succeeding at the tests conducted by the RAF.

Every morning at Padgate was a mirror image of my first morning. We woke from warm beds and placed our feet onto cold floors. We dressed into our uniforms, ate the same breakfast and fell out for inspection.

Each day, the sky above remained a constant wintery grey spotted with Spitfires or Blenheim bombers practising flight manoeuvres.

Under it, every morning, we were ordered on a cross-country run that left us winded and drenched in sweat that stung our skin because the temperature hovered at the freezing mark. In the afternoons, we marched. We about-faced, stood too or climbed ropes affixed to wooden scaffolds.

In the evenings, we were encouraged to write letters home. I didn't until the end of my stay at Padgate. However, I did receive a letter from my mother during the first few days of my RAF induction. She reminded me to share some of my RAF pay with her to keep my brothers fed.

During my short stint at Padgate, the war was a distant thunder for me- and almost everyone else there. It was still a game for us, a long summer holiday in winter. I sensed that the RAF wanted to change our attitudes because many of our evenings were spent being indoctrinated in anti-German, Italian and Japanese propaganda.

Required viewings of newsreels indoctrinated us to despise and loathe our enemy. But evil done on the continent or the threat of it to arrive by way of invasion was a difficult concept for many of us to grasp.

It wasn't that we were naïve about malevolence because we weren't. Most of us were on a first-name basis with the evil of poverty as we grew up rough and ready during the Great Depression.

Without articulating it, we understood that evil wasn't unique to one nation. It was a shared trait of anyone with excessive wealth.

We weren't like the youthful generation of 1914 who went to war to preserve a way of life that entrenched the working class to exist as penned animals for the benefit of the entitled. We lost our innocence in the 1930s and no longer feared or revered those that society told us were our “betters.”

We wanted something more than a bread and drippings democracy.

Each morning, afternoon, and evening fell like the one before it. I marched, saluted, ate, joked, slept, and- on the following morning, woke to do it all over again.

" Up and bloody down, across and bloody back; I’ve walked to fucking Manchester and never been out the bloody gate in front of us.”

On the tenth day at Padgate, we were issued wooden guns because the real ones were in short supply and needed by our soldiers at the front, which was in the North African desert.

Within a fortnight at Padgate, we were trained to fight the enemy whilst wearing gas masks.

"You can't trust the Hun to fight fair."

There was fear that- like the Great War chemical warfare was on order from Hitler.

I stood in a cement, windowless building with half a dozen other men and a warrant officer.

The warrant officer let off a smoke flare and screamed. "Gas, gas, gas."

I and the other men scrambled to put on our gas masks while the room filled with smoke that we were supposed to imagine was mustard gas.

The smoke devoured the oxygen in the room and reduced visibility. It induced claustrophobic panic in the occupants-drowning without the water.

Then, the door to the windowless block building was opened.

The warrant officer laughed at us as we stumbled out of the building like Saturday night revellers leaving a pub, weak-kneed and giddy. We pulled off our masks and sucked in the brittle march air into our lungs.

The exercise taught me that I did not want to die in a fire or by gas, but in my bed, old and very content.

Yet, there was something comforting about being in the RAF despite surrendering your free will because it came with room and board.

It was no different for most of those square bashed with me. We all had come from places worse than Padgate. But once a member of the RAF, the past tense was erased from our reality. There was only the present and a future so far off on the horizon; it wasn't discernible to the naked eye.

"We were here because we were here."

Politics, in defence of democracy, our sodding British Empire, or Europe occupied by Nazis was not something often discussed. We were socialists by being born into the hard-trodden working class in the early part of the 20th century. Football, music, films and sex were the topics that we spoke about because we were young.

Life was already short for the working class and during wartime, it was all the more precarious. Carpe Diem.

I did my duty to my country, which had never done its duty towards me or anyone in the working class, not out of patriotism.

I did it because- at eighteen years old- I failed to read the fine print of my contract with the King. He could use me and every other lad wearing a uniform until we were dead if he wished.

Three weeks into square-bashing, my squad was informed that we were moving to another RAF base in a week.

If we had any letters to write, we better do it now. I went into town that evening and had my photo taken in my new uniform.

I had a dozen copies made and posted them to various girls I knew in Halifax, along with a letter that wooed them as a proud airmen about to take up battle against the fearsome Nazis.

I also sent a letter to my sister Alberta. I didn't know what to say as she- in her own right was being square-bashed with far greater cruelty than me as a civilian.

She was a young mother, and her Dunkirk veteran husband was listed as a deserter by the army after failing to report for duty in December 1941. Alberta endured societal scorn and continuous police surveillance as they attempted to arrest my brother-in-law, who had seen his share of war in France and said. "I want no more of it."

At the end of January 1942, just as the first US troops arrived on British soil, my unit was lined up on the parade ground at Padgate. We were presented with our travel warrant cards for further wireless training at St Athan in Wales. We were also instructed to be cordial to any American soldiers encountered during a train trip to Wales.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts. I really need your help to keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith and his Last Stand alive, in the public eye and relevant. Your subscriptions to this newsletter do that and also keep my housed which has become a precarious thing thanks to getting cancer, interstial lung disease and some other co- morbidities during 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. There is also a tip jar for those inclined. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John