Whether it's 1934 or 2024 capitalism delivers a raw deal for workers and the poor.

We’ve arrived at Chapter 20 of Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green and Pleasant Land, which was a manuscript he was working on until his death in 2018.

It is 1934 and Harry is now eleven years old. He has been a child labourer for close to five years.

There is so much the poor must do to stay alive that they find shameful and undignified because capitalism exploits the many to enrich the few. Harry Leslie Smith's The Green and Pleasant is a history of one family's struggle through the hostile terrain of capitalism during the Great Depression. It's a testament to how a working-class generation born during- a period of extreme hardship fought to survive with their humanity intact during years of economic deprivation and World War.

From their struggles, the modern Welfare State was born only to be destroyed by neoliberalism over the last three decades.

What we are living now will only get worse. It will take more than a generation to change.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy and me alive is greatly appreciated. So if you can please subscribe because it literally helps pay my rent. But if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

The Green And Pleasant Land

Chapter Twenty:

Childhood was a luxury that only the middle class could afford during the days of my youth. So, within a week of moving to King Cross, I found new employment to help "pay my way," as my mother put it so often.

An outlet of Jubb's, a few miles from our new digs, had a help wanted sign placed in their front window for a delivery boy.

I went inside and inquired about the position. The manager asked if I could ride a bike and whether I had any issues with heavy lifting.

I told him I was good with both as my previous jobs had given me experience. The manager hired me on the spot. I was relieved and happy to get the job.  

I was tired of Bill needling me that I was unnecessary ballast to the family if I wasn't bringing home a wage.

The delivery boy's job was arduous servitude. I was tasked with loading and delivering groceries stored in a basket mounted at the top of the bike’s front tyre. Often the woven basket was laden with 60 pounds of groceries for delivery.

My route was 20 miles in circumference and led me all across Halifax and the rural areas surrounding King Cross.

I did my duties energetically and without complaint. Yet it angered me that I was invisible to middle-class children.

They didn't see me as anything more than part of the scenery to make their lives less burdensome.

Workhorse or work boy, it was all the same to them. Their inherited wealth, father's wages, and grammar school upbringing indoctrinated them into a belief system- where they were the masters and the working class their servants.

I despised them and envied their leisure hours denied to the likes of me. While I strained to ride my overladen delivery bike, middle-class kids were off to birthday parties, music lessons or the matinee.

Sometimes, these middle-class kids tossed me the same awkward and uncomfortable glance as one would to an animal, overladen with equipment and gear.

After a few months of working as a delivery boy, the manager at Jubb’s expanded my duties to include working behind the counter. My manager liked keeping me at the front of the store as he was having an affair with one of the married female clerks and spent much time with her in the back store room.

I caught them having sex on the sugar sacks once too often. But instead of firing me, my manager gave me the task of designing the store's window display.

I became so adept at doing it, that one of my displays took second place in a community-wide competition.

Whilst working at Jubb's, I took up smoking because my manager said it would give me more energy and stop me from being hungry. Every week, I bought Woodbine's for two pennies for a packet of five filter-less cigarettes.

At break time, I stood out back, placed a fag on my lips and struck a match. I soaked into my callow lungs the coarse tobacco that made my head dizzy and put to sleep my hunger pangs.

Next door to Jubb’s was a high-end chocolate confectionary shop. Their chocolates were all hand-crafted and presented in rich, beautiful boxes that were out of reach of an ordinary worker. The store’s clientele were mainly affluent housewives, with their well-dressed children in tow. They were ignorant or indifferent to the poverty around them. They certainly perceived me as a non-entity if they encountered me washing down the stoop at the front of Jubb's.

With a reputation for excellence, the chocolate shop routinely discarded- entire boxes of chocolate that they deemed unsatisfactory. They were dumped in a bin behind the store they shared with Jubb’s.

Out back, in the rubbish bin, exquisite boxes of chocolate with bows and ribbons wrapped across their tops lay like buried treasure amidst rotting produce.

It seemed too good to waste, and many times at the end of my shift, I dove into the rubbish bin to fish out a box of chocolates. The first layers were always covered in mould, but the lower tiers were perfectly edible.

