Whether it was the 1930s or today, capitalism has always been about making workers beasts of burden for the benefit of the rich.

Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green & Pleasant Land tells a true story about the lives of working class people living during a time of political and economic extremities. From their sufferings these unemployed miners, 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 .

The Green & Pleasant Land is proof ordinary humanity can seize destiny and make a present that is fair to all. 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 His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project.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’s almost ready. This week I’ve been dropping the first 25k words of it. Today is the 5th part for your consideration.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. 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.

Chapter Fifteen:

In 1931, Britain's working class were in a foul and desperate mood. There just wasn't enough work to go around, and jobs that were available never paid enough to keep one properly fed. Hunger was an unwelcome lodger in millions of homes and the economic system of the day that put profits of the few before the wellbeing of the many was not going to evict it. For the inhabitants of our isles who measured their life's accomplishments in toil, sweat and a week holiday, once a year at the seaside- these were unhappy times.

The adults I encountered who lived in the doss or the surrounding neighbourhood, their discontent was loud and brash. One of my uncles fled the North because he rightly believed things were better in the home counties- even for a lad with a broad Barnsley accent.

Up North, in Scotland and Wales, the fury people felt because their right to a decent life was cut short by the greed of those who ruled our empire was incendiary. Their anger was as inflammable- as dry wood on parched grass. It waited for a match to fall and begin a conflagration.

At the start of the year, I spent much- of my time working at the off-license. I fell further and further behind in my schoolwork. I was too tired to study or maintain proper attention in the classroom to absorb what I was being taught- by the authoritarian nuns at my school.

Neither the teachers nor my mother cared because the role assigned to me by poverty was to be a child labourer to ensure that my family's hunger didn't lead to starvation. I went from bairn to breadwinner in seven years as if I had been born in the 10th century.

Every moment I was a wake was another moment to witness the indignities the working class endured in the 1930s at the hands of capitalism not harnessed to a Welfare State.

There was so much pain ordinary people endured- financial, emotional and physical. The torment the dying underwent; if they and their families didn't have the means to afford a doctor's care was something out of Dante's Inferno.

I still remember the fearful din that came out of the mouths of those who approached death in 1931 if they were skint, and had no means to afford morphine to ease their passage to the grave. Those poor wretches howled like animals dying at the roadside after being hit by a car. It was inhuman- those sounds, and yet the screams erupted everywhere that year in my neighbourhood.

I was terrified by these horrific shrieks which fell from open windows in my neighbourhood or were heard- from behind the shut doors at my doss. They were like the lament priests at my school, said the damned made as they burned in eternal hellfire. But this was not some god's punishment against human beings. It was the consequence of unmitigated capitalism, which condemned those too poor to afford medicine and relief, outside of gin, a miserable death.

When I questioned my mother about these noises, she dismissed them as nothing. "Someone is dying and making a racket about it." But it was something, and it terrified me.

I knew after witnessing Marion's end that if she could die at the age of 10, I too, could die at the age of 8. And should I perish- the months and days leading up to it would seem eternal in their agony. The howling coming from people in pain who had no means to alleviate their suffering owing to their poverty could just as well be me or anyone in my family.

Every day and everywhere I walked- this dialect of moaning, yelling, cursing, and pleading used before their end of life by those who couldn't afford medicine was present.

Sometimes, my deliveries led me into the rooms and squats of the dying. Some of them were in horrible shape with festering wounds or bed sores. "Don't mind her, lad. She'll be soon off to a better place. But me- I am stuck here in this sorry place," one customer said after I brought beer into his up-one-one-down.

In 1931, our nation's poor, like in every other capitalist country, lived miserably and died in even greater misery. The unemployed of that year were a defeated army of millions vanquished by capitalism. When the factories, mills, and mines shuttered because Britain's exports dried up, no one came to help those people who had created vast profits for the entitled of our land before 1929. They were simply rubbish for the tip.

