1923: A Great Depression Memoir

Harry Leslie Smith

1923: A Great Depression Memoir

Copyright @ 2011 Harry Leslie Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Barley Hole Press

Sydney Street,

Belleville, Ontario, Canada

K8P 4Y1

www.1923thebook.ca

ISBN: 978-0-9878425-0-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-9878425-1-0 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter One  The Beginning

Chapter Two  Birth and Death

Chapter Three  Bradford

Chapter Four  Arrivals and Departures

Chapter Five  Sowerby Bridge

Chapter Six  King Cross

Chapter Seven  Moving Out

Chapter Eight  The Phony War

PART TWO

Chapter Nine  Square-bashing at Padgate

Chapter Ten  St. Athan, Wales

Chapter Eleven  White Waltham

Chapter Twelve  Chigwell

Chapter Thirteen  Invasion

Chapter Fourteen  Europe

Chapter Fifteen  Hamburg

Chapter Sixteen  Love in the Time of Occupation

About the Author

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War RAF veteran and, at 91, an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. Harry Leslie Smith is a frequent contributor to the Guardian Newspaper. His articles about politics and the decline of the social safety network in western democracies have become viral sensations on social media platforms. Some of his Guardian articles have been shared over 60,000 times on Facebook and attracted huge comment and debate. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the Great Depression, the Second World War and post-war austerity. He lives outside Toronto, Canada and in Yorkshire.

Harry Leslie Smith is represented by London’s Greene and Heaton. His latest book Harry’s Last Stand is published by Icon Books and available June 2014. For further information about the author and his life please visit www.1923thebook.ca

Gentle Reader:

I am now ninety and my death approaches with actuary punctuality. I have lived longer than any of my ancestors. My body grows weary, through decades of use and abuse and the party is almost over for me. Yet I still long for one more adventure, one more glorious sunrise; one more chance to toss the dice and see what fate unfolds for me. As I now survey my long life; I realize that there was remarkable beauty, sorrow, and humour in my long journey from boyhood to vintage maturity. The voyages taken by my ancestors and myself should not be lost to history. Those episodes of my youth, painful, sad, and absurd as they were, are worthy of being remembered.

I ask for your indulgences while reading this ever-so-brief tale of my younger days. I have forgotten much, and with the onset of time some past names and places are now obscure to me. Should you find a passage in this tome that plays falsely against your ear, blame it on the misty memory of an old man. I leave this book to you as a tribute to my tribe because I am the last of my kind and no one else is left alive to tell this tale. I am the first and last son who can recall our passing across this spectre, this enchanting world we all leave too soon.

Prologue

My sister and I were children of the one true Church, which took its orders from the Vatican. We were commanded by God’s Earthly representatives to arise early each Sunday and dress in clean, presentable clothes. After a breakfast of stale toast, my sister would clean my face and hands with an old dishrag. Until the age of six, I had been excluded and shielded from paying homage to Jesus, snug in His heaven. So, it mystified and frustrated me to have to stomp across city streets with stores shuttered and bolted on the Sabbath. I was envious of our town’s well-fed but less devout brethren, who were still wrapped up warm in their beds while my sister and I traversed to the parish cathedral.

In front of St. Joseph’s, we lined up with the other hungry children from our school and from other parochial establishments in the parish. We formed neat lines and rows designated by age and classroom. Nuns from the Sisters of the Cross and Passion barked up and down the street like sergeant majors at inspection. They pulled and dragged sleepy-eyed worshippers into their correct drill formation. Nuns in wimples wearing long black gowns, impenetrable to human emotions and suffering, demanded silence from us and ordered us to demonstrate our reverence for the Holy Father and for the Church through our absolute obedience.

Before mass, I waited impatiently to be marched into the confessional where I could reveal my sins. “Father, forgive me, it has been seven days since my last confession and I have had ravenous thoughts about my pudding for tea.”

Absolution never came to me or to any of the other poor wretches I knew in my childhood during the Great Depression.

But now, at the age of twenty-two, I don’t give a toss for the church or forgiveness because it is May 1945 and the Second World War is coming to its brutal and bloody conclusion. I have a front row seat to Nazism’s turgid end because I am part of a military convoy that is making its way from Holland to the city of Hamburg. Before me, the landscape of Europe’s lowlands is pitted and scarred from merciless battles fought by giant armies who have done their best to destroy civilized society.

As our fleet of RAF lorries trundle along a dual carriage way, we brush past an endless procession of refugees fleeing in the opposite direction. They are jetsam from over five years of total war. I am told by a superior officer that those sad creatures walking on the side of the road are a mixture of forced labourers, former concentration camp inmates, and the Diaspora, from Germany’s eastern provinces. Their eyes are cast down and their feet stamp towards a dirty, dusty unknown destination

I turn away from the refugees and feel the warm spring air caress my face; it smells of fresh earth, petrol, and newly blossomed flowers. A hundred kilometres north, Soviet infantry and stray remnants of Wehrmacht divisions are still fighting. The German army is making a final push westward in a vain attempt to surrender to America or Britain rather than face retribution from the Russians. Who can blame them because Hitler is dead and Berlin has fallen to Red Army forces that have pitched their flag on the smouldering Reichstag and began to seek their blood vengeance for the crimes committed against their countrymen, during this inhuman war.

As we approach Hamburg, a Player’s cigarette dangles from my mouth and the strap to my tin helmet hangs loosely around my chin and I think this is what Carthage must have looked like to the Romans after they laid waste to it. At the sides of the road, a few members of the defeated master race watch me, until a horn is sounded and then like frightened dogs they scurry back into the rubble.

I feel nothing for the defeated Germans as I survey the crumbling brick skeletons and the grey ghosts of buildings from the back of my RAF lorry. I have been through Holland and Belgium and seen Germany’s legacy; smashed cities, murdered families and emaciated children. I have seen both the corpses of national socialist collaborators and German army deserters hung from trees. I have seen mobs do justice in the streets to those who benefited under Nazi rule.

I have seen enough in my short life and now I have no feelings, except perhaps relief that I will at least see my twenty-third birthday, unlike so many of my generation. As I travel into the fire-bombed, ravaged city of Hamburg, I start to feel like I am some ancient warrior from the Odyssey because I am entering new and forbidding shores where maybe, I can snatch a new life, for myself, from out of the rubble.

Chapter One

The Beginning

When I was born on a cold, damp day in February 1923, we were not a happy family. We were not a well-fed family when I first cried out for my mother’s breast. Nor were we a loving family when I fell asleep in my make shift crib – a dresser drawer beside my parents’ bed. On the day of my birth, my father was not glad-handed by his friends for siring a male. When I came into this world, he was already an old man in his late fifties. If my father had any friends, they would have been elderly and unimpressed at his impecunious virility. As for my mother, she was much younger than my dad. She was only twenty-nine and jaded by marrying both above and beneath her station. My arrival was one more proof to her that she was trapped in a marriage that had long ago lost its lustre. My mother was being asphyxiated by the cliché: too little, too late.

My father, Albert Smith, was a miner and the son of an innkeeper in the small Yorkshire mining community of Barley Hole. For the first forty-five years of his life, my dad didn’t know the meaning of ‘want’ because my grandfather Francis Smith cherished him as a favoured first son. It was always understood by both my dad and the rest of his family that he was to inherit his father’s pride, joy and livelihood; a pub called the New Inn. “One day, lad, this will all be yours,” said my granddad to my father during many festive suppers.

As first born, my dad was smothered with affection by his mother, who taught him how to play the piano with great refinement. My grandmother instilled in my father a love of learning and compassion for the vulnerable, the weak and the disadvantaged. So as my father grew from child to young man, he developed an appreciation for books and nature that was considered odd or pretentious by the rest of the village. “He thinks he’s a better bolt of cloth than the likes of uz,” many of the town’s folk lamented when they saw my father with a book under his arm and a faraway look in his eyes.

The pub my grandfather owned provided a steady stream of income for him and his children. Still, my granddad knew that life was cruel and fortunes were easily lost or squandered. He did not want my father to think that the income from the New Inn was perpetual. It was best that my dad learn the trade of his community-mining.

So at twelve, when my father’s schooling was done, he joined the adult world and became a collier in the pit located across the way from the New Inn. My dad, like so many other Yorkshire lads, was exiled to a world of darkness underneath the moors where six days a week he cut and smashed black coals from the rock face a hundred feet below the surface.

By all accounts, my father was a good man to work beside because he was not afraid to lend a hand to any man in distress. But above ground, he was aloof and preferred his own company. He was a moderate drinker who favoured solitary walks on the moors to a miner’s regular pastime of rough sport, gambling or whoring.

Despite being considered an attractive catch, my father, until middle age, remained a bachelor. It was then my mother stirred his fancy during a chance encounter at my grandfather’s pub.

As to the reason why my mother ended up visiting my grandfather’s pub, I can only ascribe it to her desire to break the rules of Edwardian Society. By her own sisters’ accounts, she was wild and not easy to tame because she was beautiful and fearless. She swore she would follow no man unless it was out of the stifling atmosphere of rural Yorkshire. My mother was a force to be suffered; she was a storm to be endured. In 1913, she damned convention by visiting the New Inn and drinking light ale while mixing with rough coal mining men. She pointed her finger at fate and challenged it for good or ill.

It must have been like a gust of fresh air for the sooty-faced miners of Barley Hole to see a woman like my mother in the pub’s parlour. My mum said many years later that when she entered the New Inn for the first time, the miners lifted up their tired heads from stagnant conversations and pulled their pipes from their mouths gob smacked by her sexuality and wanton rule-breaking. With her easy wit, her adolescence, and sensuality, my mother Lillian aroused a desire in my father, which like the moth’s addiction to the flame, he could not resist.

My mother was like a siren who beguiled my father with flirtatious risqué talk. My dad was immediately smitten by my mother because she was young and beautiful. It is hard to say whether my mother felt the same passion towards my father. However, one thing is for sure, she loved the attention my father showered upon her. Still, she was twenty-six years his junior and had other suitors, but my mother deduced that since my father was heir to a prosperous pub; he was the finest catch for her in this land of poor miners and impoverished families.

During their courtship, my dad treated my mother well with outings to Rotherham and walks around Barnsley. He showered her with reverence, and complimented her about her beauty and her wit. Honestly, my mother was not accustomed to this manner of courting, and she liked its feel. My mother was seduced by the simplest and emptiest of fairy tales: the one that ends happily ever after.

My parents’ growing romance did not go unnoticed by my dad’s siblings. They told him that Lillian was no good, a bad seed, and a bad bet. His brothers were not pleased with this romance and warned him that their father would snuff it out with as much bother as he took to extinguished the gaslights behind the bar each night. But my father ignored their warnings and shrugged off their admonitions because he believed his future was assured.

So it was only natural that after another evening of drink and song at the pub that my parents eventually seduced each other. After last orders were called out, my parents were left alone in the bar. No words were exchanged, but they knew that it was time to make their way up the back stairs to my father’s room, hand-in-hand.

Not long after their liaison, my mum realized she was pregnant. At the time, she was not sure whether it was a misfortune or a blessing. When she informed my dad that she was pregnant, my father was not disappointed at the news. He told my mother that he would stand by her come what may and that they would be married as soon as he received his father’s blessing.

My grandfather, however, was a man born at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and he held his family and his small fortune together with the intensity of a despot. He allowed no truck or trade with gold diggers or interlopers. For his family to survive in the unforgiving environment of pit mines and pubs, iron authority was exercised and used without mercy.

Indeed, my grandfather was sent into a rage when he first heard about my mother’s pregnancy. He wanted to have her sent packing and barred from the New Inn. “The cheek of that lass to barge into my son’s life and turn it into a bunch of muck. Fi on her and her treacle tale ’bout some bun in the oven put there by my lad. This is bloody Yorkshire,” he said to Albert, “where bastards are as common as sheep. She can be like t’others and say, ‘It were the Woodman that made the baby with me’ when it comes time to register it.”

My dad protested, but my grandfather said, “I won’t hear another word about it. You marry that woman, and you’ll get nowt from me lad, nowt brass, nowt pub. All of thy blood will turn its back on thee. So be wise, son, and forget ’bout her tales of it being your bairn.”

Soon after this outburst, my granddad complained that he was feeling poorly. He said that his son’s tomfoolery had given him a chill, and he took to his bed. During his illness, he requested that his half-brother, Larratt, and his wife, Laura, come to tend to the pub. As the days progressed, my grandfather became more febrile, confused, and delirious. The infection turned from bad to worse, and my granddad developed pneumonia. While his body burned with a raging temperature, my grandfather dreamed that he was labouring in the pits, underneath tons of smouldering coal.

Finally, a doctor was summoned, who after listening to his chest knew my granddad’s chances for survival were slim. It would be wise, the doctor surmised, for the patriarch to say farewell to his family. My grandfather, who was seemingly indestructible, called for his half-brother, Larratt. In delusion and in the madness of fever, Francis begged his brother to look after his sons and the pub.

“There is no will,” Francis told him, his eyes bright with fever. “I wrote no will. I did not do,” he whispered, “what Father did for us; put on parchment what is for thee and what is for thou.”

Terrified, my grandfather cried out; he had misgivings and forebodings that without his half-brother’s assistance, doom would befall his children.

“Take hold of the pub,” he begged Larratt.

Francis repeated the ordination in front of all his children, the housekeeper, and the doctor. Francis, delirious from the illness, implored Larratt,

“Protect them, until they are ready.”

After eighteen days of illness, my grandfather’s breath grew shallow as he fought to draw air into his rotten and fetid lungs. He moaned and cursed death that hovered nearby. Late that afternoon while tea was being prepared, my granddad turned his back on the living and choked to death on his own bodily fluids.

Later on Mrs. Mcheter, the housekeeper cleaned and dressed his body and afterwards my father along with his brothers placed my granddad into a solid pine coffin. They carried him downstairs to the parlour of the pub and propped his coffin up along the wall beside the piano so that he could oversee, for the last time, the day’s taking.

A wake was held and my father and his uncle Larratt greeted the mourners who had come to raise a glass and say their farewells to a respected publican. During the event my dad’s uncle told him not to be dismayed by my granddad’s strange last pronouncements.

“His commands must be embraced,” Larratt told him. “It was an ultimate directive, and who are we to judge a man’s final wishes? If your dad believed that the pub’s license should be transferred to me until you have righted yourself, it is in everyone’s best interest to follow his command.”

My father struggled with my granddad’s last wishes and his uncle’s words of reassurance because after all he was the rightful successor to the pub. Besides, he had waited many decades for his turn to take his father’s place in the world. Why should he now blindly and obediently accept these new delays to receiving his birth right? But, in the end, my father relented because he was a dutiful and loving son.

When spring came to the moors, my mother was well into her third month of pregnancy and pressed my father to keep his word and make her an honest woman. He promised her that he would once my grandfather’s estate was settled. My mother told him that if he ran from his pledge to her that he was doomed to a life of misery.

On the 26th of May, my father, his half-uncle and a dodgy auctioneer named Job presented themselves to the probate court, in Wakefield. They assured the representative of His Majesty’s Government that Francis died without a will and that my grandfather’s estate was valued at £219 and 19 shillings. The testimony of Larratt, my dad, and the auctioneer satisfied the court, who released my granddad’s possessions to my father.

The license for the New Inn, however, was not considered part of the estate, as my grandfather had transferred his rights to his brother in his last moments on Earth. The Brewery that controlled the pub also had no care if the license went from father to son or brother to brother, as long as there was continuity and the taps kept flowing, drowning the thirst of paying customers.

For now, Larratt would remain innkeeper and it seemed to my dad to be an acceptable temporary solution. Eventually, he thought, full and rightful ownership of the public house will come to me. A little while after the probate hearing, my father proposed marriage to my mother because he thought my granddad’s death had liberated him. However, my grandfather’s passing was instead a talisman that marked the end of an era and the demise of Edwardian England. What followed my grandfather’s death was the beginning of a fearful, new world whose grammar and structure was alien to the past.

My father believed when he asked my mum to marry him that his life was set like his watch and that it would keep ticking as before. Nothing would change, he thought – not his relationships with his brothers and sisters or his involvement with the pub or his job in the coal pit.

My mother accepted his proposal because she was fond of him and carried his child. What my mum did not understand was that the money, the so-called wealth of the Smiths, was slight and tied to the pub. Moreover, Larratt was now the legal licensee of the New Inn and controlled its revenue as tightly as my grandfather had when alive.

When my mother told her parents, Walter and Mary Ellen, that she was betrothed to Albert Smith, she failed to mention that she was pregnant. Walter forbade the marriage; he knew his family was not the proper sort to be mixing with the Smiths. It was well known that the Deans were several steps below the Smiths in economic security and status. In fact, Walter had to join the Army when he was eighteen because there was neither work nor enough food for him at home.

“He be too old fer ya, lass. Why, I have only seven years on im. Look at uz. Ready for the bone yard, I am, and Albert can’t be far behind. Lil, it’s not proper. Francis asn’t even warmed the dirt in his grave.”

