Whether it is 1939 or 2025, Fascism is born from unfettered capitalism.

Maybe it is because Trump will become President in a week. But the chapter below in The Green and Pleasant Land feels like it could be us now in 2025. I find it so maddeningly sad and incomprehensible that our society has begun its sunset into fascism.

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 and not 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His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Twenty-Six:

By 1938, it was apparent the future ahead for my generation was war, destruction and death. It wasn't written in the tea leaves but in the politics of the times.

The Spanish Civil War was being won by Franco because of Hitler and Mussolini's assistance. It was only a question of when, not if fascism would rule Spain. France became more right-wing and intolerant towards Jewish and political refugees who had fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge in that country. Most of Europe began to accommodate Hitler's politics either because they were fellow travellers in fascism or because the wealthy wanted more advantageous trade deals with a growing superpower.

Militarism and authoritarianism were normalised as political solutions by the right and those who profited the most from capitalism.

Fascism was popular in the middle classes and the classes above them. It was a violent shortcut to an ordered society, and England had its fair amount of acolytes to this ideology of intolerance.

It was already embedded in Britain because of the Empire and the racism it took to have colonial possessions over 25% of the world.

Oswald Mosely, aristocrat, crank, and former Labour MP became Britain's most vocal proponent of fascism in the 1930s. Mosely and his Black Shirts, who styled themselves on Hitler's anti-Semitic street fighters, were popular that year.

But, 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.

I was fifteen years old that year. 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 gave me the feeling of belonging to the more prosperous working class.

I could afford to socialise, go to the pictures or political lectures, and I had sufficient time to read books as well as faff about with mates.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. The day ended, and another began. The routine of daily living continued as if peace was a promise of forever and then 1939 came along.

*********

During the Winter and Spring of 1939, war with Germany still didn't seem possible to most British people. After Munich everyone went back to living and forgetting that fascism was everywhere gaining strength and readying itself to strike and smother the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

When summer came it was long and lazy. I worked. I chased girls, went to political lectures or loafed with mates in city parks. I was sixteen; and had begun to free myself of a past that included extreme poverty, hunger, homelessness, the dissolution of my family from death and the Great Depression.

Then at the end of summer everything stopped, peace, optimism, and the future was a dark landscape of battles, carnage and annihilation.

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 Bill Moxon. This time, even my mum was quiet as the Prime Minister explained that we were now at war. After years of state propaganda that Britain would always be at peace with Germany, it was like trying to shake awake a surgical patient who had received too much anaesthetic.

Moxon said.

“We’re in the shit now, lad, we are in the shit.”

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 young men were already signing up for the services. They were being trained for death and combat. 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. But I was adamant that I would not rush into the war, I would wait for the war to come to me. "If I am drafted, I will go when told to but if I am allowed to volunteer, I will take my sweet bloody time."

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 I returned home for a few hours kip- before my shift started 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 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?

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