The government of the day- a so-called national one- with Ramsey Macdonald- a Labour PM at the helm- let us starve and then let us die. My mother spent that year and every year after that until 1945 cursing Macdonald because he appeased the ruling classes at the expense of the workers. Mum believed that she had wasted her first vote as an emancipated woman when she cast it for a "bunch of bastards that called themselves Labour."

In 1931, at just eight years old, I felt abandoned by my family and by England. I may as well have been a sailor- fallen overboard- who watched his ship steam off into the nothingness of a distant horizon. I was alone and all around me was a wide open sea of poverty that stretched in every direction, past, present or future.

***********

Through each hour, day and month of 1931, my mother clung to Bill Moxon the way a shipwreck survivor holds tight to the side of an overturned lifeboat. She tried her best to never let him out of her sight because Moxon was a man in employment, a rarity for Yorkshire during the worst of the Great Depression.

His job didn't pay much at the pig farm. But it was steady work, and because of it, fried bread, drippings, and potatoes- as well as an occasional roast, kept our bellies full.

Moxon was our meal ticket, and Mum was always fearful he'd bolt from her affection, leaving us worse off than we had been when our dad lived with us. Mum was paranoid because Moxon leaving her was always a real possibility. Moxon had no loyalty to her and certainly had none for Alberta, me or our little brother Mathew- as we were his by default rather than by blood.

Moxon wasn't a man of deep thought of loyalties, and after the first year as my mum's boyfriend, he grew tired of her and the responsibilities that came with it. He wanted out and found his exit by quitting his job as a pig man at the industrial farm on the outskirts of Bradford. He thought by doing this he'd be clear of her and us children. The one thing he didn't bargain on was my mother was a desperate woman. She wasn't going to let him slip away from her without a fight.

One Friday evening, Bill returned from the pub and announced he had quit his job. “There be no more shovelling pig shit and muck for me. I am moving to Sowerby Bridge. Some rich bloke built a sparkling new rendering plant there. And, he promises good wages for anyone willing to put in a hard day's labour slaughtering livestock.”

Moxon figured that because he'd done his fair share of killing Germans in the Great War, he'd be all right butchering cows from sun up to sundown.

Bill told my mother he'd be leaving the next day. Half-heartedly, Moxon said- once he was sorted- he would send for her and us.

My mother was aware that Bill was no more likely to send word for us to join him in Sowerby Bridge than he was to purchase a pair of dentures; which he was in desperate need of as he had lost most of his teeth from decay and brawling.

Panic overcame my mother at this news. If Bill left, she had no means to feed and keep us housed in the doss.

Mum's only option was to travel to Sowerby Bridge and convince him through guilt and seduction that he was responsible for her and her children.

A few days after Bill left Bradford, my mother made preparations to find him in Sowerby Bridge. Alberta and I were taken out of school on the excuse there was a near and dear relation on death’s door. My brother Matt was deposited with our mum's sister Alice because he was too young to assist in our nomadic search for Bill Moxon.

The three of us took a bus to Halifax, where Mum rented a room in a doss for my sister and me to hold up in while she tracked down Bill in the neighbouring Sowerby Bridge.

Mum left us there with two loaves of bread and some jam.

Before leaving us, Mum said.

“Don’t scarf it all at once; I might be gone a few days. Be good. Don’t get under anyone’s feet.”

Our room possessed- a bed with a mouldy mattress that reeked strongly of the sweat of the many who had rested on it before my sister and me. After our mother had left to find Bill, my sister and I began to eat the bread with jam slathered on top. In between, chewing, we talked about whether our mother would find Bill and convince him to be the head of our household again or whether we were for the workhouse.

By nightfall, my sister and I began to feel hungry. From our bedroom, we smelt a stew cooking on a stove in the nearby kitchen. We ventured out of the room and headed toward the direction of the aroma. When we arrived at the kitchen, we were pleased to discover no one was in it.

Alberta told me to return to the room and fetch what was left from our loaf of bread because it would be a shame not to taste the stew cooking on the stove.

When I returned, my sister and I took turns soaking chunks of the bread into the pot of hot and succulent meat, potatoes, and veg simmering on the stove.