Even more aghast at this proposed union were my uncles who each asked my dad, “How are we all going to fit under this one roof?”

Still, despite my uncles reservations about my mother all of them bit their tongue and held their nose over my mum joining the family because my dad was the eldest brother. However, my father’s uncle Larratt and his wife did not ascribe to the motto “live and let live.” Instead, after my father announced his intention to marry my mum, they spread discord and rumours about my parents. Larratt told my dad’s siblings that this proposed marriage was irresponsible. Larratt also asserted that Francis have been wise to have left him in charge of the pub because my father was unbalanced due to his infatuation with this slattern.

My mum and dad were wed in early summer 1914, at the Barnsley Registry office. As my father and mother both courted a lie in their wooing, why not continue it into their marriage? My father subtracted seven years from his actual age on the marriage certificate and wrote down that he was forty. My mother added seven years and wrote her age as twenty-six. Perhaps by one subtracting seven years and the other one adding seven years, they were both trying to cancel out their mutual deception. They wanted to obscure from the curious and the meddling that one was too young and the other too old for this marriage bed. The formulization of my parent’s marriage was a brief, perfunctory affair and no family members or friends attended their wedding.

The day before my parents’ marriage ceremony, the Archduke of Austria and his wife were assassinated by an unemployed Slav nationalist in the sleepy Serbian town of Sarajevo. My parents, like most of Europe, were totally unaware of the horrific significance that the murder of these royals would play upon their lives.

While my parents settled into married life, armies across Europe mobilized and prepared for war, which came in August. As men began to sing its A Long Way to Tiporery and boarded ships for the battlefields of France, my mother miscarried. It was the first of many omens signalling their life together was cursed.

Through the autumn, my father saw droves of Army recruiters seduce fit and hungry miners to join the local regiments. Fat, balding men sold tales of adventure in foreign climes. Army recruiters were no better than carnival barkers, regaling the callow youth about the rewards awaiting a man who picked up a rifle for the King. Men far beyond the age of enlistment admonished the young not to miss a chance in the dust up. It would be a shame, they said, to lose out on the fun and adventure because battle ennobles the spirit. Even the pit owners got into the business of supplying the state with cannon fodder and financed their own regiments. They encouraged their employees to take the pledge and be purified in this just war. My father saw beer sales plummet as more miners made their way to France. No matter, Albert thought, the war will be short, and everyone must roll up their sleeves.

In 1915, my mother became pregnant again but this time she felt at ease with both the child growing within her womb and herself. Yet as my mother relished her new role as expectant mother, death covered the continent. The Great War was draining Europe of its youth through murderous battles, chemical warfare and diseases born and bred in the filth of trenches that stretched from the coast of France to the Swiss border.

As the war dragged on, my father found it increasingly more difficult to defer to his uncle over matters about the pub. It goaded my dad’s pride that he was now a lodger in the house and Inn his father had built. He was now a tenant to his half-uncle who was his senior by a handful of years. He was under the authority of an uncle who showed no inclination to surrender the pub to its rightful heirs. For my dad, the summation of these calculations was horrifying. He had relinquished his birth right; he had betrayed my granddad’s wish that he would continue to make the family prosper. My dad had trusted too much and given up too much because of misplaced family loyalty.

For my mother life in the pub was becoming increasingly difficult because she was treated like an interloper by Larratt’s wife, Laura. From the moment she took up residence at the New Inn, Laura assumed the role of mistress. Either by omission or failure of memory, she forgot the pub belonged to my father and his brothers. When downstairs in the bar, Laura referred to the New Inn as “our pub, our home.” She ingratiated herself with the miners with free pints of beer. Laura looked for any reason and issues to disagree with or disavow my mum. She spread word around the village and pub that my mother was not to be trusted.

“These Deans,” she gossiped, “are nothing but bad blood. They’re rotten to the core.” Laura intensified her campaign against my mother. She questioned my mum’s motives in marrying my dad.

“She’s a gold digger. She got with child to steal from our house.” Laura made jokes to the other village wives. “She be his bairn, nowt his wife.”

In September 1915 with my mother seven months pregnant, my dad confronted my Great uncle and demanded to know when he would receive his legacy. Larratt declared vehemently that the pub was not ever going to be my father’s to own or control.

“Never in this day, nor in the days hereafter will thee Albert have this pub. Lad, you chose wrong, you picked the wrong filly to win life’s derby. Thy father, Francis, would be ashamed of thee. A steady hand as mine is needed to take your dad’s work, my work, to greater riches. It’s just not in ya, lad. Best you and thy woman be gone from here ’cause yer nowt but trouble.”

Afterwards, Larratt declared to my father, “You received all your father’s worldly assets but the pub. What you were given at the probate court was a tidy sum. You have done with it as you wished. It has set you and your brothers and sisters right with me and god.”

My dad threatened to take his uncle to court. No court in the land, Larratt re-joined, would accept my father’s title to the pub, as there were witnesses to the deathbed bequest. He added with smug satisfaction that even the local council had tabled and accepted the motion to change the license to him eighteen months before.

At this point, my father knew then that The New Inn was lost to him. My dad had no allies, and although his brothers and sisters were sympathetic to his claim, they had no wish to be caught in a legal battle that offered them nothing but grief. His siblings believed my dad should move on and accept that his uncle was the legal proprietor of the pub.

Without allies, my father understood that there was nothing more he could do except leave Barley Hole and try to make a new life for himself and his wife in some other desolate mining village. So when the cold autumn rains began to fall hard and heavy over Yorkshire, my parents moved away from my father’s village and tried to banish from their minds memories of what might have been.

Eventually, my parents ended up in a one-bedroom terraced cottage in Brampton Bierlow. It was a dank and inhospitable home, but it was all my dad could afford on his wages. There, my mother gave birth to my sister Marian on a frigid November day. It was a brutal season for my parents because that year winter came early and ravaged the countryside with bone chilling temperatures. My father tried to make the best of a very bad situation by being cheerful and saying on too many occasions that “it is always darkest before the light.”

Unfortunately, my father was proved wrong because as 1915 trudged through the ice to 1916, the war being fought in the trenches of France was taking a horrible toll on the lives of my parents’ contemporaries. Every day the local newspapers published a growing list of the dead, the wounded or the missing. It was a solemn litany to those that were lost in the mud of Flanders, Ypres, and Passchendaele or in the nameless skirmishes fought all along the Western Front in the mud of no man’s land.

When the war ended in 1918, millions of men women and children were dead across the length and breadth of Europe. Empires had fallen, revolutions had murdered kings and the continent was in ruins. As Army veterans marched home to civilian life, many returned infected by a plague that was caused by the unsanitary conditions found in the trenches. It was called the Spanish Flu, and it killed millions across the globe.

My family was spared the scourge of death from the plague, but because of their poverty and primitive living conditions my sister Marian developed TB that drained into her spine, like fetid water. It was a relentless disease that ate away at the marrow inside her bones and left her a fragile invalid. My sister’s illness required that my parents move to Barnsley to allow her to be treated at the local hospital. While Marian languished with TB, my other sister Mary was born in 1920.

Chapter Two

Birth and Death

When I came into the world only my sister, Mary, was enthused by my arrival because my parents were too consumed with my eldest sister Marian’s terminal illness. Besides, money was short and the rent was always past due. My father was never able to catch up with the cost of living because his wages as a miner had been slashed by the coal pit owners. As was their way, they mitigated their loss in profits caused by depressed coal prices by drawing back the wages of their employees.

During the 1920s, we were not the only family who lived ragged and threadbare. In fact there were millions like us that existed just above the line that marks one either as a pauper or a beggar. Horrendous working conditions, subhuman wages and primitive housing for the British working class led to social unrest across this island during my infancy. In May 1926, the first of several General Strikes were called. It was to protest the brutal practices of mill and mine owners against their employees.

England saw two weeks of pitched battles that almost dissolved the country into civil anarchy. The British Army was called out to quell the uprising. There was an overall gloom in the houses and clubs of the upper classes who feared, like Russia, that revolutionaries would take the country. For the workers, there was dread that their demands for fair wages and better working conditions would be denied them. In parliament and in newspapers, Winston Churchill and his Tory allies railed against the working class and said my father’s kind were a rabble that recklessly held the nation to ransom.

When the strikes were quelled, it caused more strife for the miners and millworkers than when they had put down their tools and taken up their pickets. The workers lost more rights when they returned to work than when they had taken strike action. Their pay was cut almost in half, and their hours of work increased to Victorian times. For many the brutal suppression of The General Strike proved that the Great War had been waged to protect the wealth and power of a few mighty families at the expense of the working class who sacrificed their lives by the thousands in the trenches.

At the time of these strikes, I was almost four, but I vividly can recall the unease that spread out across our household as my parents slipped further into poverty and my eldest sister grew more infirm. Marian was treated like a delicate porcelain doll because her bones were brittle and easily fractured. She was so ill that she was kept on a basket-woven bed that had wheels to allow my mum to take her outdoors. When her bed was pushed outside, the thin rubber tires squeaked mournfully, but Marian remained silent as she took in the fresh air. Eventually, Marian became too ill to be tended to at home and she was sent to a work house infirmary for medical attention as it was the only institution that treated patients too poor to pay for a doctor.

At the work house, my sister’s conditioned worsened and my mother was told that nothing could be done for Marian, except “pray to God to deliver her soul to heaven.” My mother was made inconsolable by the news and my father was so heartbroken he cried out, “Let God take me, rather than my first born lass because she is as innocent as the light at dawn.”

For three weeks, my parent’s kept vigil over my sister while her tuberculosis trundled on until it killed her on the morning of October thirtieth. When my mother came to tell my sister Mary and me of the news, she wept and said “Our Marian was only ten and didn’t deserve all that bloody misery.” Desolate as my parents were, Marian’s body was committed to a common, mass grave because their love alone wasn’t enough to pay the church warden’s bills.

Just after my sister’s death, I fell ill with whooping cough, a pernicious killer of children. It left my tiny lungs gasping for air and I almost died from the sickness. My father, already having lost one child to tuberculosis, used whatever energy he had to make sure I would survive. At night, he cradled me in his arms and calmed my fears with his warm and reassuring voice. “S’all right lad, yer mum and dad will see you safe.”

By Christmas Day, I was well enough to enjoy the festivities which included singing carols while my dad played the piano. On that holiday, my mother cooked an enormous goose and we gorged ourselves, as if knowing this day would never come again for us. After the meal, I lay on a throw rug on the parlour floor and played with a small miniature railway set made in Japan, while the heat from a coal fire kept me snug. All of us were at peace that yuletide afternoon and we were allowed a brief respite from grief, but like the calm before a storm, it was not to last.

Soon after the holidays, my parents started to loathe each other as our economic situation worsened. As the coins that fed their optimism ran out, their love exhausted itself and my mother began to feel contempt for my father and what she considered his greatest weakness-not being able to see into the future. My dad silently accepted her accusations because he was overcome with guilt for events beyond his control. Both of them wandered through the daily routine of their lives like shell shock victims and were unable to deal with the grief of having lost a daughter during an extreme financial crisis. Neither of them saw a way out of our pitiable lifestyle because my father was now sixty and he had no inheritance, no savings, no property, and no real potential to continue earning money.

Our lives became more difficult after my dad suffered an accident while hacking coal three hundred feet below the moors and was reassigned to surface work. He slaked out a living on top of the mine as an odd-job man. What shame, what sadness this wrought upon my father, I do not know. It must have been a humiliation and a sad recognition to him that he had been reduced to an old work-horse who was poorly treated and paid. In fact, the silver in his weekly pay packet was so insignificant that we often did not have enough money to buy coal to heat our cramped terraced house.

As there was no money for coal, our mother engaged me and Mary to scrounge for fuel. “Be off you two and go to the pit that is up past our road. You will find there a mountain of slag at the colliery’s entrance which is free for the taking. Grab a bucket from the kitchen and remember not to come back home until it is filled to the rim with that lovely black brass”

So in winter, on cold afternoons, my sister and I scratched through the mighty heaps of sub grade coal and filled our buckets with shards of coke and grit. We were never alone because our neighbours were just as destitute as us, and so the slag heap teemed with dirty coal faced children as if it were a tip cluttered with gulls looking for grub. Sometimes, when I dug my hands became brittle from the frigid temperatures and I cried out that the work was too hard for me.

“Hush,” my sister replied in a kind voice, “the sooner we’ve got our coal, the sooner we can be home by the fire.”

After our labours, we walked home along dusky teatime streets that seemed haunted by the uniformity of their poverty. Sparse gas lights sputtered and hissed above us like menacing serpents, while my sister admonished me to stop dawdling. “Wee one, get a move on or we will miss our drippings.”

By the late 1920s, my father was well and truly beaten by age and fate. The strain of using a shovel to put food on our family’s table had ground him down. He was physically exhausted from work and emotionally exhausted from financial worries. To preserve his employment, my father took every order, from his superiors with patient silence. My dad did not complain when he was ordered to lift, carry and fetch because the few shillings he earned kept his family away from the poor house.

However, his body could not keep up with the six-day work week. The physical demands, the sheer stamina and strength required to work nine hours a day, lifting and dumping scrap, were too much for my father. Soon enough, he ruptured himself and threw his intestines and internal organs askew. It crippled him and he was dismissed from the pits as a has-been and pensioned off with twelve shillings a week which could keep one man barely afloat but not a family of four.

Our family’s fall from grace in the 1920’s was a prelude to the destruction waiting to befall working class families across the world in the 1930’s. We were on the threshold of the Great Depression and the levelling of the poor, the middle class, and the downtrodden in Europe and America. In the coming global economic turmoil, my sister and I and our disconnected parents were to spend years ducking debt collectors and doing midnight runners from landlords.

Chapter Three

Bradford

From Barnsley we moved to Bradford because my mother was able to secure a position as a rent collector in a doss house. It was the best she could do as a woman with no trade, an invalided husband and two young children in her care. Besides there was nothing for us in Barnsley but debt, bad memories and my mother’s relatives who couldn’t even afford to give us a tinker’s damn because they were plagued by their own troubles. Without a doubt, we were on our own and like migratory beasts of the plain in a time of drought we moved forward and found a safe savannah for grazing.

The workman’s doss was a three storied house that in Victorian times must have been quite a respectable home for a prosperous family. However, by the time we had come to live there, it was a rundown eye sore whose tenants were Irish Navies that slept four to a room on hard cots. They were tough men who had spent a lifetime building roads across the country. They knew how to drink, how to swear and how to brawl but in my mother’s hands they were like butter on toast because they feared her lashing tongue.

There was one tenant who received both my mother’s sympathy and her wrath because he was too young to live in this lion’s den populated by fornicating drunkards. The young man pissed his bed on one too many occasions for my mum’s liking. But, for a while, my mother let his bed wetting pass without much rebuke because he paid his rent on time. However, when the smell of urine became so strong that it even overpowered the cloying stench of unwashed humanity that resided in the house, my mother tossed the poor beggar out on his ear. When he pleaded for his possessions; she returned to his former bedroom and from an open window hurled his meagre belongings, along with the piss-stained mattress, to the pavement where he stood below.

As books and clothes dropped to the ground my mother swore at him and warned him never to return to her door stoop. “Oi piss pants bugger off home to your own mam and stay out of my bloody way or I’ll give you such a bollocking, you’ll have a reason to wet the bed.”

By this time, my father had given up all hope of being able to change our financial situation for the better. So, most evenings, he sat resigned on a stool beside the fireplace in the common room parlour. Silent and morose, he smoked his pipe while my mother flirted with the lodgers and degraded him in front of younger, more virile men.

Whatever turmoil, whatever regrets he may have had, they were wordless. On the wall above his chair, my dad had hung an elegant portrait of his father which was part of his inheritance settlement. In the painting, my granddad appeared with a giant handlebar moustache. He wore a morning coat adorned with the tie of a prosperous publican. I wonder if my father sensed disappointment glaring down from the portrait over how much had been lost. Or perhaps my dad stared upward and cursed his father for his deathbed betrayal to him.

During those early days in Bradford, my father withdrew into himself because he couldn’t tolerate his own helplessness as we fell further into rough circumstances. So to avoid unpleasant questions, every morning, he put on his worker’s cap and short coat as if he were preparing to leave for work.

My mother invariably stopped him, each time, before he left to berate him and always asked “Where do you think you’re going? There’s work to be done around this house.”

“Out for a walk,” was his standard response, and then my dad vanished until tea time.

As the door closed behind him, my mum muttered under her breath, “It must be nice to live the life of the idle, bloody rich and have time to stroll about town.”

My father in his way, tried to make amends with me for our shabby existence because sometimes on a weekend he’d kindly bellow out for me to come upstairs to our rooms. “Cum with uz, lad, ah av summa ta show thee.”

Once upstairs, he invited me to look at his prized possession Harmsworth History of the World in eight volumes. They were bound in leather, embossed with gold leaf and mounted across an old and wobbling table.

“Go on then have a go,” he said.