I'd bring these boxes I'd looted from the bin home and shared them with my sister, mother and Bill.

We were all gobsmacked by the richness of their taste and how the middle class lived so much better than our bread-and-dripping working-class existence. A box of that chocolate if bought in the shop rather than fished from a bin was the equivalent of a week's rent for us.

               ******************

Bill Moxon's butcher business plodded along during the first few months of 1934. Much of the time- his shop was empty of customers. He didn't have a great deal of meat to sell and Moxon was an arsehole to most people who walked in looking to buy something. Without clients, Moxon occupied his time by standing outside and kicking a pig's bladder filled with water; as if it were a football until it eventually burst.

Over a day, he went through at least three pigs' bladders as footballs in between gripping about his lack of clientele.

If it weren't for shady dealings in stolen beef, my mother's boyfriend wouldn't have been able to make the rent on his shop or the one-up-one down on King Cross Road he let for himself, mum, my sister, me and our little brother Matthew.

Moxon's business was not sustainable. He lacked the temperament and capital to be a shop owner. It was only a surprise to Moxon that his shop was shuttered around the time my mother found out she was pregnant with his child.

The news she was pregnant didn't sit well with Bill. He was outraged that the Great Depression had knocked him down and left him out of work and in rent debt because of an ill-conceived foray into owning a small business.

Out of money and schemes, Bill buggered off. One morning, after a night out at the pub, he said to Mum,

"I’m better off without thee.”

When my mother pleaded with him to stay at least for the sake of his child growing within her. He denied paternity to it and called my mother a whore for becoming pregnant. After his outburst, Moxon got up and left.

The morning he left, Mum looked as shell-shocked as in past moments when Moxon hit her for speaking out of turn.

Mum didn't know what to do without Bill because, since 1930, she viewed him as a life raft. Mum had abandoned our father because she believed Bill promised survival for her and us during those times of economic calamity. Mum had damned herself and us by the extreme measures she took to ensure she was with Bill.

My sister and I renounced our father to facilitate her relationship with Bill which forever tarnished our psychologies. Our love for our mother was forever poisoned by being implicated in the destruction of our father to save ourselves in the Great Depression.

Mum had given everything up to be with Bill and was now ostracised by her family- because of it.

For Four years she had taken his beatings because he offered in return a meagre salary that paid the rent on shambolic, sub-human housing. It meant nothing to him her sacrifices. Mum was so unimportant to him that Bill abandoned her, pregnant and without income.

With Bill gone Mum warned us,

"There's nowt in the cupboard. There's nowt left but the workhouse for thee- if I don't fix this.”

My mother's warnings that the workhouse was in my future- if our luck didn't change, terrified me. My sister seemed less anxious by threats of the poor house because she worked full time in a mill by then.

It did not pay much as she was only 14. But Alberta knew she could afford a room somewhere. Alberta attempted to assure me that, in time, we'd come out safe on our journey through poverty. I wasn't convinced. In my fear of being sent to a workhouse, I began to despise my mother. I blamed Mum for leaving herself and her children vulnerable because I was not mature enough to understand- working-class women had few options when it came to surviving.

Without Bill, Mum found respite, or courage, from life without a breadwinner through drink. At the time, I thought it was cowardice and escapism- that drove her down to the pub. I believed she was wasting what little money we had on selfish pleasure, and I openly attacked her for it.

Later, I learned her trips to the pub were a drastic action to keep us together and housed as a family. On occasions, Mum sold herself for rent to men looking for sex. It was not an uncommon thing for working-class women in the 1930s.

Having to exchange sex for money took its toll on my mother's emotional balance. During the day, she suffered from panic attacks, which at the time I thought were simply high dramatics and cries for attention.

I didn't know then our housing was paid through letting men shag her against the rough walls of ginnels near the pubs of King Cross.

There were many times when my sister and I hauled our mother from between bins outside our house when she came home blind drunk from the pub. We'd drag our mother indoors and hoped that no neighbour had witnessed her fall or spied us transporting Mum into the house drunk and lifeless. Mum would sleep it off and wake in the morning bitterly angry at herself for scraping rock bottom.