Sated, we went back to our cramped room with content stomachs. Eating more than our fill tired us out after being so used to living life, for the last 3 years on an empty stomach. I gutted the candle burning on the table beside us and slipped underneath the dirty blankets of the bed with my sister beside me.

Once the light was doused bed bugs began to devour us. The bugs sucked our blood with as much relish as we had shown when we stole another resident's meal in the kitchen. Itching and dejected, we spent the night squashing them with our bare fingers and then used our shoes against the ones we flicked with our fingers onto the floor.

The following morning, Mum returned to collect us and said her hunt for Bill Moxon was successful. Mum described her encounter with Moxon as if it was a victory for her and us. In truth, it was a complete surrender of her autonomy as Mum swore subservience to him if he promised to protect us all.

The conditions for Mum's unconditional surrender were harsh. If we wanted to eat, we had to follow Bill Moxon’s orbit no matter where it led us. The trajectory my mother placed herself on to break free of the gravitational pull of our poverty was about to become a rocket ride of violence against her from Bill.

Chapter Sixteen:

It was late in the winter of 1932 when my family moved from the doss house on St Andrew's Villa to an outbuilding in the nether region of Sowerby Bridge. We left Bradford as we had come to the city in 1928 with little more than the shirts on our backs.

My sister and I knew what awaited us in Sowerby Bridge was the same poverty and feeling of hopelessness we endured in Bradford. But we were children and had no choice- when it came to our mother's necessity to rely upon her boyfriend, Bill, who promised to keep us fed.

On the day we departed, my sister argued with my mother outside the front steps of the doss house. Alberta wanted to say farewell to our estranged father, who now resided in a room in one of the doss houses across the street from us. My mother said there was no time or point.

A sense of shame overcame me as we left the street that had been my neighbourhood for two years. I knew my Dad was being left behind for good. We weren't ever going to return for him. He was going to have to make his way alone in this slum as if he were a stranger to us.

After a bus deposited us at Sowerby Bridge, my mother informed us that our new lodgings were at the top of a steep- and winding road far from the town's high street.

The long walk to our new residence seemed more like a march because my mother barked at my sister and me to get a move on and stop dawdling. Both my sister and I carried sacks- that contained the few possessions we owned, while my mother held onto Matt as he was only two years old. The further we moved up the steep hill, the more the housing on each side of the road began to resemble the slum dwellings built near the coal mines that surrounded Barnsley, where I spent my first years of life when my father worked in the pits.

Atop the hill was a crossroad where we turned right and proceeded to a farmhouse. At first, I thought this was our new lodgings but was quickly informed that this was where our landlord lived. Our new home was an outbuilding located off- to the side of the farmhouse.

The building was smaller than a one- up-one-down tenement but larger- than the room my mother and Bill let at St Andrew's Villas. It was used to house farm labourers, and now us; owing to the fact the farmer couldn't afford to pay for labour anymore. Later on, I learned one of the farm workers housed in that outbuilding in the 1920s hung himself on an exposed beam that jutted, like a railway trestle- across the ceiling of the kitchen.

It was dark inside the outbuilding owing to a lack of windows and gaslighting. The walls were damp, and the cement floor was brittle, with cold. A long, narrow stone stair covered in cobwebs led upwards to the bedroom- I shared with my sister. As there was a perpetual draft inside the building, the candle I used to guide me to bed at night generally blew out before I reached my bed- which was a filthy mattress that rested on the floor as if it were disposed already in a tip.

My mother and Bill took the parlour because it had a coal fire grate to keep them warm. The view from the narrow window upstairs bedroom was a barren field that contained a few craggy trees bent against a grey sky that dripped down cold, wet rain.

The slums that my family had lived in before were dismal places. But at least they were in urban settings, where I could find comfort in the company of other children who were just as poor as my family. Living here- in this outbuilding- on a hill atop Sowerby Bridge- I was isolated. More importantly, my mother was also alone. She was dependent on Bill for food and support. She soon learned Bill withdrew affection and material support with the capriciousness of a dictator because his character was malicious and violent.