And with that, I had free reign to take one of those beautifully bound books and leaf through it where I discovered vast hidden treasures about exotic worlds and ancient days. However, my father warned me to be careful, as these books were special and not playthings.

They were to learn and to improve oneself, he said. So on many weekends with my father close by, the noise of boarders below, and the catcalls of my mother seeping up through the floorboards, I became lost in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I saw magnificent illustrations, exact drawings of faraway places, unheard-of kingdoms. I dreamed that I was before the mighty Pyramids of Egypt. I imagined myself walking through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which soared seventy-five feet above the ground, flush with a bounty of flowers. On another page, I was at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, conversing with ancient Greeks or sparring with Alexander the Great. I lingered at the temple of Diana, breathing fresh, clean Ionian air. On another page, I stumbled upon the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and felt a million miles from the doss house and our cramped room.

Only the smell of my father’s pipe or the harsh sound of his throat clearing to indicate that I was too rough on the book brought me crashing down to kith and kin. But there were more pages to explore, and I sailed between the Colossus of Rhodes while the lighthouse of Alexandria guided me into safe Egyptian shores.

On one such day after our excursions through ancient lands, my father said to me, “One day, lad, one day you might go out into the world and see some fantastic, magical places.”

His tender words were like fine spun gold to me and I longed to spend more time with him and rummage through his books but it was not to be because events unfolding below our rooms would banish him from our lives soon enough. The Great Depression had begun to lay siege to Bradford and anyone unfit for work and without allies was about to be destroyed by the dragon of poverty.

Across the country, the economic crisis had left millions unemployed, and now the city where we had fled was awash in misery. Mills shut, factories went bust, the council was broke, road work came to a stop and the navies who had kept the doss afloat were unemployed and we were in severe rent arrears. My mother’s charm was not going to placate the landlord or forestall him giving us the eviction boot. So before the bailiff came and under black, cold Yorkshire skies, we slipped from our doss house lodgings and on to unfriendly streets.

My mother found us another set of rooms to live in that were more decrepit than the last. Our new residence was located in a wretched slum that possessed furtive characters that seemed to have lived their entire existence at the edge of the gutter as if they were like water rats that feared the light. My sister and I did not take well to this new lifestyle because our hunger quickly turned to malnutrition as leg ulcers and boils began to plague us.

During those days in that brutal neighbourhood, we lived famished from sun up to sun down, until one day good fortune seemed to shine down upon my family. My mum had gone out to pawn her wedding ring and as she walked along Manningham Lane; she spied a leather bag with a chain clasp around it. She picked it up and noticed that it had the name of a department store stencilled across it.

Curious and hungry, she proceeded to open it and discovered fifty pounds in notes and silver in the purse. It was the store’s bank purse, and an accounting clerk must have dropped it in the street while on his way to make a deposit. It crossed her mind to pocket the money and not say a word to anyone because fifty pounds was a king’s ransom to a family living on less than a pound a week. However, my mother’s conscience and the knowledge that she was many things but not a thief wore her down.

My mother walked over to the store whose clientele were the well-heeled residents of Bradford who had escaped the misery of the Great Depression. Once inside, she spoke with the establishment’s manager, who sized up my mother as being from the soiled working class. He was officious and thanked her coldly for her honesty and rewarded my mother’s good turn by presenting her with a tin of stale broken biscuits.

My mum fled the store, ashamed and furious that her honesty had paid her so unjustly. Civic duty meant her children went hungry, went without toys, went without clothes, and simply went without. Her good deed was valued by the store’s manager to be worth no more than a tin of broken biscuits in a city where children were dying from hunger.

My mother spent that night in bitter silence and glared at the tin of broken biscuits that rested on our empty kitchen table. She shrugged off any affection shown to her with angry words. “Be gone,” she said, “cause all that you can see here is your mam’s bloody murdered corpse.” So my sister and I crept to our beds, hungry and afraid that our mum was about to do harm to herself or worst to a toffee-nosed manager of a High Street shop.

The following morning, my mum returned to the department store with the tin of broken biscuits. At the store, she demanded to see the manager. The obsequious attendant asked if the manager would know the reason for her visit.

“He bloody well will,” my mother intoned.

Several minutes passed. The highbrow manager, who had looked down upon my mother the day before, greeted her with cold, officious, politeness. He inquired as to how he could be of assistance to her today.

My mother slammed down the tin of broken biscuits and said, “You can start by taking these bloody things back.”

Aghast, the manager asked, “Back? But why?”

“I found fifty pounds of yer money yesterday. You think a few broken biscuits are fair compensation for my kindness to your store?”

The manager arrogantly and dismissively replied, “Yes.”

“Bollocks,” retorted my mum, my good deed is worth at least five pounds.”

“Five pounds?” the manager said incredulously.

“That’s right,” my mother replied, “five pounds, for my service to you and your store.”

“But that is a lot of money,” the manager told her.

“It’s a lot less than losing fifty pounds,” my mother replied.

“I can’t possibly…” the manager responded with haughty disgust.

“Look,” my mother told him, as she pushed up close to the manager’s face. “Give me a fiver, or I am going to scream at the top of me lungs that this store is a heap of rubbish and treats a poor, ungry mam like shite. It’s a grand place that throws crumbs to a poor mother with two little kids to feed and a sick husband to care for. After I saved you a pot of money you have the cheek to hand me some broken biscuits like it were some prized piece of jewellery. ”

The manager, who wore the suit of his class, stood ramrod straight as he answered, “You will have to go to the book-keeping office. I will have someone issue you a five pound note under the condition you never come into this store again.”

During our time in Bradford, I changed schools as many times as I changed homes. The schools I attended were Catholic. It seemed my mother, having lost her belief in my father, found faith in Catholicism. More to the point, she was told Catholic institutions were more generous in their alms. My mother came to this revelation after she developed a deep fancy for one of the Irish men who had lodged with us. His name was O’Sullivan and my mother thought she could entice him into her heart with boarding house coquetry and newly baptized Catholic children. As for her husband, my dad, that was a problem best dealt with by altering his position in the family.

After O’Sullivan entered my mum’s orbit, she told my sister and me to refer to our dad as our grandfather in public. When my sister and I objected, my mother hissed at us, “You want to eat don’t you?”

There was some logic in my mother’s machinations because eliminating my father as her husband gave her free reign to date and flirt with the men she thought could assist us to survive the Great Depression. As for my dad, he made no real protest about his relocation in the family dynamic because he knew he was on sufferance. Without my mother’s stamina for loosening stray bobs out of other men’s hands, my dad and the rest of us would have been out on the streets begging for alms.

So both Mary and I entered the Catholic faith as mendicants and to permit my mother her carnal desire with more ease. Mary and I learned our catechism without devotion, except to avoid the cane. I went to school wearing the only pair of shoes I possessed: hard workman’s clogs whose design had not changed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The rigid fitting shoes cut into my feet and made walking painful. However they were more durable than my trousers which were made from shorn corduroy and came from a charity shop where everything available for the poor was old, dirty and stank of other people’s piss and shit. Every day, the tides of the economy, and my father’s illness drove us further beneath the waves of life in Bradford.

The staggering effects of the 1929 stock market crash reaped total industrial collapse in the North of England. By 1930, mills and mines were closing on a daily basis and the only relief for the unemployed was the dole which gave one fifteen weeks of substandard government assistance and after it ran out you starved. The North, along with Scotland and Wales, bore the full strength of this economic maelstrom despite the fact that for centuries they had been the fuel that drove Britain’s economy. Nevertheless, during the Great Depression, the counties that had built the foundations of the empire were abandoned by the government and left to whither and rot like fruit that had fallen to the ground in autumn.

However, down south in London night clubs, upper middle class youth, who were called “the bright young things,” drank champagne and danced until dawn while miners marched on Parliament to protest shoddy wages which left their families destitute. Poverty in the 1930’s was considered, by the ruling classes to be caused by the intellectual deficiencies of the poor, rather than an absence of social policy and just labour laws which could protect the worker from unscrupulous employers. This warped Malthusian philosophy was reinforced by the country’s numerous right-wing newspapers that in the 1930s wrote ominously and continually about the scourge of communism that infected the working class through their involvement with the trade union movement. It was plain and simple fear mongering, but unfortunately there were only a handful of writers, like George Orwell who had the courage to denounce and fulminate against a business and political system that exploited the vast majority of British citizens to fund their opulent and narcissistic lifestyles. At the time, most intellectuals and journalist chose to ignore the economic holocaust which decimated the working class because they preferred their own comfort to biting the hand that fed them-industrialists who were loath to part with any of their ill gained profits.

Even when the country’s unemployment rate exploded to 2.5 million, the government remained unmoved as their minders told them that fiscal austerity was the cure all for weak national economies. So the poor, the working and middle class were bled like a patient in the 17th century and it resulted in an epidemic of malnutrition that swept through the industrialized cities of the North, South, East and West. Hunger stalked the poor and those it could not kill through starvation it crippled and maimed through rickets, TB and other diseases born by the underfed and poorly housed. Disease was so prevalent in the slums we lived in that children trolled the squalid, dense streets of our neighbourhood and chanted:

“Mother, Mother, take me home from the convalescent home.

I’ve been here a month or two, now I’d like to be with you.”

As for me, I was marked by my clothing as a beggar and I was deemed an untouchable at school. Amongst the poor, I was considered the lowest of the low because of my rotting corduroy trousers. Other children were afraid to befriend me, as if my hunger and poverty could be transferred like an airborne plague. Besides, there was little time for friendship because my family was always on the run from landlords or on the hunt for something to eat.

My sister and I were hungry in the morning, hungry in the evening and even in sleep our stomachs were sick from hunger pangs. Our skin crawled with sores from lack of vitamins and when we suffered from excruciating chilblains the only remedy to sooth the pain was to rub piss on our leg sores. As my malnutrition grew worse, a creeping sense that I was doomed to die young and helpless in a squat overwhelmed my dreams.

So at night, while I slept on a bed made from old straw and used my coat as a blanket, I tumbled into a world of horrifying night terrors. Generally, each night I was dogged by the same dream which always began with the joyful sensation of soaring high above Bradford’s festering cityscape, like a kestrel. But just as I felt my body was about to ascend into the jet stream and break free from the bonds of the earth and my poverty; I’d look down and see that my ankles were bound with metal straps that were connected to a chain that tethered me to the roof of our doss.

At that moment, the dream always ended and I awoke to a frost-chilled morning and groaned at the cold and the hunger knawing at my belly.

By then, my sister was awake beside me and she coaxed me from our bed with a warning, “Harry, you better get a move on, or else you’ll be late for school.”

So, I jumped out of bed clothed in my old rags, poured watered into a chipped wash basin and like a cat cleaned my face and neck with my tiny, dirty hands.

“As we went to the scullery, my sister said sarcastically, I hope the mice haven’t been at our breakfast, while we slept.”

That day like most every other day we were greeted in the scullery by a cold grate and an empty larder.

“Blimey,” said my sister, “its nowt again for us bairns of Bradford.”

With those words, she went off to scrounge a slice of bread from one of the other lodgers.

As she left, I sang:

“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to give the poor dog a bone.

But when she got there the cupboard was bare and so the poor doggie had none.”

Outside, I faced a long and desolate walk to a school I hated because I had fallen far behind in my studies, owing to our hard pressed life on Bradford’s dingy side. I felt ashamed and stupid because I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the students and the nuns caned me for my lack of diligence.

The Sister who had had the strongest dislike for me was my art instructor. She was a dour, unhappy character who took no joy in children, except in tormenting them. One time, she grew exasperated at my lousy sketch of an apple which neither resembled the forbidden fruit of Adam and Eve nor anything slightly tempting. This outraged her esthetic sensibilities to such an extent that she slapped me hard across the side of my face. The strength and ferocity of the blow almost made me lose consciousness. For the whole afternoon, that side of my head hurt and my pride stung as if it had been pricked by nettles.

Even my mother noticed my injury when I returned home from school. My mother said nothing to me, but the following day she arrived unannounced at the school during the lunch hour and demanded to see the Sister who was my drawing instructor.

My mum told the sister, “I hear you’ve been disciplining our Harry for not meeting your fancy apple approval.” The sister became angry and claimed I had been acting out in class.

“Sister,” my mother said, “Cross me or touch my lad again, I’ll give thee a thrashing you’ll never forget.”

As the Great Reckoning of the Great Depression grew worse and more families became destitute, the Catholic Church began to provide hot lunches for famished school children. Without it, I don’t think I lived past my tenth birthday because my body was stunted by malnutrition. Mind you, what the church doled out wasn’t much and each day it was the same menu shepherd’s pie but it was just enough to keep me going. Once the food was slapped avariciously onto my plate I went and sat on a wooden bench with half a dozen other children. There, I gorged upon my meal like a half-starved mutt, licked my plate clean and despaired that there was not to be anything more to eat until the following day.

As our family’s hardship grew, my mother started to become unhinged by our plunge into poverty and hunger. My mum began to despise her responsibility as a mother, and most certainly as a wife. There was an element in her that became untamed and never returned to normalcy, which was caused by her constant fight to feed her family and keep us as far from society’s dead end as possible. My mother was a resilient woman, but she was scarred by her sacrifices and she started to resent those she thought weren’t strong enough to swim in the treacherous currents of living nil by mouth.

Sometimes, my mother was just wantonly cruel and noted that her life would be easier if she abandoned us to a work house. However, after each time she made these horrible declarations, she would recant, “Wot you looking at, don’t be daft, I’d never give you up to the poor house. Your mum’s got lots of irons in the fire, so not one of us is going to have to work as a boot blacker.”

In truth my mother only had one practical scheme to keep us afloat during these miserable days and that was adultery with Mr. O’Sullivan. She believed that he was the man who could save her and maybe her children from total destitution. My mum based her belief on a very thin strand of hope that O’ Sullivan’s desire for her kisses extended to commitment for her wellbeing. Yet, as my mother’s relationship with O’ Sullivan blossomed, we moved to different lodgings on Chesham Street to avoid a rent collector.

We left one step ahead of the bailiff with just the shirts on our backs but my parents managed to drag with them a steamer trunk full of resentment and acrimony for each other. And each night my parents opened up that bitter emotional baggage and raged over lost illusions, wanton wives, and rudderless lives. Their sixteen years of marriage was based upon the hope that things could only get better. Whereas the opposite occurred; the longer they stayed together, the worse things got. The emotional plates that had held my parents together through so many mutual failures and defeats finally shifted and my mother fled with Mr. O’Sullivan to St.Albans, near London.

My father gave us no explanation for my mother’s disappearance. She was just gone. Mary said, “Mam didn’t go with the milkman because he still comes ’round looking for money.” Through the spring, we waited for news of my mother, and none came. Mary tended house for my father while he smoked his pipe and read Harmsworth’s eight-volume encyclopaedia, and looked for solace in the history of vanished civilizations.

At the end of spring, close to my parents’ wedding anniversary, my mother returned home from St. Albans. She came back wearing a new dress, a new coat, and carried cheap penny presents for the whole family. My mum held in one hand a pineapple, as if she had just arrived from Captain Cooke’s expedition to the South Seas and the other hand, she held “authentic Irish soda bread.” My mother announced to all of us that she was many months pregnant and that O’Sullivan was the father. Upon hearing the news, my dad said nothing to my mother but kissed both me and my sister on our cheeks and then left for his daily walk around town.

That night, Mary and I ate large portions of the Irish soda bread with a weak and meatless broth unsure if my mother’s return was a happy or a sad occasion. As for the pineapple, my mother showed it to our neighbours as proof that London was indeed a city of both magic and prosperity.

Chapter Four

Arrivals and Departures

In the summer of 1930, the British economy plunged into a freefall as exports of our manufactured goods were cut in half by the worsening Great Depression that now affected every industrialized nation, around the globe. In Some areas of our country, particularly the North, Scotland or Wales unemployment was as high as 70%. Amongst the ordinary worker, there was a growing anxiety that this financial crisis would not stop until every able bodied man was on the dole or forced to work for half wages. As for my family, we were already at the ground floor marked desperation, so I didn’t think things could get much worse for me or my parents. Besides, at the time, I was only seven and I learned that as long as one was able to keep fed, it was possible to have hope for the future.

I also discovered that even in times of want there was food available for those who couldn’t afford to buy it. All one had to do was follow the city’s stray cats because they led you to the rubbish bins of Bradford’s hotels which were replete with over ripe fruit, semi stale bread and half eaten bankers’ lunches. During those long June days, I and a multitude of other destitute children supped well, thanks in part to the wise Yorkshire moggies that took us to these Aladdin’s Caves filled with the rubbish of Bradford’s well-heeled citizens.