In January 1935, a few weeks before her pregnancy was due, Mum told us she was leaving King Cross. "I am going to find Bill and fetch him back to us."

Mum left for Bradford to look for Bill with money scoffed from my piggy bank. She busted it open with a butter knife held in a hand overcome by desperation.

"You'll be right as rain- because you can make more of it."

She took our baby brother Matt with her and deposited him at her sister Alice the only sibling that still talked to her.

Chapter Twenty-One:

My mother found Bill in Bradford living in our old neighbourhood of St Andrew's Villa. He had returned to work as a “pig man” at a nearby farm and wanted nothing to do with my mother. He told her to go home to King Cross. Instead, she took a room in one of the doss houses that littered the street and gave birth to her new child there on January 13th 1935. Her only plan was to shame him into fatherhood.

Moxon was initially unmoved by the child or Lillian’s demands for recognition of his new son. My mum lived off the charity of her sister Alice. She even received- some help from my dad who still lived in a doss on that street. He gave her what little he had despite his abandonment by her.

Mum didn't leave Bradford until Bill agreed to register the child and accept it as coming from his blood and bone. He only did so on the proviso the child be called like him William.

When Mum returned to King's Cross after a three-month absence with her son "Bill Junior, " she acted as if she had only stepped out for a pint of milk and not abandoned her other children to fend for themselves for 90 days.

Her "Come and say hello to your new brother, revolted me because Bill Junior was another mouth to feed.

He was not like Matt, who I saw as my brother, blameless for his condition. Irrationally, I saw Bill Jr. and my mother as conspirators in our family’s unravelling. I was never able to accept the child as anything but an impediment and an intrusion into my life. I was not kindly possessed to having more responsibility thrust upon me, with this desperate child, in this desperate household.

Fortunately, I had found a means to escape the cries of a new-born and my mother's cries for assistance at the library in King Cross. It became my real school, as well as an escape from the greyness and the emotional hunger in my life. In my off time, I would go to the library, which was housed in a Victorian building near our house.

I perused the shelves of books filled with strange titles. I grabbed novels that caught my fancy and indulged my mind and imagination. With Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable, I suffered Jean Valijean's torments, indignities and poverty- and compared it to my own sorry state. In The Count of Monte Cristo, I witnessed injustice and the fight to right the wrongs of birth and legacy.

For the price of a library card that cost a few pennies, I was transported across the world and sat at the feet of great thinkers, poets, playwrights, novelists, historians and political advocates for change.

I spent any moment I wasn't working or at school enraptured in the poems of Wordsworth, the plays of Shakespeare or discovered by reading books like The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the Communist Manifesto that the ordinary worker was a commodity abused and exploited by the rich.

I was comforted, strengthened, befriended and revolutionised by books, whose ideas spoke to me. They eased my loneliness and gave me courage and resolve. They gave me hope that there was a world outside my hunger, poverty, and broken family waiting to welcome me.

The books I read in 1935 and afterwards were doing something else for me; they were politicising me. I began to formulate in my childish mind that the circumstances of my poverty weren't the fault of my shortcomings or my parents but because society was rigged to favour an entrenched entitled class.

Books- made me aware that poverty wasn't the natural order of things but a perverse and cruel means to control and subjugate ordinary humanity.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Since my birth, the housing I lived in was cramped and damp. 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 time lest we forget our lowly place in capitalism’s hierarchy. 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 conceal it from the watchful eyes of my mother. With it, on my only day off Sundays, 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 wandering to the great church as a religious supplicant; I wanted to go as a servant to beauty in a disfigured world.

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, my family's dislocation, my dad's abandonment by us, as well as all the indignities my mother endured to keep her children fed: 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.

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I understood, because of that day at York, that I was destined to carry all those memories, all that pain with me, for as long as I lived. But I was also granted the right to ascend and try to escape my backward existence because I was different and unique.

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.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way.

A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 8 to make June’s payment. But with 3 days to go, it is getting tight.
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. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John