Chapter Seventeen:

I understood how to survive in the city slums of Bradford, but Sowerby Bridge was a different story. My heart was desolate from living in that farmer's outbuilding in the hills above the village. In that place, there wasn't enough food, warmth or love to engender hope in me that everything would be all right.

There was nothing to divert me from the glumness of our Great Depression existence. Cinemas and libraries were a fair distance from our farming neighbourhood. And, the wireless was still an entertainment for richer folk.

I only had my imagination to keep myself hopeful that something better might come to my life than the day in and day out of existing on the margins. Sometimes, I told myself stories where my dad came and rescued my sister and me after he was awarded a legacy from a wealthy deceased relative. They were idle daydreams as fragile as soap bubbles that burst before me each time I remembered my father was skinter than us and lived hand to mouth in a Bradford doss house.

I viewed my new surroundings and people with distrust and uncertainty- including the farmer who rented us the outbuilding. He was gruff and had a long, shaggy white beard that made him look like a biblical patriarch in suspenders. He seemed to me like all of our landlords-- someone to keep well away from.

But one day, while he worked his field- he spied Alberta and me dragging our feet in the dirt. He called us over and said to go into his barn and jump from the rafters onto his haystacks. "It's like landing on a featherbed."

Shortly after we had settled into the outbuilding, my mother found Alberta and myself work. It was as she said to pay our way. Alberta was put to work in the kitchen of a more prosperous farmer than our current landlord. On occasion, my sister scoffed the leftover food or pudding to add to our meagre diet that still consisted too often of boiled, mashed or fried potatoes, despite Bill's promise of butchered animals from his job at the nearby rendering plant.

For me, Mum convinced a local coal delivery company to take me on. "He may look scrawny, but my lad's as tough as nails."

At first, the owner was unimpressed with my potential, but eventually, he was won over and hired me from a combination of my mother's hectoring and his thrift.

A nine-year-old shifting a hundredweight coal sacks to village homeowners and the surrounding environs was cheaper than paying an adult's wage for another man to assist his one-person operation.

The owner delivered coal with a horse and wagon that I loaded at the start of my shift and unloaded during our route around Sowerby Bridge. The coal sacks were heavy to lift and keep balanced on my child's shoulders. The owner either- didn't notice or care that I struggled to haul these coal sacks from the roadway to his customers' houses. The time it took- to do these feats of strength was his main sticking point. "What took you so long?

Only his horse seemed to care that my body was overwhelmed and pummelled mercilessly by this work. His horse whinnied and then- clomped his hoof as if showing solidarity with my struggle to perform tasks more suited to a grown-up after each, of my deliveries.

When not at work, I attended a village school, where one teacher taught all the different grades. He was a petty, middle-aged man with flakes of dandruff that ran down his jacket, who spent more time thrashing his students than teaching them. His broad Yorkshire accent rolled out lessons and homilies- about King and Country to school children too hungry to learn from a good teacher, let alone a mediocre one like himself. He harangued and humiliated his pupils with sarcasm and the strap.

In 1933, the man who owned the coal delivery company decided I wasn't worth the few shillings he paid me because "times were tough, all around."

My mother's boyfriend took my loss of unemployment as an indication of sloth. "Lad just doesn't want to work." Bill insisted that- I must get less food for my breakfast and tea because I wasn't earning it. "If you want to eat more- get another job." The hunger hurt me more than his lack of love or compassion. Fortunately, Alberta began to provide me food from the larder of her employer to make up for my reduced rations at home.

But I knew I needed to find work and fast, which didn't prove to be difficult. I was only a decade old but was three years into being a child labourer. I was street-wise enough to know- there'd be someone willing to exploit me- for little pay if I asked around.

Jubb's Grocers fit that bill. They were located- in the village and needed a boy to do their dog's work because the old one had moved on to greener pastures. I was hired because of my ability to lift heavy objects and take their shit without much backtalk. I worked for them after school until late at night and then for twelve hours on Saturdays. I stocked their shelves, swept floors and ran deliveries for them while- in moments of both work and rest, hatched plots to run away from my mother, Bill and Sowerby Bridge.