Through July, the days fell upon one another like the footfalls of a new-born lamb, clumsy and spry. Our street, Chesham, ran onto Great Horton, which ended up in a large open field called Trinity. One afternoon, we heard rumours that a circus had set up their tents on the common. Mary and I made our way up the street and discovered erected tents in the clearing. In the distance, you could hear the sounds of exotic animals bellowing from the field. Mary and I went to the opposite end of Trinity Field, where we were camouflaged in the long, tall grass. We crouched on our hind legs and I gazed towards the circus to see if I could catch sight of this strange and mysterious world of carnivals. The sound of hammers and workmen straining to construct the circus was all around us. The odd elephant trumpet made our mouths drop open in surprise. I was tinged with mild fear and wondered if the mighty beasts were strong enough to break loose, from their enclosure and trample us hidden in the brush. An hour had almost passed, and I grew restless. I became bored, having seen no wild creatures, no clown, and no strong man. I was about to ask my sister if we could go when suddenly Mary began to shake my shoulder.

“Harry, Harry, come and look.”

It was as if I had been transported right into the middle of Harmsworth’s History of the Ancient World. Parading outside one of the tents were three beautiful, lithe Burmese women. Their necks were wrapped tightly with gold bands, making them appear as thin and graceful as giraffes on the African plain. They walked in front of their tent and appeared to me like princesses of Asia. The Burmese women of the circus were enticing, forbidden, and utterly foreign to the world as I understood it.

As my mother’s pregnancy progressed, I was considered a nuisance and sent to live with my grandparents in Barnsley. My mother packed a cheap suitcase for me and took me, dragging behind her, to the bus station. When the bus to Barnsley arrived, she pushed me through the open door and advised the driver to make sure I got off at the right stop. “Wait for Uncle Harold,” she admonished. “He will walk you to Grandma Dean’s house.”

When I arrived at my grandparents’ tenement, I was greeted by my granddad who sat in an old chair, located in their parlour. He was a large bald man whose face was covered by a giant moustache which made him look like an old grumpy walrus. He laboured to stand and then when erect, he looked me up and down as if I were a pony that had been brought into his parlour. In slow painful movements, he walked towards me, stopped within an inch of my body and sniffed me. Satisfied that I smelled like family, he grunted his approval, shook my hand curtly and then returned to his chair where he collapsed into sleep.

“He’s off,” said my uncle Harold.

“Where to,” I asked puzzled.

“He’s gone back to India, and his soldiering days for Queen Victoria in the land of the heathens,” my uncle replied.

At this point my grandmother entered the parlour and said in a voice that was harsh and judgmental. “So what trouble has Harold brought me from Bradford?”

I extended my hand, but my grandmother refused it and instead warned me to be good or else I’d be sent packing back to my mother.

When it came time for supper, my grandma insisted that grace be said and those were the last words spoken, until after tea. The lack of conversation didn’t bother me because I reasoned it was better than being asked unpleasant questions about my parents and my mother’s pregnancy. After our meal, I was introduced to another one of my uncles who was named Ted; that night, he had wisely taken his sustenance down at the pub. He like every other male in my mother’s family was a miner and he said to me after we shook hands. “The boy’s got a miner’s grip, will see you down in the pits as sure as there is sunshine when you are old enough lad”

As the evening progressed, he told me about the hand-painted gypsy caravan he’d obtained after he’d won a bet.

“When I am done working as a collier,” he said “I am going to buy some horses and travel across the country in my caravan and live like a vagabond. I never want to see a day of darkness again after I leave these mines for good.”

Outside of his wanderlusts, Ted was also passionate about cricket and travelled to York for the test matches. But he quickly stopped talking about the sport when he realized, that I’d never had the opportunity to play.

Come morning, I found Ted at the back of my grandparents two bedroom terraced house. He was carefully tending a small garden. When he noticed me, he offered me a cherry tomato that tasted succulent to my deprived palate. I soon realized that Ted did not speak much, and everything was spoken in short syllables to me, like “Mind this” or “Yer alright there.” However, it was spoken from a calm river of emotion which made me feel relaxed in his company.

Ted, however, could not abide my mother and if I tried to start a conversation about her, he gruffly responded, “She’s oil to my water.” So I learned that if Ted and I were to remain allies it was best to not ask questions about my family.

Ted also didn’t get along with his brother Harold. But considering that there was almost twenty years that separated them, it was hardly surprising that they had little in common. Harold’s spirit, however, was easily vexed and because he liked to gamble and avoid Sunday church, his relationship with my grandmother was fraught with tension. On some days the two of them went at each other like two wasps trapped in an empty jam jar. When either my uncle or my grandma begged, my grandfather to intercede, he laughed at them and responded by saying, “Time down in mine has made me wise, and you won’t find me daft enough to get between two swinging picks.”

Wisely, I followed my grandfather’s dictum and avoided both of them when my grandmother and uncle fought. However, one day, the argument was over me, because Harold had sensed that I was bored and might fancy a trip with him to Sheffield which displeased my grandmother. “It’s bad enough that young Harry has to pick up Bradford vices from his mother and now you want to take him to Sheffield and teach him about more sinful things.”

My uncle said that the trip was nothing of the sort and that he had legitimate errands to attend to, in the city. Besides, he said, “it will do the lad good to be out of this mausoleum.”

My grandmother reluctantly agreed for me to accompany my uncle to Sheffield but warned me to, “be on your guard, young one, and avoid the devil’s temptation which your uncle and mother like as much as you love sweets.”

So, with my grandmother’s mixed blessings, my uncle and I travelled to Sheffield on a bus that meandered across the dales. It made numerous stops including at the village of my father’s birth where my uncle told me, “yer dad’s kin live ere, not that I give a toss for them.”

Puzzled, I looked out of the window and asked him, “why not?”

My uncle, grunted and said, “their blood runs with ice, except for your dad, he’s an alright sort- for a codger.”

When we arrived, Harold told me not to be a nuisance when he went about his errands or to ask him any questions about what he was doing. By about lunchtime, he had concluded his dealings and he took me into a public house, where we stood by the bar. My uncle had me stand on the rails so the bar man could see me. Harold ordered himself a neat whisky and inquired to the innkeeper, “How ’bout something for my nephew?”

“Orange cordial?” suggested the innkeeper.

“Make it an orange and gin,” replied my uncle.

The afternoon passed with my uncle sipping whiskey and me gin and orange while he told me about the cruel hearts of women and the thrill of horse racing. After several hours, my uncle said it was time to go and made me swear that I’d not tell either my mother or my grandmother what we had been up to, that day.

Although Harold lived with my grandparents, he was married. His wife, Ida, worked on a large industrial farm as a book-keeper and lodged there. However on weekends Ida returned to my grandparents’ house and upset my grandmother’s dour dictatorship with her good humour and kindness. In no time, she sensed that I was bored with the strict rules imposed upon me by my grandmother and decided to give me a means to escape the slow and dull pattern of summer days at my grandparent’s house by lending me her bicycle.

I energetically and arrogantly hopped on this gearless bike, built for an adult and not a young boy. My feet barely reached the thick wooden pedals, but laboriously I started to pedal until I felt my mobility. For a few brief seconds, I soared like Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk. Alas, the seconds were brief and I came crashing down on the hard cobbled street whereupon my Uncle Ted cried out, “Boy, you’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.”

Many attempts and many aborted take-offs ensued in that first week. Gradually, by the second week I developed my wings and I was able to pedal and remained balanced and aloft. I was ready to discover the hills and dales surrounding my grandparents’ house. I spent my mornings and afternoons with this bike and I sensed that for the first time in my life, I was independent. I was free of the burdens of hunger or my parents disintegrating marriage. I was free from my own sense of shame and feeling of worthlessness. On this bike, no one judged me poor because I pedalled faster than their taunts and escaped to fields and meadows empty of human gazes.

Near the end of the summer, I returned to Bradford and was greeted by Mary at the bus station. She was happy to see me but said that things had gotten worse for my mother and father.

Mary said, “It’s a right mad house with mum and dad fighting like cats and dogs over the smallest trifle.”

As we made our way home, the city looked hollow and the inhabitants sick from being out of work. The further we moved into our part of town, the more desperate and forsaken people appeared. There were even some children whose families were so destitute that they begged in the streets. My sister grabbed me by the arm and said, “Hurry up and don’t stare at the poor sods or else their going to steal what little you’ve got.”

At the end of September, my mother went into labour. While my mother screamed out in pain from the parlour, my sister and I played in the kitchen under our father’s silent and absentminded supervision. After much effort and pleading from a midwife, my half-brother Matthew was born. When it was all over and we heard our new brother cry for our mother’s breast, my sister said sardonically, “that bugger eats better than us in this house of nowt.”

After Matt was born, my mother’s hopes of being rescued by Mr. O’Sullivan evaporated when she wrote to him in London to tell him about the birth of his son. He replied expeditiously but without any ardour for my mother or his little boy. The letter told my mother that he was moving to Australia and not to bother looking for him because as far as he was concerned their relationship was over and as for the paternity of my mother’s new son, O’Sullivan repudiated all claims to him.

Not long after Matt’s birth, our unhappy family left Chesham Street and moved into another doss house located in St. Andrews Villas. Our new patch was fraught with itinerant labourers, unemployed mill workers, and struggling pensioners and it looked to me and my sister as grim as the entrance to hell.

My parents and my mum’s new baby, Matt slept in a room that also doubled as our scullery while Mary and I occupied the attic. The loft was shabby, infested with mice, vermin and the floorboards in some locations were so rotten that you could peer into the rooms below. In my new sleeping quarters, asides from candle light the only illumination came from a tiny window. It had been cut through the side of the roof which was in desperate need of patching.

For the residents of our doss at St Andrews Villas there was a common parlour to read a newspaper, smoke, or play endless games of whist. Against my mother’s wishes my father placed the portrait of my grandfather above the coal fireplace. “I don’t know why you want that mug staring down at us; it gives me the shivers to look at him and remember what he did to thee.”

Most of the other tenants were like my family shamed by their circumstance and they hid their former lives from their new companions in this leaky lifeboat. No one wanted to be reminded of better days or that their skills were no longer required in an ever-wasting economy.

One lodger, Mr. Brown, was not as reticent as the others in the parlour. It might have been because his wife preferred to remain in their room, nursing both drink and resentment for her husband’s financial failure. Brown was a garrulous sort who needed to hear his own voice as if that proved to him that he was still amongst the living. He was a trim man who was always meticulously dressed even though his suit was old and worn. When he had the ready, he liked to smoke Kensington cigarettes and he enjoyed my company the best because his stories about the Great War never bored me.

In the evenings, Brown sang to me marching songs and told me abbreviated tales of the trenches, cleansed of dirt and death. At the end of each tale, I begged for more, but he always said “the war can wait for another day, because its time you went to your chambers to sleep, because a good soldier needs his rest.”

However, before I prepared to march up to my attic bedroom, Brown always stopped me and said, “I’ve got something for you.” He then reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a silk card which had a national flag from one of the many countries in the world.

“Ta, very much,” I said.

“It’s alright your dad told me you loved geography and the cigarette companies, put a different flag in every package, I buy.”

Glowing, I rushed up to my bed and pinned the flag to the wall nearest my straw mattress. Before I gutted my candle out, I stared up at my growing collection of flags and dreamed about lands faraway from doss houses and dirty slums.

Six months shy of my eighth birthday; my mother took me to the off license located up the street from us and said, “Lad, you go in there and ask for a job because I know they are looking for someone to help out around the shop. I hate to ask son, but the money you earn will help keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs.”

So, I went in and asked the owner who stood behind a counter, for a job but at first he gave me a disdainful look; until he realized that it was cheaper to hire a child than a hungry adult to do general clean up and said “you’ll do just fine, if you don’t get on my bad side.”

I worked for him every day after school and did a half-day on Saturdays. I scrubbed the floors and stacked the shelves for tuppence and suffered the angry leers from the short tempered owner. Apparently, I showed enough aptitude and my duties were expanded to include delivering beer on a steel-wheeled handcart, to local customers. Even though, I weighed no more than eighty pounds, and I stood less than four feet I pushed and navigated my barrow down the narrow cobbled streets of Bradford like I was the captain of a Cunard ocean liner.

On Friday, afternoons, while my mother looked on, I placed my wages, a handful of copper and some silver, into the family’s piggy bank. Each time the money was deposited, my mum said, “Son, you are a right dependable boy.”

If my father was present, he’d hang his head in humiliated shame, pat me on the head and quietly agree that I was a big help to the family.

However, neither of my parents knew that I was holding out on them because I kept my tips from the beer deliveries and used them to buy treats for Mary and myself that we shared at bedtime.

With my part-time work and my chores around the doss house, I found that there was little time for my school work. When my exams came up in November, I played truant from my tests rather than face the humiliation of sitting them and failing them. So, I spent most of my days loitering in the city centre of Bradford and walked myself to distraction. Sometimes, I met my father on the High Street in a similar state of truancy whereupon he asked me why I was not in school and I always responded with shrugged shoulders and evasion.

“It’s not right to miss school,” he routinely said in admonition to me, “because you are a bright spark.” But seeing you are here, it will hurt no one if you walk with me for a while.”

So, for a few minutes, my father and I strolled together while each of us was lost in our own anxieties but still united by our love for each other.

After being absent from school for several weeks, the truant officer, one evening, paid a visit to my mother and me. I told him I was not prepared for my tests and that I preferred not to write them. The officer let me off with a warning. However, my lenient sentence had not been received by the nuns and when I returned to school they set upon me with the cane. Once corporal punishment had ceased, the good sisters unleashed a verbal maelstrom regarding God’s vengeance on lying and deceitful boys.

On some Saturdays, I treated Mary from my tip money and took her to the pictures where we watched comedies that starred Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd. For a few pence, my sister and I disappeared into a celluloid dream where we escaped our decrepit life in the doss house. The cinema was a place of refuge for a small boy like me and I was able to drift away into a world filled with laughter or adventure. But my respite was furtive and it lasted only as long as the screen was filled with the bright antics of my movie star heroes and the moment the film faded to black, I knew the magic was over for me, until the next matinee.

From an early age, I understood that there was a stark difference between my life and the comedic or adventurous worlds I encountered at the pictures. Moreover, this was especially true if I was near my mother when she had been drinking because then she was all sharp corners. For me nothing better illustrated her constant struggle to overcome the darkness that invaded her soul after my sister died and we were ruined by misfortune then on the day I returned from having seen a Silvia Sydney film. As was normal I went into the parlour to say that I was home and I noticed that my father was subdued while my mother held court with some of the other residents. My mother, who was slightly tipsy and garrulous from drink even though my brother fed on her breast, gushed on about her early years and the men who had courted her.

I rushed up to my mum to tell her about my magic time at the pictures but when I got up to her she looked irritated by my arrival or my calls for attention. She told me to be quiet but I continued and with a wicked look in her eye, she abruptly pulled out her engorged breast from Matt’s wet lips and pumped her milk across my stunned face.

I started to cry whereupon my mum laughed sardonically and asked me, “What’s the matter, ain’t you hungry?”

Humiliated and heartbroken I dashed from the room and hurried up to my attic refuge where I wept angry tears because I understood how far removed my life was from the celluloid fantasies I watched at the Saturday morning cinema.

The tension and despair between my parents lumbered through autumn. However, near Christmas 1930, their relationship ended in an explosive confrontation when my mother announced to my father that her lover was to join us in this hellish boarding house. At first my mother thought dad took the news like every other calamity that had befallen him or us, with stoical resignation.

In fact my mother didn’t think anything was amiss until she found him in the parlour, after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. She saw him, smoking his pipe and staring upwards at the portrait of his father and said, “You know he’s not going to answer you back.”

“Oh aye,” responded my father who refused to turn from the picture.

“It’s time for you to get to your bed,” my mother said and then with some coldness added “Best you sleep in the attic with Mary and Harry, because my new man will be with us soon.”

These words were for my father the final indignity, the final shame because it articulated without a doubt for him that he was as good as dead to her and was finished as a man, a husband and a father. The knowledge cut into him like a pick through lime chalk and his spirit was broken. My dad after sixteen years of marriage, after the loss of his birth right, the death of his first born, his physical infirmity, his unemployment and his poverty finally snapped and displayed his long, mute suffering for the first and last time.

My dad cried out, “I am betrayed; I am cheated.” He charged at my mother and tried to stab her with a small knife which he used to clean his pipe. The noise of my father’s enraged voice woke me and my sister out of our sleep. We rushed down and witnessed my mother struggling out of our father’s grasp until he was left alone on the floor like a wounded animal, quivering and shuddering with adrenalin and spent anger.

My mother walked over to my sister and me and said, “There is nothing here to see, so get back to your beds, before I pull you up there by your ears.”

Mary and I left our subjugated father on the floor and heard him cry out “What have I done to deserve this.”

The next day, my mother told me “go to the butcher’s and ask him to cut you two ounces of roast beef for your father’s tea.”

I can only surmise the gift of meat was kind treatment to those that had surrendered to the waves and were now drowned.

My mother’s lover and our new provider was an old beau from her teenage years named Bill Moxon. Although my mother had fancied Bill, when younger, their relationship never grew into anything because he had a love of drink and a reputation as a womanizer. So, my mother moved on and married my father while Bill caroused through Yorkshire romancing women and finding work where he could until he ended up as a cow hand on a farm on the outskirts of Bradford. It was pure whimsy that after almost twenty-five years my mum encountered Bill in Bradford during the early months of her pregnancy with Matt. Naturally, my mother told Moxon nothing about her liaison with O’Sullivan, but she did dramatically recount how unhappy her life had turned out after she married my father.

