“Your Courage. Your Cheerfulness. Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory.” — Bollocks
The Green & Pleasant Land is a poignant and unflinching memoir of working-class life in early 20th-century England, told through the eyes of my father, Harry Leslie Smith, later celebrated as the world’s oldest rebel.
Chronicling the struggles, resilience, and humanity of a family navigating poverty, the Great Depression, and societal neglect, the memoir immerses readers in the doss houses and streets of Bradford, where survival, family tensions, and fleeting moments of joy shaped a young life.
After Harry’s death, I carefully pieced together his notes to create The Green & Pleasant Land — the book my father would have wanted published. It is a faithful testament to his life, his values, and his unwavering moral vision. A staunch defender of Jeremy Corbyn and a relentless critic of inequality, austerity, xenophobia, and the rise of fascist extremism, Harry repeatedly warned that his past should not become our future.
The memoir illustrates how adversity fostered resilience and ultimately contributed to the establishment of the Welfare State in 1945. The greatest generation forged a society designed to ensure prosperity for all, not just the privileged few. Today, it isn’t under threat — because it is already six feet underground.
With lyrical clarity, sharp observation, and unflinching moral insight, The Green & Pleasant Land preserves the voices of the often-forgotten working class while delivering a timely reminder: the lessons of the past remain essential for confronting the crises of today.
An early digital copy of Harry’s memoir is available for those interested in reading it ahead of publication. Just message me for a copy.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Home
When I left to join the war, a forlorn rain fell on the working-class streets of Halifax. Many weeks later, when I returned on leave to my mother’s house, the clouds above looked as though they had never once been broken by the sun.
Outside the rail station, the newspaper headlines chalked on boards weren’t encouraging. Leningrad was still under a merciless siege. The war in the desert against Rommel’s Panzers had become a costly series of battles that left too many men dead on the sands. We weren’t winning, and nor was Russia. The Allies were holding the line — but only by our fingernails.
I wondered how Roy was doing in the Coldstream Guards in the desert. I also wondered when my own unit would be deemed ready to join the war rather than be trained for it.
Before I went to my mother’s house, I had a beer at Halifax’s White Swan. It was the grand hotel for the city’s posh and successful. In civilian life, I would never have dared enter except to deliver something from Grosvenor’s to their kitchen. But the war was on, and I felt I had the right to stand at its bar rail and sip a beer.
Propaganda posters hung on the barroom walls:
“Your Courage.
Your Cheerfulness.
Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory.”
Bollocks, I thought.
A prominent portrait of the King stared at me as I savoured my half-pint. The photograph leered at me the way the picture of my grandad dressed in his finery once did, when my dad hung it on the greasy wall of our first room in a Bradford doss. The businessmen enjoying their drinks ignored me completely, just as their kind had ignored me when I plied a barrow for Grosvenor’s Grocers and wore a worker’s cap and coat in peacetime.
From the hotel, I walked in the rain to my mother’s house on Boothtown Road. The air smelt of burning coal as drizzle slicked the pavements. In the street, a few children played war games, imitating what their fathers were performing in deadly earnest at the front.
I was disappointed that no adults were outside. I wanted Mum’s neighbours to see me in RAF blue. They could all get stuffed, I thought — I was now part of the machine fighting for their safety.
When my mum saw me at her door, she said sarcastically,
“Look what the cat’s dragged in.”
Once the kettle was on for tea, Mum let me know Alberta was enduring a harsh war on the home front owing to Charlie’s desertion.
“The coppers should be looking for Charlie because he deserted our Alberta and his bairn, not because he skipped out on the bloody army.”
From the moment Charlie went on the lam, I wasn’t the best of brothers to Alberta. I didn’t understand — nor want to understand — the enormity of her problems. My sister had to raise a child with few resources in wartime, and a deserter for a husband who the police were hunting.
Mum said that even in the shops, some owners were rude to her and said they shouldn’t have to serve the wife of a deserter.
I drank Mum’s strong tea in her worn and spartan kitchen. She complained that there was no sugar for the tea, nor coal to ward off the damp because of rationing. As I sipped my cuppa and listened to her complaints — and her requests for me to send more money from my pay — remorse, affection, and revulsion shifted in my heart like an uneven load on the back of a lorry.
Smugly, I believed I had escaped my childhood and its painful memories because I had learned to march to a parade sergeant’s orders. Coldly, I looked at my mother and thought:
In a day, I’ll be gone.
And I won’t come back, even when this bloody war is done.
My homecoming with Mum was interrupted when Bill arrived home.
“Let’s have a look at you. You did all right, lad. There’s no muck on you, Harry.”
That night, our sleep was disturbed by the sound of air-raid sirens. I quickly got dressed, but when I went downstairs, Bill said there was nowhere to bloody go but under the kitchen table if a bomb dropped, as their street had no nearby shelters. He added he’d rather be dead than found cowering underneath a “bloody table, like a frightened dog in a thunderstorm.”
The all-clear eventually sounded, and I went back to sleep.
The following morning, I visited my sister in Low Moor, Bradford. On the bus journey there, propaganda posters lined the roadside hoardings, warning civilians to be vigilant for spies and saboteurs, and to conserve food and clothing.
Alberta’s house was a dingy millworker’s terrace built at the end of the nineteenth century. Around it, the air was thick with coal smoke belching from the weaving mills’ rooftops. Until that day, I had never visited her at home, because Charlie had always carried an air of violence and drink about him.
It had been six months since I’d seen my sister, and the change in her appearance shocked me. She was anaemic and underweight — almost a skeleton wrapped in skin. Much of her hair had fallen out from the stress of police harassment. The cops and military police frequently came to her workplace and her home, hounding her about Charlie’s desertion.
Alberta was reluctant to talk about her life or her husband, and I was hesitant to speak of my RAF days, which I thought were insignificant. She said,
“You men get all the bloody luck and glory. Look at you in the RAF — it’s a life of adventure. No dull days down at the mill for you.”
At the time, I did not understand her words. I only realised years later what she meant. My sister was far more trapped by the bonds of earth, kith, and kin than I was as a man. Society denied her the right to a well-paying profession and financial independence. She had nowhere to run, no bolt-hole to hide in until the storms subsided. Even her husband’s desertion was considered her sin as much as Charlie’s.
When I left, she said,
“If you need something, just holler. I’ll help.”
I told her the same and kissed her ashen cheek. But I left knowing neither of us would ever call upon the other. We both wrongly believed we shouldn’t burden each other with our problems.
The next day, I left Mum’s house at six in the morning with a terse “Tara,” and caught the train back to St Athan. The carriages overflowed with soldiers, sailors, and airmen returning from leave — some quiet, some joking — but all of them already weary from this war.
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John