Chapter Eighteen:

It was the time I spent with my mother and Bill- that I hated most during those Sowerby Bridge years. Our existence in Sowerby Bridge had made Mum and Bill no better than two enraged scorpions stuck in a sealed bottle, who fought an endless battle to the death.

Weekends were the worst because my mother and Bill drank to forget how little control they had over their lives. They had no money and little prospect for a better future because both were almost forty, which is- washed up in working-class years.

In 1932, Bill became more resentful about his relationship with my mother, who in turn became more resentful that she was dependent on a man who didn't want to be with her.

Naturally, things between my mother and Bill always became- worse on weekends because they attempted to forget the loathsomeness of reality by visiting the pub.

My sister called Weekends in Sowerby Bridge "The Bill and Lillian Show," because there was high drama, lots of shouting and broken crockery before and after they visited the village pub.

From Friday tea time- to Sunday bedtime, they verbally vomited forth their distrust and paranoia about each other. Bill’s general lament was to accuse my mother of entrapping him with bastard children.

“You caught me, Lil, with lies, a mountain of lies, nothing but rubbish from yer gob. You and your useless children are nowt but trouble for me.”

The weekend was when plates were smashed, glasses tossed, and drawers emptied of their contents. Many Saturday and Sunday mornings, Alberta and I surveyed a kitchen of broken glass, up-turned chairs, and shattered dreams and hopes. Our cement kitchen floor resembled a beach after a tempest-tossed a ship and broke its spine, spilling its contents into the tide to wash up on shore.

Within time, Bill and my mother destroyed or damaged every cup, saucer, and glass in their mutual war of attrition. We were left to drink from empty jam jars as we had no money to replace the broken crockery.

Their verbal and emotional violence against each other frightened both me and my sister. We knew our little lives were hostage to their regrets, their drunkenness, and their violence to themselves. For us children, it was like being forever in a trench, suffering heavy bombardment from enemy guns. Silence moved to shrill voices, tears to accusations, love to vitriol, and contempt.

While Bill and my mother fought each other, my sister and I tended to our little brother, whose first years were nurtured by us- who were also just children.

Bill and Mum stormed and fumed at each other from weekend to weekend and from season to season.

Then, one weekend, their yelling and threats against each other crossed over an unmarked border that separated verbal abuse from physical assault. After an evening of pouring the little money they had- away in a narrow, smoky pub in Sowerby Bridge- they came home with a stomach full of beer and resentment that exploded into a vicious confrontation.

My sister and I were jarred from sleep when Bill hollered profanities at our mother. Then we heard our mother scream in pain because Bill had started to beat her with his fists. Alberta and I fell over ourselves- to get downstairs and protect our mother from Bill.

Downstairs, we found Mum on the ground being kicked by Bill. My sister and I pounced onto Bill Moxon’s back. Our young fists beat his back. We pulled his hair and bit his shoulder. Bill yelled for us to get off him or else he would start clobbering us. We didn't stop even when he began to hit us while we rode on his back.

We held onto his back and shoulders until Mum escaped his boot kicking her in the face. Moments later, Mum was up and on her feet. Her eyes were blackened, and blood dripped from her lips.

“That’s enough, Bill. Alberta, Harry, get off him. Stop this now.”

We did. Then both my sister and I began to cry. Emotionally, I may as well have been the bits of crockery shattered and unrecognizable on the floor. I was busted up inside from violence, the lack of stability in my life and the ugliness of people forced to live hopeless lives.

I wept because I still remembered a better time, before the famine, before the economy collapsed, and first his employer sacrificed our dad, and then we, in turn, finished him off by abandoning him.

The morning following the attack on Mum, Bill greeted us unshaven and hung-over, even contrite. But his shame over physically harming Mum never lasted longer than the time it took to get from Sunday to Friday night. Hitting Mum became a routine for Bill. It was as normal to him as bathing in a tin tub every Saturday morning.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. 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 promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John