My mother who had been cheated more than once by luck and by men, decided to hedge her bets. So, she enticed Moxon into her bed as insurance in case O’Sullivan proved to be financially unreliable to support her or her unborn child. It proved to be the pragmatic strategy because once O’Sullivan did a runner; my mum ensnared Bill Moxon and planted the seed into his head that he was the father of her new child.

However, once Moxon believed he was my half-brother’s true father, he insisted that my dad be cast to the proverbial wolves. As, he put it to my mother: “its im or me.”

My mum had very little choice but to accept that Moxon was to share her bed because she knew my dad was now too old and too infirm to maintain our family in anything but the rags of misery.

By Christmas of that year, the anxiety and despair in the doss was overwhelming for me and I fell into a deep depression. My downcast mood was not improved by the fact that despite my father’s replacement as head of the household Bill seemed intent to see us starve.

On Christmas morning I awoke with an overwhelming hunger which ate away at my belly. I jumped from the bed and began to cry that it was so unfair that Father Christmas didn’t give a damn about us and never stopped to bring presents to our attic bedroom. My father rose from our bed and hugged me and said, “Go into my trouser pocket, it’s not from Father Christmas and it’s not much but it is from thy dad.”

I went over and rustled through his pockets and found two small packages wrapped in cheap paper. He smiled and said, “One is for thou and the other is for thy sister.” I opened mine and beamed because it was a few bits of penny sweets that I ate for my breakfast.

Downstairs, my mother told my sister and me that we had to go to mass in order to receive our Christmas dinner because it was being provided by the St. Vincent De Paul Society.

In no time, Mary and I dressed for our journey to hear mass and receive the church’s bounty. Once there the nuns told us it was important to give thanks for the birth of baby Jesus and the eternal life He granted us in the hereafter. On that Christmas Day, I gave thanks that the sermon was brief and the hymns at least joyful.

Following mass, we made our way to the meal for indigent children. The feast for Bradford’s poor was held in a school gymnasium. There were long bench tables where we sat and ate our Christmas goose and pudding. We were told to pray, and we, the poor, the destitute, the unloved and unlucky, gave thanks again to the ever-watchful Jesus. Silently, I prayed that the nuns were in a forgiving mood that day and that my ear would not be pulled or my backside bruised by their love for discipline in the name of the Lord. After the meal, a Father Christmas appeared, with a tubercular cough, and presented to each child an orange and a pair of socks.

At home, I found my father upstairs in the attic.

“Happy Christmas, lad, sorry there weren’t much for thee and thy sister. Next year, hey son, next year…”

On New Year’s Eve, Mary and I went mumming which earned us some cash for sweets. Later on, I asked my sister if our dad would stay with us up in the attic and if our mother was going to make Bill our new dad.

Mary told me, “Never you mind about that. It’s grown up doings. Harry, you and me,” she added with conviction, “will look out for each other. I won’t let you fall out of my hands. The only thing that matters is us two.” She stared straight into my eyes as she continued. “Bugger the lot of them. Remember, Dad is our dad, and nobody can take him away from us. Even if he goes away, he will always be our dad.”

I felt happy; I could trust one person not to leave me, not to scold me. There was always one person to make sure that I was washed and loved, and it was Mary.

During the first week of the New Year, my father quietly moved out of our house and out of our lives. My dad took up residence across the street and only took with him the grand portrait of his long-dead father. The chair where my father used to sit by the fire was now occupied by Bill Moxon. To me, this shift in personnel did not seem right. But I was too young to protest except through escaping into fantasy and dreams. When I was older, I told myself, I would be independent from fickle families.

My sense of detachment and apartness from the rest of the world was only enhanced by my father’s disappearance and my mother’s new love interest. I trusted no one but my sister, and reluctantly and with reservations, my mother. My mum still held our family together with whatever resources she had or could obtain, but it was hard for me, as a child, to comprehend or forgive her actions that allowed my father to be set adrift from us. My father became to me like Marian; a vision without real form. My dad was a ghost who visited my night dreams and left a shadow upon my soul.

Now Bill Moxon was the central male figure in my childhood. Bill was able to provide us with milk and meat from his job as a cowhand, which was a considerable improvement to living off drippings and hope. One weekend, he asked me if I would like to go to the country and see his cows. I gladly accepted.

The dairy farm was a modernized production unit with automatic milk machines for the cows and a giant pasteurization vat. Bill carefully explained the intricacies of this modern farm to my eight-year-old ears. For my troubles, Bill gave me a fresh bottle of milk, laden with butter fat. The top of the milk was as sweet as toffee. When we left the farm, he tousled my hair and said, “Good lad,” in the manner he would to a terrier.

Eventually, Bill was promoted to pig handler. In the mornings, Moxon travelled across Bradford with a horse-drawn cart. He collected slops from the restaurants and pubs for the pigs to dine on. On occasion, he brought me and Mary discarded toffee from the Mackintosh sweets factory. It looked like a football and contained not only toffee but shreds of paper, dirt and human hair. It had originally been intended for the pigs, but Bill thought it better suited children. With a wooden mallet, Mary and I bashed away at the mound of toffee until our hard work transformed the mass into shrouds of thick brown treacle. We sucked the sweetness from it as a carnivore licks the marrow from a bone.

Not only was Bill in charge of feeding the pigs, he was also responsible for cleaning the shit out of their pens. Every day, he shovelled, washed, and scraped away the effluence of four hundred well-fed pigs. After his shift, he rode the bus home stinking of shit while the other passengers gave him a wide berth. When he returned home, his stench enveloped every room as if we lived right beside the pig tip.

One day, Bill needed me to give him a hand with the pigs and he bribed me with the promise of Macintosh toffee waiting for me at the farm. When we arrived, Bill furtively explained he had come to kill a pig. I was required to assist him but I was terror-stricken and blood-curling images danced in my head about having to slay a giant pig. Bill calmed me down. He told me where I could find the toffee. Later, I learned it was intended for the pig’s dessert. So I enjoyed a condemned animal’s last treat. By mid-morning, stuffed with treacle, Bill found me and said, “Come on, Harry; wait in shed over there while I get the pig for killing.”

I cautiously walked into the concrete shed which was empty except for a giant sledge hammer that rested on a broken stone floor. At the back of the shed suspended just below its rusting tin roof was a hook attached to a metal wheel which was poised along two large steel rails.

Minutes passed and I started to believe that Bill had already killed the pig and was just making me wait to frighten me. But my relief was erased when I first heard the plaintive wail of a giant hog then saw Moxon drag with a rope a pig towards the shed. Its wails grew louder, more shrill and frightened as it got closer to me. In one hand Bill held the pig’s lead, and in the other he carried a tightly knotted noose. “Right, Harry,” he said, “I’m going to put this noose against pig’s mouth on top of teeth. Come quick, I need you to hold rope as tight as you got. Piggy’s head has got to be high to the sky. Don’t let go of im, lad, because I am going to clout im from behind with hammer.”

The pig struggled with every turn to break free. I was terrified that the pig would escape and attack me for threatening his life. I stammered, “I can’t do it, Bill… he’s too strong.”

“Better, lad, or you be for dinner tonight.”

I grabbed the short rope; the pig’s teeth were yellow and threatening. The rope held his mouth open while its menacing tongue slapped back and forth in its giant jaws. The pig cried out in fury and fear while at its back end dollops of shit dropped out.

“Higher, lad, higher,” Bill instructed.

I felt I could not hold on for much longer. Finally, Bill smashed the back of the pig’s head with the sledgehammer. The pig collapsed and the rope went loose. Bill attacked the pig’s neck with a strong, long blade and slit its throat and blood exploded from the jugular. I felt sick to my stomach and rushed away to retch. Bill struggled to bring the pig’s carcass to the shed.

He called out to me, “Boy the job’s not done yet.”

Moxon hoisted the pig up onto the rail trolley to let the blood run clean of the carcass. “Good work, lad,” he told me. “There be plenty of crackle for you on Sunday’s roast… good work, lad…”

As time progressed, my family’s life, without my dad moved on and fell into a steady depressing pace. I ate, went to school, went to work and went to bed and each second that I was conscious, I was overwhelmed with my father’s shame, my mother’s ruthlessness and Bill’s callousness. Even the delights of Mr. Brown’s company were denied me because he and his wife moved out to either better or worst establishments. When new people arrived and let rooms in the doss, it was explained to anyone who dared to inquire that my real father was long dead and Bill was my mother’s new husband.

Despite my mother’s relief that Bill was able to keep us from the workhouse gates; she was still disappointed in her life with him and he with her. No doubt their mutual love of drink and melodrama which they indulged on every weekend as some couples might an affinity for the light opera society, didn’t help matters. After a time, their boozing and fighting began to wear thin on Bill and he started to gnaw through the emotional bands that held him tight to my mother.

Chapter Five

Sowerby Bridge

After a couple of pints at his local, Bill came home on a Friday evening and told my mother that he’d quit his job. “The days of Bill Moxon shovelling muck and pig shit to earn his crust are done. I put my name down at a brand new rendering plant in Sowerby Bridge, and by gum they want me to start Monday, and they pay right good wages,” he said with satisfaction.

On hearing the news, my mother grew concerned because Sowerby Bridge was miles from Bradford and Bill was not keen at taking us with him. In fact he told my mother that he would write her when he was sorted which made my mother very anxious because she knew that outside of making his signature for his pay, Bill was almost illiterate. My mum believed that Bill had either found another woman or had grown tired of supporting a family not of his making. Without Bill’s money, my mother knew our future was very precarious. So, my mother schemed to follow him to Sowerby Bridge and beguile him back into her clutches with a combination of romance and guilt.

The day Bill left for Sowerby Bridge, my mother made preparations to follow him. Mary and I were taken out of school on the excuse that our granddad was on death’s door while our brother Matt was left with her sister Alice because he was far too young to assist in our nomadic search for Bill Moxon.

Just as we were about to board the bus, Mary declaimed, “Here we go again, on the Smith merry-go-round.”

When we arrived in Sowerby Bridge, our mum took us straight away to a dingy boarding house, on a dilapidated side street. The landlady who looked as dodgy as the establishment she ran asked my mum no questions as to why a nine and twelve-year-old were left in the care of the forsaken. For our tea and breakfast mother left us with a loaf of bread and a bit of jam in an old jar.

“Don’t scarf it all at once;” she warned us. “I might be gone a couple of days.” As she hugged us goodbye, she advised us to, “Be good and don’t get under anyone’s feet.”

Our sleeping quarters were sparse, dark and musty. The bed was old and the mattress stuffed with straw and vermin. We had a piss pot and there was an old candle stump to give us a bit of light when darkness came. Our room was situated beside the kitchen and the aroma of food cooking on a hob wafted into our cramped and sullen bedroom like a perfumed breeze.

“Let’s have a look,” said Mary, “and bring the bread mum gave us for our tea.”

So Mary and I snuck into the empty scullery and found a stew filled with meat and veg simmering in a pot.

“It looks too good to waste,” my sister said whilst staring ravenously at someone else’s meal. “Go on then,” she said to me, “let’s have a tuck in and see how Sowerby Bridge folk make their suppers.”

Afterwards, Mary and I went back to our cramped room, our stomachs full and our spirits content. However, when my sister and I slipped between the covers and blew out the candle, we were left like roped and baited prey for bed bugs. The doss house was rife with the noxious, blood-devouring insects. They burrowed underneath our skin. The bugs sucked our blood with as much relish as we had eaten another person’s meal. Itching and dejected, we spent the night squashing them with our bare fingers and our shoes.

Late the next morning, our mother returned and looked more relieved than when she had said good-bye to us. She said that she had gone to Bill’s new place of employment the Stand Evens meat processing plant.

“I found him when he came off shift and he was like good bread dough in your mother’s hands.”

According to my mum she used all her feminine persuasion to charm Bill back into her heart. After a night of romance, Bill was again smitten with my mother and was eager to resume his life with us.

My mother’s elation at saving her station in life and ours as well was short lived because after she had finished her account of snaring Bill, she noticed our arms, legs and face were covered in bed bug bites.

“I can’t leave you two alone for a blooming minute,” she said in frustration. “Well don’t just stand there like two flea-bitten gypsies; get a move on or else will be late for our bus back to Bradford.”

By afternoon we were back at our residence at St. Andrew’s Villas and my mother announced to a collection of indifferent lodgers who loitered in the parlour that we were moving from Bradford as quickly as the wind could take us.

The following morning, our mother left for Sowerby Bridge to secure lodgings and returned the following day with news that we had a new home. A few days afterwards, my mum arranged for a beat up old lorry to collect our belongings which wasn’t much outside of my mother’s bedroom furniture and piano both of which had come from my father’s inheritance. My possessions were a few books, a collection of the world’s flags on small silk cards and the clothes I wore.

While the vehicle was being loaded, I stood, abject on the street with my sister. Both of us noticed our dad peering at us from his room in the house opposite ours. We turned away from him and tried to pretend that he wasn’t there.

When it was time to go, my mother gathered us up and we walked down the rough cobble street. I tried hard not to look back but I had an overwhelming urge to run back for my dad.

My mum sensed my torn loyalties and she said in a weary voice, “There’s nowt there lad but a world of tears.” With that, she grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me along to the bus station where we departed for the nether reaches of Sowerby Bridge.

When the bus dropped us off on the High Street, we encountered a crowd of large matronly women who judging by their net mesh bags were out for a day of shopping. They had loud voices and blocked our way with their sure sense of purpose in life and in this community. They seemed to be disturbed by our arrival in this small town and glared at us with stern faces as if their propriety could protect their ancient neighbourhood from our poverty. I looked back at them, uninterested in their condemning glares, and complained bitterly to my mother for having to lug my uncooperative baby brother Matt in my arms.

As my sister and I grew increasingly tired our mum encouraged us to move onward by saying, “it’s not much longer Poppets and we’ll be in our own home with a snug fire burning.”

By this point we were on a narrow cobbled lane that on either side had tenement housing for the poor and unskilled workers of this settlement. It was a filthy place that seemed deserted except for screams of rage that filtered out from one of the dwellings. At the end of the lane way, we discovered an enormous, forbidding hill.

My sister and I paused and rested by leaning on a stone wall. Panting, we looked at each other and demanded to know if our mother was serious. She surely did not expect us to climb up a road that looked like it led to the snowy summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. I asked her if she was joking. “Do we really have to live on top of a bleeding mountain peak?”

“Never mind the hill, my mother said. “Cause at top, there’s a cottage with our name on it. We have it all to ourselves not like that Bradford rat hole we kipped in. It will be just right for all of us. We will be as snug as bugs in a rug.”

It was an ordeal and while we struggled up that hill, we cursed our mother for choosing such a barren spot for us to live. When we were atop the hill, we turned right at a cross road and walked a short distance until we found our lodgings which was in a farm’s outbuilding that had been converted for human habitation at the turn of the century.

We had to walk through a worn stone vestibule to get to our residence. I noticed that the elements had eroded the cement floor and it was just a broken mess of debris and gravel which I started to kick around.

“Don’t mess about;” my mother warned me, “Ages ago, a farm hand took a rope and hung himself, on the very spot where you are digging dirt with your boot because his true love left him for another.”

I shivered while my sister laughed and said “the bugger probably hung himself when he knew that this was the best it was going to get for him.”

The door to the living area was made from old and thick discoloured wood. My mother turned over the lock with a long key that looked like it was manufactured in the 18th century and the door swung open with a lugubrious squeak of a prison door. While we stood on the threshold, an odour of damp and decay trod outside like it was a tramp being startled from an afternoon nap.

We walked inside and my mother brushed aside cobwebs and dust and tried to reassure us, “with a bit of soap and water, this house will be right cheap and cheerful for uz.”

“It’s like a crypt in here,” I whispered to my sister who nodded in horrified agreement.

A long, narrow stone stair, led up to our bedrooms which were as appealing to me as our attic lair in Bradford. From my sleeping quarters, I looked out of a small window and grew depressed at the scenery-barren fields and a few craggy trees bent against a grey sky, dripping down with cold, wet rain.

The lorry arrived several hours after us. The driver was irate, as my mother had misled him about the actual distance to our new abode. The driver fumed about taking an ancient contraption up a steep gradient, and he demanded more money. My mother told him to stop his complaining because he would take what he got and not a penny more.

Afterwards, the three of us unpacked our belongings and squared away the house as best we could. Thankfully, my mum had the foresight to have stolen a bag of coal from our last house, and we were treated to a warm fire to accompany our dinner of cold sandwiches and hot black tea.

For the present, this was the best my mother could do to keep us alive. We survived, but our mother wasn’t permitted to salvage even a small sliver of dignity for herself in the process. It was a small price to pay considering the alternative was life on the street. However, our new home was not an oasis in the economic desert; it was a place to hide from the storms blowing across the country.

It was the best my mother could do after she had abandoned our natural father to eat and keep her children fed by using a man who was keen on her but cold to her bairns. However, my mum didn’t really have much of a choice considering, like so many women of her generation, she had no skills to present to the working world.

My mum, tried to explain this new and unhappy situation to me by saying, “at least we are a family, once again.”

My sister objected strenuously to this new living arrangement and ached for our dad’s company. Sometimes the pain was so great she would steal herself away from home to visit our dad. The tales she told me when she returned broke my heart because he was so poor he could barely afford tea or a bun to eat.

Life went on in the cottage, without my father, as it must because the clock doesn’t pause for happy or sad moments; it just keeps turning from second to minute to hour. My mother promptly enrolled me in the village school in Norland. At first, I was thankful it was not a religious institution, but I learned that God’s absence from my schooling didn’t make the teachers any less cruel or reluctant to employ corporal punishment.

Being a small village school, my teacher was compelled to teach three different grades at once. He did it with equal disdain for anyone who disturbed his hectoring and brow-beating. He was a nameless, formless, middle-aged man with flakes of dandruff running down his jacket. His broad Yorkshire accent rolled out the tedium of existence with every remonstrance to his pupils. His teaching method was to harangue. He showed his loathing for all children who could not grasp what he perceived as profundity with sarcasm. It was a hard, lonely term for me. I dreaded each morning as if it were my last on Earth.

Even with Bill’s full-time employment, we were always short of money. My mother was also reluctant to ask Bill for the full upkeep to provide for us. She feared Bill would again find enforced fatherhood a burden. My mother advised me, “Time to find another job because the fairies don’t bring milk at night for ya.”

As I had past experience as a barrow boy, I was able to secure a similar job at Jubb’s Grocers that had an outlet in Sowerby Bridge. When I applied for the job I learned that the store manager had no patience for his underlings.

He made sure I knew my place when he told me, “Master Smith, you are on probation. Our store believes in high standards. Any transgression from my instructions and you shall be shown the door. If you cheat me in anyway, you will have no reference and no prospects in life.”

After I accepted Jubb’s offer of employment, I trudged up the long, elevated road to our grey, dank cottage. I proudly announced to my mother that I had a job again and could assist in providing food and other necessities. My mother, ever pragmatic, asked what I was to be paid. Without hesitation, I lied. “Four shillings per week,” I exclaimed when in fact I was to be paid five.

My mother was pleased by the amount and did not question me further. That evening, I told Mary “I’ve got a shilling spare per week for us to share. We can spend it on whatever we like, and Mam and Bill know nowt.” My sister beamed at my ingenuity and our mutual riches.

Our landlord was a farmer who tilled the surrounding land, and he lived just up the road from us. His farmhouse was even more dilapidated than ours. When my mother had some dosh, she had me and Mary buy milk and eggs from him. It seemed every time I knocked on his door, there was a long silence until eventually the door creaked and broke open a fraction. On the other side was the staring eyeball of the farmer’s wife or his half-wit daughter, who would demand, “What ya want?”

“Milk, mam,” I boldly proclaimed whereupon the door was slammed shut. Minutes passed, and then the door opened just enough for me to thrust the money into the hand of the farmer’s wife who then handed me a bottle of milk.

At first I was intimidated and fearful of the farmer because he had a long, shaggy white beard that made him look like a biblical patriarch. But one day, I saw him out in his fields, and when he noticed me and Mary, he called us over and gave us permission to play on the haystacks in his barn. It was the best carefree diversion my sister and I experienced during our long and lonely days imprisoned in that desolate community.

After many months in the remote farmhouse my mum began to feel isolated. She was nearing forty, and the ceaseless days spent in search of food and money ground her down, both emotionally and physically. My mother took to drinking, either to create a false sense of hope or to keep Bill distracted down at the pub. She had to hold a vigilant eye on Bill, or else he would stray into another woman’s affections. As time went on, they both began to drink themselves unconscious. After so many years of struggle, whatever pride my mother had was stripped away from her like whitewash in the rain. Even her vanity over her looks dissipated, and she began to ignore her grooming.

She was constantly being fished out of the pub, drunk and rambling. One time, my sister and I dragged her home from a night of boozing at the pub. Her voice was hoarse from cigarette smoke and the coarse shanties she sung. She was barely able to get up the hill to the farmhouse. My mother stumbled on the ground laughing and cackling like a mad woman. Mary and I grunted with exertion as we dragged her home like a soldier wounded in the field of battle.

We were almost home when my mother pushed us away and slurred “leave off,”

My sister then called out to her, “You dirty bitch.”

At that moment, my mother was in the middle of the road, her legs akimbo. She took a piss wantonly, without remorse, as if she were a dog on the street. My sister and I were mortified and shrunk away from her in disgust. Eventually, we brought her home and put her roughly to bed.

Hours later, we heard Bill Moxon roll in like a bad storm. He swore, banged doors, and yelled at unknown ghosts from his past. The sound of the wind and rain whipped across the barren moors as Mary and I made a pact by candlelight inside our tiny room. We pledged one day we would run away from this sad madness. We would live in houses filled with food and laughter. There would be no self-pitying drunks in our adult life.

The ‘Bill and Lillian Show’ was now a regular weekend occurrence, where both of them consumed liquor in gin madness. Rat arsed 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. What a useless cunt you are. You and your useless children are nowt but trouble fer me.”

Plates were smashed. Glasses tossed and drawers emptied of their contents. In the morning, Mary and I surveyed a kitchen of broken glass, upturned chairs, and shattered dreams and hopes. The floor resembled a beach after a tempest had tossed a ship and broken 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 out of jam jars, as we had no money to replace the broken crockery.

Their weekend ordeals were a nauseating spectacle. Mary and I were forced to listen to their endless tirades that exhausted them into a dreamless sleep. We were consumed with fright. 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. Nightly, we heard silence move to shrill voices, tears to accusations, love to vitriol and contempt.

After weeks of storming and fuming, it reached a fever pitch and the yelling and the threats crossed over an unmarked border that divided the civilized from the barbarian. On another miserable night while Mary and I tried to sleep in our cold bedroom, we heard Bill and our mother arguing downstairs in the kitchen. Their quarrel was over Bill’s philandering eye, which had got the better of him while they spent their evening pouring their money, our money, away at some pub in Sowerby Bridge. Their voices grew in crescendo, as reason was lost and affection killed by too much drink and too much petty resentment. We heard my mother scream and knew that Bill was beating up our mother.

“Please, stop,” my mother cried, but he continued to thrash her. Mary and I fell over ourselves as we rushed downstairs to protect our mother from Bill. When we reached the kitchen, my sister and I pounced onto Bill Moxon’s back, but he still continued to kick our mother as she lay on the ground.

Our young fists beat his back. We pulled his hair and bit his shoulder, but Bill was like a giant animal stung by a wasp. He threw his shoulders to and fro, trying to toss us from him. Bill moaned and threatened us to get off him or face a beating ourselves. He punched us, but we did not let go. We held roughly and firmly onto his back and shoulders. We were not going to let go until he released our mum.

Eventually, Bill’s writhing stopped, and as if woken from a night terror his breathing calmed and his anger simmered off his body, like beads of water evaporating off a skillet. Moments later, my mother was up and on her feet. She was unsteady, a little crouched, and defensive. Her eyes were blackened, and blood dripped from her lips.

In a whisper, she said, “That’s enough, Bill. Mary, Harry, get off him. Stop this now.”

I was crying. Mary was crying. We were broken vessels; we were like the bits of crockery shattered and unrecognizable on the floor. I cried out for my dad and knew he was not ever going to be with us again; he was never coming back, but I still cried out for him. Mary cried out in fear, in anger, and loss. She wept loudly, remembering a better time, before the famine, before the economy collapsed, and our father was sacrificed. Mary shook and could not be comforted.

Like two prized fighters in their corners, my mother and Bill panted, waiting for the bell to send them back into their skirmish. The night ended in the ejaculate of violence with lost mothers, lost fathers, and forsaken children. For a long time, everyone remained on the dirty stone floor like discarded gun casings.

In the morning, after the tempest of ale, anger, and poverty, Bill acted contrite and sheepish. He was ashamed of the violence the night before and left early for work where he hoped the exertion from a day butchering animals was penance enough for his transgressions against my mother.

Bill and my mother’s drinking stretched and meandered from one weekend to the next. We knew as the light grew less and as the hours crept away into the darkness that they would come home pissed and violent. As long as beer was plentiful and money short, the fighting between Bill and my mum continued. Like sentinels, Mary and I waited in our bed for the verbal arguments to turn into physical battles down in the kitchen.

It took almost two years but Bill lost his job at the meat rendering plant because of his temper. So, we were on the move again like a herd of animals that only travelled in the dead of night to avoid the carnivorous landlord. Leaving the bleak farmhouse crucified on the top of the moor was a relief for me and Mary. We deluded ourselves into thinking that wherever we now travelled, it would be better than where we had last settled.

Chapter Six

King Cross

After living a hard life on the edge of the moors, our family moved to King Cross, a Halifax suburb where Bill Moxon tried to go into business for himself as a butcher. Somehow Moxon had convinced a landlord to let him a small shop where he sold offal and unappetizing cuts of meat to the working poor. Since few customers bothered to visit his shop, Moxon wasted away most of his afternoons by kicking around, like it was a football, an inflated pig’s bladder outside his hole-in-the-wall establishment.

My mother found us lodgings in a terraced house that was built on a steep slope. Looking out from the front stoop all you could see, in the distance, were weaving mills that stood like forbidding grey battlements, from the industrial revolution. Plumes of smoke smouldered from their chimney pots, darkened the sky and polluted the air around us. But I was happy to be back in a community, no matter how rough, poor and foul its condition because there was greater diversion from my sorrows than in that squalid cottage on the moors.

Besides, my new school was better than any other I had ever attended before. It was called Bolton Brow and for the first time during my education I was afforded some respect and consideration by my teachers, especially Mr. Stokes. He was my history teacher who taught me about Roman Britain, the Crusades and the war against Napoleon. I enjoyed his early morning lectures, but his other students were less than enthusiastic and preferred to torment him with catcalls and pea shooters. Stokes was too timid to discipline them, but I was hungry for tales about long ago Britain with errant knights and mighty battles against the French, so I kept the peace in his classroom.

When the other students went too far or took the piss out of Stokes making me miss out on a history lesson, I clamoured, “Shut your gobs. Let the man talk, for pity’s sake.”

As I found a new appreciation for school, Bill’s butcher business wobbled from bad to worse and hunger returned as an unwelcome lodger in our lives. The new business, the lack of money, and debt collectors looming at every corner were not improving Bill and my mother’s relationship. Their brawling continued, and their drinking persisted until we were no better off than when our father was with us.

My sister and I began to look like beggars as our clothes were worn and no amount of washing could remove the grime from my trousers or the shame I harboured at my sorry state. I was falling apart physically, mentally and emotionally. When fall turned to winter, the shoes that I had preserved through many years of midnight dashes, rotted away and I wept in anger at how unfair life was for me and every other sod born poor.

My sister noticed my anguish and one night gave me some old cardboard and said, “It keeps the draft from coming into our bedroom, so it should keep the snow and sleet off your stocking feet.”

It worked for a while but then the cardboard disintegrated and I stopped attending school when the weather was wet. Naturally, I fell behind in my lessons and it made me feel dejected and ashamed. I started to believe that I was the most miserable of creatures who was condemned to a life of want and drudgery.

When I finally returned to school, it was my arithmetic instructor, Mr. Dawson who remarked that he did not take kindly to truants. He told me that I had to stay after class which made the other students break out into jeers and jibes against me.

After the other students left, Dawson called me up to the front of the class. He sat behind a thick wooden desk. Distracted, he flipped through homework papers while I quivered in silence.

“Now,” he started.

Pausing, he reached into his upper waist coat pocket. He produced a silver snuff box and opened it. He tapped some snuff onto his finger and inhaled the ground tobacco into his nose and then sneezed.

“Why were you away from class, for the last few days?”

“Not my fault, sir, it’s my shoes,” I blurted out.

I turned round and lifted one of my feet upwards so that he saw the gaping holes plugged haphazardly with soggy cardboard.

“Ah,” replied Mr. Dawson. “That is a dilemma. Go home,” he told me. “Complete today’s assignment and see me again after class tomorrow. Now go straight home, boy, and no dawdling.”

That night, as best as I could, I did my assignment. The following morning, I trod alone to school. When it came time for Mr. Dawson’s arithmetic lesson, I hid in the back row and avoided the smug glares from the more well-to-do students. At the end of lessons, I approached his desk as I had done the day before. Mr. Dawson took my homework assignment and placed it carefully on his desk. He pulled open the top left-hand drawer and took out a bag. Inside the paper bag was a pair of sturdy brown shoes.

“Try them on, boy,” he said, expressionless.

I slipped off my rotting shoes and slid into the new shoes. The fit was far from perfect and I would have to put newspaper into the toes to keep them from falling off my feet, but they felt warm and strong. That afternoon, two emotions swam in the pit of my stomach: gratitude and shame. But I thanked Dawson and said they were grand. He waved me away and said, “Not a word to anyone about this lad, not a word because this is between us two and no one else.”

After that, he turned his attention from me and started to fumble in his jacket pocket for his snuff box.

As I got used to my new shoes, Bill Moxon’s business collapsed, and he and my mother began jousting daily about money until one day Bill just got up and left us and returned to Bradford.

Before he went, he told my mother to “Bugger off. I’m better off without thee and wee kids.”

Bill’s departure spelled our inevitable ruin as my mum was now alone with three children and no source of income. In desperation, my mother found respite in drink and denial. Until she couldn’t delude herself any longer and told us, “Poppets, if there be no brass soon in my hands, it’s the workhouse for thee. There’s nowt in the cupboard, there’s nowt left but the gutter for all of uz.” With that terrifying declaration she departed and went down to the pub to drink and scheme her way out of being at life’s dead end.

That night, Mary and I went to bed hungry and dreamed about the next day’s school lunch. At around eleven, we heard milk bottles rolling down the lane way. There was a dull, sharp thud, as if a bin man had tossed a sack of heavy rubbish onto the pavement. Mary and I rushed down the stairs. I reluctantly peeled the door open and found our mum, lying face down, dead and silently drunk.

Grabbing one arm and Mary grabbing the other arm, we hauled our mother through the door. We were like fisherman on a trawler pulling in an enormous haul of near-dead fish. She did not stir as her body was dragged roughly across the front entrance into our house. Once safely inside, we closed the door. Both of us prayed that no neighbour had either seen her approach, witnessed her fall, or spied us transporting our mother into the house as drunk and lifeless as a street derelict. I found a blanket and dropped it onto my mother’s intoxicated snoring and farting body and went to bed, shivering with shame and emotional exhaustion.

The following morning, my mum informed us in a hung-over voice, “We’re in shite. Without our Bill, there be no meat for tea, no milk, and no pudding ’cause we are bust. We are good and proper buggered. I’ve got enough brass to last a fortnight, maybe a month. Then, my ones, it’s the poor ’ouse. We’ll be vagrants. For us to survive, wee kids of mine, must be tough and work like grownups.”

“We’ll be all right, mam,” I said optimistically, but my mother shook her head and replied, “I don’t know about that ’cause “there’s another nipper on the way.”

After hearing that my mother was pregnant with Bill’s child I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I was furious with my mother because I thought she had utterly and totally betrayed my dad, my sister and me with this child inside her. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t her fault because she was trapped in a desperate situation since society valued working class women less than men. All she could offer in exchange to keep her children safe and fed was her sex and her charm. It was the same pitiable mess for countless women across the country who, like my mother, were condemned to a harsh life that was controlled by the whim of their husbands or lovers.

One thing my mum’s pregnancy did stir in me was my desire to quickly find work and put as much distance as possible between my mother and me. My sister Mary felt the same way and was more vocal about her growing animosity towards our mum. She took to calling her “a stupid old cow” behind her back and was barely civil to her while we shared our meagre suppers.

A couple days after my mum announced that she was pregnant Mary found a job as a spinner at a local wool mill while I found a position as a delivery boy at an outlet of Jubb’s on the High Street of King Cross.

For me, I found my new work was arduous, bone-breaking servitude because I was tasked with loading and delivering baskets of groceries that weighed up to fifty pounds. The basket was mounted on the top of the bike’s front tire, which was two feet by three feet. The front tire was half the size of the back tire. This allowed for a larger basket to be attached to the front that was laden with an enormous amount of groceries that generally consisted of flour, potatoes, meat, produce, jams, bread, milk, and a wide assortment of dried goods. My delivery route took me miles away from the store in King Cross and I biked to the suburbs, profitable farms, across the dales and through every hill and dip imaginable.

I did my duties energetically and without complaint. Yet secretly, I was ashamed that I was compelled to work no better than a dog. It was because my family’s fortunes by either caprice or poor judgment had left me enslaved to child labour. If I saw another kid walking or biking to a social event while I was left to toil with weighty, cumbersome food deliveries, it humiliated me.

While I was on my deliveries, many times, I rode past young girls dressed for a birthday party, and I felt their indifference to my servitude. Their party shoes quickly tapped across the cobblestone streets to get away from me. Sometimes they tossed me the same awkward and uncomfortable glance as one would to an animal over laden with equipment and gear.

After some time, the manager who was originally from France and spoke with a thick Normandy accent allowed me to work behind the counter rather than make deliveries because as he put it “I’ve had my eyes on you and I can tell that there are some brains behind that brawn.”

I was certainly smart but it was more because I had discovered him shagging a female customer on the sugar sacks in the back store room. As I kept stum, the manager presumed it was good to keep me close by, so that he could continue his afternoon snogging trysts.

The manager’s carnal desires allowed me to take on more and more responsibility and I was permitted to decorate the store’s front window display. The store window arrangements were a source of pride for me, as I was able to create some impressive displays and one even took second place in a local competition.

At twelve, I took up smoking Woodbine cigarettes that cost two pennies a packet. On my break, I stood outside and lit the rough fags with Bryant matches. The match box displayed a pompous-looking Captain Webb. Webb had been the first man to dare to swim across the English Channel. The matches spluttered to life, and I soaked into my callow lungs the coarse tobacco. Standing with my cigarette in hand and a green feeling in my stomach, I believed I was quite the man.

Next door to Jubb’s was a very high-end chocolate confectionary shop. It had an enormous window display dripping with brightly coloured bon bons and chocolates created in all manner of shape and sizes. They were all handcrafted and presented in rich, beautiful boxes. The store’s clientele were affluent and ignorant of the want that permeated Yorkshire. On my fag break, I used to watch, elegant women, with their elegantly dressed fat children in tow enter the shop. They always left with boxes of chocolate whose calorie count exceeded my weekly intake of food.

However, I discovered that the shop routinely discarded entire boxes of chocolate and dumped them in a bin located in the lane at the back of the store. Curious, I pulled one of the exquisite boxes out of the rubbish and tore its lid off like I was a buccaneer.

The chocolate was blanched in white mould, destined but rejected as unfit for the moneyed class. Yet, when I discarded the first tray, I found underneath it perfect chocolates, edible and sweet created with pure artistry. After my shift was finished, I scooped up the boxes and brought them home and shared them with Mary until we were sick from the rich sweet chocolate.

With the combined salary of me and Mary, we were able to keep ourselves, our mum, and little Matt in the house in King Cross. At the start of 1935, pregnant and desperate, my mother rushed to Bradford to find Bill Moxon. She took a room in a doss-house at our old haunt of St. Andrew’s Villas, as she knew Moxon was kipping there. My mother hoped to shame him into accepting his namesake, but it did not succeed.

At first Bill was unmoved by her or his child but eventually, through my mother’s persistence Moxon was worn down, and he agreed to register the child in his name and accept it as coming from his blood and bone. Still, he refused to return with my mother to King Cross or to give his son anything but his first and last name.

When my mother came home with my new half-brother, I felt revulsion for my mother and this new mouth to feed. Irrationally, I saw Bill, Jr., and my mother as co-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. He was a nuisance, especially since I was beginning to enjoy my experience at school.

Fortunately, I had found a means to escape the cries of a new-born and my mum’s half-drunken cries for assistance. It was my introduction to the library in King Cross. It was my university, my comfort, and my escape from the greyness and the emotional hunger in my life. On my off time, I trudged over to the library, which was housed in an antiquated Victorian building near our house. I perused the shelves of books filled with strange titles. There was a multiplicity of authors, from Aesop to Toynbee. I grabbed novels that caught my fancy and indulged my mind and my imagination. With Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, I suffered another man’s sorrow, his poverty, his love for his sister, 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. I endured the pain of romantic, unattainable love through the writings of Dumas. In Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, I was pitched into a fast-paced world of thieves, daring archaeologists, and intrigue. Or in Montezuma’s Daughter, erotic desire was aroused for foreign beauties and distant shores. I lost myself in the world of the Lake poets and became entranced and enmeshed at the pure ethereal beauty of Wordsworth’s sonnets.

For the price of a few pennies, I was transported across the world and sat at the feet of great thinkers. I read and imagined tall adventures, and I absorbed wondrous riches that the world held out for those that could break free of their provincial, dusty lives. I took my weekly selection of books from the library and selfishly kept them to myself. I read them underneath my bedcovers, long into the night with a dimming battery operated torch. I woke up bleary-eyed and hung-over from words.

From my pay packet I was able to put a few shillings aside until I had enough money to buy a used bike. It was a heavy and ponderous contraption with a chain that was reluctant to remain in gear. For me, however, the bike was as noble and as graceful as Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus because it allowed me to escape into the country on my days off from work.

On one Sunday, I peddled as hard as I could to put as much distance between me and my mother and the crowded, dingy tenement that I shared with her and the rest of my unhappy family. I rode until I found a lonely meadow that possessed an oak tree and where the only noise I heard was from the wind walking through the tall grass.

Resting against the tree’s trunk, I ate a picnic lunch that consisted of a sandwich an apple and a hot flask of tea. In-between bites of my sandwich; I daydreamed about my future and wondered what would happen to me when I grew older. I recited romantic poetry to myself and pretended that there was a beautiful woman beside me who adored me and thought my voice was sweeter than honey. As I packed up my belongings, I resolved to ride my bike, on the following weekend, to the medieval city of York that was located twenty miles north from my disfigured neighbourhood.

For an entire week in-between school and work, I studied maps in the library. I plotted my course and the exact time I should leave. I purchased puncture kits for my worn tires, which I knew would face much abuse on the journey. I bought a new satchel to hold a rain coat, my thermos, and sandwiches.

On the following Sunday, before anyone else had stirred from bed, I ate a hurried breakfast and wrote a note to Mary that told her not to worry because I had gone on a trip and would be back late in the day. When I pushed off on my bike from King Cross I felt like Charles Lindbergh when he departed New Jersey to fly solo across the Atlantic.

The route I chose avoided Bradford and Leeds, as I feared heavy traffic and unwieldy lorries. Instead, I utilized country lanes and a secondary dual carriageway. Before long, I realized that my chosen path to the ancient city was through some of the hilliest and bent roads designed by man. My tires punctured every half hour, and I was more often at the side of the road repairing my bike.

When a rain shower turned into a downpour, I took cover underneath an elderly roadside tree and ate my lunch. I began to doubt myself and cursed my arrogance at attempting this stupid venture. Turning back was not possible, as I was past the halfway mark to York and it was now closing in on noon. Eventually, the storms 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 was on the outskirts of York and I saw the spires of the Minster towered before me. They were a fulcrum in the landscape and since the 12th century, the tallest structure for a hundred miles around the city. I pedalled my bike to the city’s main entrance at Bothan Bar and 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, or sweets. Their shouts implored me to come over and see their fresh produce, the best apples, and the most magnificent pies or jam. The shambles was like a Moroccan bizarre that 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 had no love of religion or the cold-hearted, cruel, impiety of the nuns and the priests that I had encountered at school. I had no affection for my church or respect for the celibate hypocrites who doled out physical punishments for my alleged imperfections as a Christian. 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, its life stretching back to the Dark Ages in the 600s, I felt the magnetic draw of open and honest belief. I perceived the majesty, the solemn beatitude this cathedral held over life in Yorkshire for close to 1500 years. I felt reverence for the workers, the stone masons, the carvers, 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 had grown up in cramped, damp terraced houses that were built as if their inhabitants were livestock. I lived in a neighbourhood where people were forgotten by the government, by the church and were expected to exist without beauty or hope. My people were the ones always promised that if we obeyed, riches in Heaven awaited us. We were told that if we were meek and obedient, paradise awaited us after we had endured all of our earthly trials and tribulations.

However, from that day onward, I knew that I was not going to allow my rough life to define my destiny. I made a vow to myself that the rich and powerful were not going to make me a servant to their desires. I finally understood that I had value because after I’d seen York, I knew I was part of this great tapestry of life, in Northern England.

Looking upwards against the vaulted ceiling and across to the silent saints of the church, I finally knew I had worth. I knew that despite, my family’s lost legacy, my sister’s death, my father’s ruin, my mother’s damaged innocence and my lost childhood that I was not eternally condemned to a life empty of purpose. I realized that the pain and suffering that I endured along with so many in my social class were now like sparks of electricity in my spirit because they energized my determination to break free from my poverty created by an unjust society.

I did not reach home until well after supper. Twilight was fading into dark when I arrived back to the gas lit streets and laneways of King Cross. I was exhausted, elated, and unable to explain to anyone why I had ridden my bike to York. My mother thought I was daft, and Mary laughed at my folly. But I went to bed and fell into a fitful sleep that night. I dreamed of my eventual escape from King Cross, Halifax, and Yorkshire.

However, my epiphany at York was short-lived, because soon after my pilgrimage, Bill Moxon returned to disturb the calm that had settled over our household. It was as if he had never left when I found him in our parlour banging on our out of tune piano a mournful dirge.

“Down in the Deep, Sailor, Beware, Down in the Deep, Sailor, take care.”

It was the only song he knew how to play and Moxon had learned it in the Royal Navy during the First World War. Seeing him sitting in our front parlour, I froze in horror. The last few months had been peaceful for me and Mary and despite our struggles to keep the rent paid and food on the table, we were again like a loving family. Now with Bill’s return the atmosphere within the house reverted back to one of animosity and distrust.

As Bill settled back into our lives and his routine of drinking and brawling with my mother, King George died, When his death was announced at school, I along with a horde of other children paraded down the streets and sang at the top of our voices, “God Save our gracious King, God Save our noble King… send him to Heaven in a corn beef tin… God save the King.”

But those good hearted jeers against the monarch were my last school boy hurrah because I was soon to turn fourteen and therefore was deemed old enough to leave school and take up full time work. However, I despaired at my chances of finding a good job because I lacked family connections to enter a trade.

I complained to my mother that I’d be lucky enough to get a job as a rag and bone man if I wasn’t able to find some money to buy a decent pair of togs to wear whilst looking for full time employment.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I haven’t been able to afford a new dress, since your sister died.”

With little conviction in her voice, she suggested “why don’t you ask our Bill if he can lend you a couple of bob until you get sorted?”

When I asked him, he looked at me as if I’d asked to borrow his kidney and said, “Bugger off lad, as soon as you are working like a man, you’ll know how hard it is to get brass and keep it in thy pocket.”

I didn’t know what to do and feared what was to become of me. But on my birthday, Mary took me to a tea shop to celebrate my becoming a man. However, I was not good company because I was terrified at what lay ahead for me especially since Britain was still blindly fumbling through the economic collapse. Moreover, the stench of world conflict raged around us, from the smouldering ruins of Spain to the growing menace of Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Germany.

I tried to talk to Mary about it but she said, “Why do you want to go and spoil a good birthday by talking nonsense. You should get yourself a girl and stop fussing about the world; it will sort itself out one way or t’other. But lasses are something your big sister can help you out with. There are quite a few comely ones down at my mill. They would be dead proud to have you on their arm. I can put a good word in fer ya, Harry?”

“No thanks, Mary. I am doing all right with the lasses on my own,” I lied.

“Perhaps, you are,” she said dubiously “but you still need help getting kitted out to look for work. So I am going to give you a bit of cash that I’ve squirreled away from mum’s beady eyes. “Go on take it,” she said and thrust the money towards me.

I didn’t know what to say except “ta very much.”

She winked and replied, “We’ll be all right Harry because this storm can’t go on forever.”

I used the money Mary had lent me to buy a pair of trousers and a jacket at a used clothing store called Copley’s.

Even though my new clothes weren’t made to my measure, I felt better about myself and my prospects of finding work. However, I soon discovered that there were more fourteen year olds looking for positions than employers.

My self-confidence was shattered because I heard the same story time after time, “Sorry lad but there’s nowt going.”

Dejected after days of rejections from prospective employers, I went to the Halifax Arcade and thought I’d buy myself a sherbet to bolster my flagging spirits. But once inside, I decided to have a look around because the enclosed mall contained around fifty different stalls and shops and I thought someone must be hiring.

I was right because inside the Arcade, Grosvenor’s Grocers had a help wanted sign in front of their establishment. I went in and explained to the owner that I was looking for full time work after the end of the school term but that I was able to work part-time until the start of summer. The owner who was a Christadelphian with strange ideas about God and charity liked my earnestness and agreed to employ me. However, he explained that I would start as a barrow boy and if I was diligent, I could work my way up the ladder to be one of his managers. “If you show gumption lad the world is thy oyster.”

But for now, the owner said he wanted me to transport freshly butchered meat and giant wheels of cheese from their main store to the Arcade. At first, I was devastated because the last labour I sought was that of Sisyphus, rolling rock upon rock up steep and dangerous slopes.

“As much as I would like a job, sir,” I explained, “I’m getting plum tired of being relegated to hauler and loader of foodstuffs.”

“Son, didn’t you hear me right, I said show some gumption and the world is thy oyster. This is both my test and Gods to see if you are up to the task of working in my shop.”

I agreed but I wasn’t convinced that he was going to use me for anything other than brute labour.

The owner saw that I looked dubious over his claims, so he said, “Give me your hand, and we’ll shake on it because you have my word as a Christian that if you won’t let me down, I won’t let you waste your talents pushing a barrow for the rest of your days.”

When spring arrived the new King was crowned, George VI, after his brother Edward abdicated the thrown for the love of a divorced American woman. To celebrate the coronation, every schoolchild was presented with a box of chocolates which had a photograph of the new King George and Queen Elizabeth embossed on its lid.

My mother said, “Son, eat and enjoy them sweets because that is the last thing this country is going to give you for free.”

As for Mary, she said to me after scoffing one of the chocolates, “the new King is a cheap old bugger.”

“How do you figure,” I asked?

She responded with her mouth full of chocolate, “the kiddies get sweets and a working girl like me doesn’t even get a thank-you very much. Where’s my gift from his royal muck?”

Mary was right; she was seventeen and toiled away at a mill, week in week out, without any hope of her life changing except through marriage, age or infirmity.

“But I’ll tell you this,” she said confidently, “I am going to get something better than a box of chocolates very soon.”

“What are you going to get,” I asked curiously?

“I am going to get cracking,” she said “and move out of this dull, dreary flipping house.”

“How?”

Mary responded to me in a whisper, “I’ve saved some money and now I have enough to move straight out of mum’s bleeding life.”

I was crestfallen by her announcement because I didn’t want her to leave me behind to live with my mother Bill and my two half-brothers.

“Take me with you,” I begged.

“Can’t luv, not until you are old enough, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do for your school leaving present. I’ll take you to Blackpool for the day.”

My eyes lit up and Mary saw my excitement and said, “You haven’t been back to the seaside, since dad took us to Southport all those years ago.”

“Too right,” I replied and then Mary interjected, “I am surprised you remember because it was ages ago, the year after our Marion died and dad and mam could still hold their heads up high in Barnsley.”

On the Sunday following our conversation, we took an early train from Halifax to Blackpool. It was my first train trip, and I was enthralled at the prospect of an adventure. The giant steam locomotive pushed itself out of the station with blasts of grey smoke and a giant cry from its whistle. Mary and I sat on wooden benches in the third class compartment. We pulled the heavy window down and breathed in heavy, sooty air as we were propelled towards the sea. On our voyage, we passed innumerable identical hamlets and villages. We saw the same grim and dour people enter or exit the train. Mary and I made fun of the stodgy old people while we passed the time eating apples. In my imagination, our train was steaming across the Asian continent to Tashkent instead of Blackpool.

“Harry, Harry,” my sister called out to me, waking me from my dreams. “Don’t you worry; one day, Harry, we will grab a train and never look back, never come back. Bye-bye, Mum, bye, shite life… Hello, world…”

Enthusiastically, I cried out, “Yes.”

When our trained arrived at Blackpool, Mary took my hand and said, “Remember, Harry, no rainy day thoughts because it’s time to go find some fun!”

Outside, the sky was clear and blue and the temperature mild and refreshing. We were lucky because we found a cheap fish and chip shop on our way to the beach and pier. We treated ourselves handsomely to two orders of battered cod and chips that were wrapped in day old newspaper. Mary and I found a bench near the shop, and tore through our meal. We laughed and joked in-between bites of fish drowned in malt vinegar. Feeling stuffed and sated, we crunched up our spent lunch and dumped it in a bin. We walked down to the beating heart of Blackpool, the promenade beside the sea. As we approached, we heard the noise, the electricity coming from the amusement rides. We saw the giant Ferris wheels turning on the horizon with loud and boisterous occupants. We heard bells clanking while men barked into metal tubes, magnifying their voices.

We made our way to the beach and once there our feet sank into the voluminous sand. Above us, seagulls frolicked and shrieked while out in the sea cumbersome breakers rode towards the shore. I had brought a ball with us, and so we played toss on the cool sand. Afterwards, we traipsed arm and arm down along the beach and sang childish lullabies.

“Once upon a time, when birds shit lime and monkeys chewed tobacco…”

Then, Mary said, “Let’s go to the Blackpool Tower.”

The tower stood 520 feet high, and at its base was a giant building that housed a circus, zoo, and aquarium. We gained admittance for a couple of pence and immediately went to the animal enclosure, where we laughed at the monkeys. I made silly faces back to them and imitated their gestures and their antics. The lions in their cage looked proud and indifferent to our entreaties to roar as kings of the jungle.

In a quiet moment, Mary said, “Not a bad life, eh Harry? For the lion, that is… all he has got to do is look fierce and tough and scare the shite out of people. But at tea time, he knows a man will come along and throw him a nice piece of roast beef or a leg of lamb that we wouldn’t even see on Sunday. For that big polecat’s supper, I’d roar and snarl and bark.”

Suddenly, she let loose a giant growl as if she were a lioness. We left the animal den and rode the elevator to the top of the tower, eating a piece of Blackpool rock. We stared out across the sea, and I told Mary, “If you stare a little further out, there is Ireland.”

“And a little further back is Leeds and bloody Manchester,” she replied. “One day, Harry, and never you mind, one day we will get out.”

We descended the tower, our cheeks whipped by the wind as we raced to the fairground.

“My treat, let’s ride the dodgems,” I called to Mary.

We jumped into our separate cars and chased each other around the ring while sparks of electricity traced the ceiling. We drove into one another and bumped other cars. We laughed until tears ran down our faces and our turn and our money ran low, ending the ride.

The day was quickly done. We made our way back to the station and our train, which would take us to Halifax and home. On our return journey, we were both exhausted from joy and we hugged each other.

“Promise me, that we can do this again, real soon.”

“Sure, Harry, sure we will.”

Separately and forlornly, we stared out of the window while outside clouds and darkness descended.

A few weeks later after the magic of Blackpool had evaporated; Mary told me she had found better employment at a mill in Low Moor, near Bradford and was moving out of the house. As Mary put it, “I’m not going to stomach another year living in this house watching Bill and our mum drink and brawl.”

“But,” Mary warned me, “not a whisper to mum or our brothers until I have everything done and dusted.”

Soon afterwards, my sister told me that she had found a room in Bradford and would be gone from my mother’s house by the following Friday before our mother collected our money for room and board.

“That cow is not going to get another penny from me,” Mary said bitterly.

My mother collected our rent money on Fridays with avaricious relish. She always reminded me of an overseer in Ancient Egypt who was tasked with tallying up the crops harvested, by the enslaved Israelites for the Pharaoh’s granaries.

My mother was no different on the day, Mary left and as usual she called upon me first to pay my way. I handed it to her and she placed my coins on the kitchen table to better count them because my mum never allowed the house to be cheated. Normally, after me, Mary followed with her wages. That Friday, she was not behind me, and our mother enquired where my sister was. I acted indifferent and ignorant. Tentatively, I said, “Upstairs, I think.”

Moments later, with light footfalls Mary came downstairs, holding a small bag. Her coat was already wrapped around her.

“What’s this, then?” asked my mother suspiciously. “What are you up to, Mary?” my mother asked in a puzzled tone.

“Nothing, Mam,” Mary sheepishly replied.

“Come on then, Mary, get into scullery and give me thy wages,” my mother demanded impatiently.

“Can’t, Mam,” Mary replied.

“Can’t?” our mother barked. “Why can’t thee? Why the bloody hell can’t thee?” she said with rising anger.

Mary entered the front entrance of our kitchen and said defiantly, “I am moving out.”

My mother rose from her chair. She lurched forward to within inches of my sister. She raised her right finger and began wagging it as she ranted.

“Like hell you are…how dare you move out?”

“Dare?” Mary replied. “You bloody cow, I can do what I want. And there’s no one to stop me. Do you think we are just here to feed you? Do you think I work at a bloody mill to pay for you? You are a lazy fucking cow and since your man is back by your bleeding side; I think that he can start to pay his way by keeping you right.

My mother roared, “You ungrateful bitch, you little grabbing, mewling bitch.”

“Me?” Mary demanded in rising anger. “Me, ungrateful?” she repeated. “Since I was four, Mam, I’ve been working like a fucking dog, for you. After your fights and boozing, after the debt collectors had gone, after dad was chucked and Bill buggered off, who was bloody left? Me! Mary! I’ve had no bloody life because of you. I’ve gone to bed cold and fucking hungry because of you. I took care of Harry and Matt because you were not fit to help.”

“Fit to help,” our mum retorted. “Fit, you know nowt about what I’ve done for thee. I’ve lost my bloody life to you fucking kids, to your fucking needs,” my mother said desperately. “Without me, you’d be in a workhouse or on the streets. Your dad, with his igh ’n mighty family, he was no bloody help to me or to you. Did any of them raise a finger when we had less than nowt, when we were so bloody skint we ate shite from rubbish bins? I’ve got blood on my hands, lass, from scraping and fighting for food for you and your bloody brothers,” my mum retorted, her anger rising. “And now you come to me and say, ‘Here’s the thanks, Mam, for all your work; I am moving out.’ You are moving on and out like you have bloody airs or something, like you’re better than us. Mark me, Mary, life will soon have you sorted, and sorted well and good.

“I tell ya, good bloody luck, ’cause you’re going to need it; because nowt is coming from here. Bugger off then, good riddance to thee.”

Mary reached into her coat, found her house key, and threw it to the ground. She looked at me and said with a weary smile, “Never you mind, Harry. When you’re ready, you can come live with me. Take care of yourself because Mam is going to be no bloody hope to you.”

Her words trailed off like an echo coming from the dying notes of a phonograph and fled out the door with her. Outside, Mary walked alone towards the bus stop and with that, my sister who kept me warm at night, shared my hunger, my tears, my joy and made me feel loved was gone. She was gone, like Marian, like my dad, and now Mary was just a phantom to haunt my mother’s soul.

My mother returned to her chair and fell into it, subdued by the storm that had just passed. I remained quiet and waited for Bill to return home. After a while my baby brother started to cry and my mother ordered me to fetch him whereupon she dejectedly hugged him and kissed his head. When Bill arrived home from work, she prepared our tea, runny fried eggs and fried bread. We ate in silence because no one dared utter a word aloud about Mary’s departure.

Chapter Seven

Moving Out

After Mary moved out, our house on Boothtown Road was sheathed in an emotional darkness and I marked time, until I could flee from my mother’s house and begin a fresh new life. I felt no warmth or real attachment to my mother, Bill, or his toddler. I needed to escape from the weariness of living in an unhappy household that contained too many ghosts and too much regret for deeds best forgotten, as if they had occurred under the fog of war. We were a family silent in love, but outspoken in hate and shame. If there had been any chance for us to love each other, it was wrecked from the dark forces around us. The brutality of the Great Depression had strangled any possibility that our family could develop into a healthy, caring, and adoring unit.

Growing into a teen, I blamed my mother for our sorry plight and I saw my mum as an object of disgrace and embarrassment, for me. She drank too much, brawled too much and lived with her lover, while still married to my dad.

I harboured a deep resentment against my mother because I saw her as the principal instrument in my father’s destruction. My mum, I thought, was the reason for our expulsion into a dark and unfeeling world. It was as if my mother had wrought our downfall from her vices, be it drink or the need to be admired by wicked men.

I failed to recognize that she was neither evil nor a bad mother. It was because our world had been turned on its side and that drove us to cannibalize love. Our struggle for employment, food and housing caused us to discard affection, love, and decency as unnecessary luxuries. Besides, my mum was too proud and too reticent to explain to me the workings of her mind.

She never voiced to me the humiliation she was forced to endure when she had to beg for money, for a loaf of bread, a pint of milk or when she had to lumber down to a pub to get Bill home before he drank all the food money away. At the age of fourteen, I could not square in my heart that my mother was anything but an object for me to ridicule.

Shamed by both my present and past, I began to loathe my broad Northern accent. My voice was like a mark of Cain. It condemned me with every syllable I uttered to being from the lowest order in Britain’s rigid social class system. My accent only made me good for one thing in the eyes of my so-called betters: manual labour. But I was determined to forge my way out of poverty and out of my social class. I enrolled at the Athenaeum Working Man’s Academy for elocution lessons.

The Athenaeum was a cooperative learning centre for languages, pronunciation, diction, and self-improvement. The school was established by a group of utopian cloth cutters in the 1890s. They hoped to advance education to the downtrodden. Entering the school, I was greeted by an attractive middle-aged woman with a middle-brow accent. The woman offered her hand in a polite, gentle greeting.

“My name is Miss Florence Haynes.”

Awkwardly, I took her soft hand, but I held it too tightly, as if her good breeding could infect me like a tactile infection. I explained to her I wanted to speak proper, educated English. I wanted an accent and a voice that no one was able to identify or recognize sprang from Barnsley, Bradford, or Halifax.

Florence explained, “Primarily, this is a finishing school for young men and women to improve their chances at gaining entrance to college or university. At the very least, they come here to improve their chance of success in business. You see, a modulated tone is a passport to a successful future in business or education.” However, you don’t look the sort to be going to either university or joining the banking profession. So, I don’t know if we can take you on?”

“I might not have gone to Grammar School,” I replied. “But, I still ave a right to succeed and make summa of myself.”

“Too true,” Miss Haynes noted. “Sadly, these days there are too many of you wanting more and getting less.” The administrator sighed. “I am reluctant, but I will make an exception in your case, as you seem earnest. Be here next Saturday afternoon,” she instructed. “Class begins at two. Don’t be late. Don’t forget, it is a shilling a lesson.”

Quite a fair deal, I naively thought, to become a polished and sophisticated gentleman for a shilling.

When I arrived the following Saturday, I was greeted by a teacher named Agnes, who was in her twenties. Agnes wore a grey, pleated skirt and looked as far removed from sophisticated society as I was. There were nine other students in our class, which was primarily comprised of young men a few years older than me, but there were also two women in attendance who were in their twenties. By the look of their clothes, I could tell the other students were children of mill supervisors, green grocers, and the developing mercantile class.

As I took my seat, I self-consciously smiled at everyone and said hello. The other students replied with measured salutations. I could tell by the supercilious expressions on their faces as they eyed my threadbare trousers that they believed I was miles apart from them in both class and education. It was as almost if the other students viewed me as someone who had mistakenly entered the room and forgotten to bring the tea trolley and biscuits.

Agnes began the lessons by having every student read a line or two from a nursery rhyme. All of us failed miserably in imparting any voice but broad Yorkshire. Still, I was not disheartened and I meticulously practiced my lessons before I went to bed or when I walked to work. I even whispered my tongue twisting exercises to myself while in the bog. Any moment that I was alone, I practiced my lessons and tried to erase the accent that my forefathers had used during their five hundred years of servitude to the feudal masters of the moors.

Gradually, my speech pattern developed to a more neutral accent, which resembled the ‘neither from here nor there’ county. My workmates thought I was taking the piss out of them with my newly developed speech pattern. The owner, with his profound reverence for God and self-improvement, applauded my efforts. As my speech became less my own, I became bolder. I was able to erase my past as if it were a ritual cleansing with each vowel and syllable that sounded less like my mother’s speech, Bill’s bold as brash utterance or my dad’s long-ago, almost musical solicitudes. Now when I spoke, there was a cloak of strength and anonymity that surrounded me. I felt less like a servant and more like a master. I was able to conceal, if only for brief moments, my poor education and my impoverished upbringing. I was able to repudiate my history for good or ill.

However, when I met Mary for tea one day after my lessons; she looked straight through my futile attempts to erase my identity and said, “No matter how hard we scrub, there is always going to be dirt underneath our fingernails.”

To her, I was like so many from my class who had attempted this deception before. We soared, briefly, like Icarus through the class structure of England, only to be discovered to be a peasant from the North and our wings of social mobility were burnt and we tumbled backwards to Earth.

By September 1937, I was a full-time employee of Grosvenor’s. I hauled their cheese barrow from their warehouse to their shop in the Commercial Street Arcade. It was always loaded high with giant, heavy wheels of Gouda and enormous blocks of cheddar, butter and bacon. Although it took the strength of a beast of burden to shift it, I moved down the street with youthful enthusiasm. Every work day, I wielded my freight down that street like I was an acrobat riding a unicycle. I dodged pretty street girls, clerks, men of business and bankers, along my route with alacrity. However, as I sped past them I knew that to those lofty pedestrians my existence was not even noticed. For them, I was just another nameless face that was part of the giant cog of manual labour that plied the busy streets of Halifax.

Thankfully, on the weekends the manager set me to work at their Arcade store rather than work the barrow all day. My shift began at seven in the morning and finished at ten in the evening, with a half hour for my tea break.

As the autumn progressed, my mother informed me that we were moving to a dwelling on Boothtown Road, which was closer to Halifax’s city centre. The change in addresses was neither a move up nor down the ladder. It was a sidewise manoeuvre. Our house was the end unit in a row of fifteen attached houses that had been constructed for mill workers before the turn of the 20th Century. There was a drab and grey hue to the interior of our home because it was lit by gas, which cast a low, sad light over the time between tea and sleep. We had a small fireplace in the parlour which at its roaring best could barely keep frost from forming on the inside of the windows in winter.

Naturally, the bog was outdoors and it was my only place of refuge from the constant teeming noise of my family or our neighbour’s lives that seeped through the thin walls that divided one household from the next. I shared a minute bedroom with my two half-brothers while my mother and Bill slept in an equally cramped room at the top of the stairs.

Our new neighbourhood was situated near the public baths, Ackroyd Park, and a cake shop, but it was still a grim and desolate part of town where the working class drank, fucked and died in their miserable squats. During the week, there was always a giant procession of workers who marched to work, and their boots beat against the cobbled streets, with the ferocity of an army moving onto war.

Through my work, and because I now lived closer to the centre of Halifax, I was able to meet new friends who were of my social class. I started to chum around with a fellow named Eric Whitely, who was an apprentice at a small engineering firm in the city. I liked him, I envied him and sometimes I despised him because he was everything I could never be: he was all-modern, quick-witted, vain, and boastful.

He liked to brag about the girls he’d dated, kissed or bagged. Eric had a thin terrier face and a wispy-haired moustache. His personality seemed to exude cynicism, as if he were a man on the take or who knew how to make money without working for it. Being around him, I felt the cheap excitement of a lie told brazenly. Yet in spite of his nature, he liked me and valued my friendship because he found in me a comrade that was sincere and loyal to him, no matter his chicanery.

Eric introduced me to Roy Broadbent, who lived with his mother and grandmother. Roy and I got along instantly because we had something in common: we both had lost our fathers at a young age. Roy’s died when he was an infant, and mine died emotionally for me when he was shown the door by my mother. Eric’s father, on the other hand, was very much alive. Eric spent a lot of time boasting about his dad, which was an irritation to both me and Roy. It was not the fact that Eric had a father that bothered us; it was because he insisted on talking about him and this made us keenly aware of our own absent dads.

The final element in my trinity of mates was Doug Butterworth. He lived near King Cross with his mother, brother, and sister. Like me and Roy, Doug was fatherless but his mother exuded so much love and good sense that no one doubted that he had been well protected from the cruelty of life during the economic troubles during the 1930s.

Butterworth’s mother was so welcoming that anyone who was a friend of her son’s was considered an honorary member of their household. I delighted in going to his house because I was treated as part of the family and when I sat myself down on a cluttered chair in their parlour, his mother always greeted me with “Fancy a cuppa and don’t mind the mess; it’s the servants’ day off.”

The Butterworth’s home was in a perpetual state of chaos, with people charging in and out and tea cups cluttering tables while clothes for mending were heaped around the four corners of their parlour. In the scullery, dishes were piled high in the sink but no matter how disorganized things were, their affection for me was true and I relished every moment that I was in their company.

When my friends and I were not working, we spent a great deal of time chasing girls because like all teenagers our hormones were on fire. On Fridays, if we had the money, we went to a dancehall that was located above Jamison’s Tailors, in the centre of the city. It was the best place in Halifax to meet young women because a live band played dance tune favourites, from America. However for me, I did not shine in the dancehall because I didn’t dance and couldn’t afford to take lessons. So, instead of doing the jitterbug, I circled the perimeter of the dance floor and chatted up stray, partner-less girls and asked them if they fancied an escort home. If I was lucky, a girl accepted my advances.

After one of the dances, I was successful and allowed to escort a girl home but we both knew we were going to end up at People’s Park because that is where teenagers went, after dark to kiss and grope members of the opposite sex. However, my attempts at furtive love making were not successful that night because I was afraid that my efforts were going to end up getting the girl pregnant. So, after a while the young woman grew tired of my indecisiveness and stopped our mutual frustration. She jumped up, cleared the twigs and dirt from her skirt and demanded to be taken home. “Next time, bring a french letter with you,” she said with obvious irritation towards my lack of initiative.

Between working, chasing girls and dreaming of my escape from my mother’s house the world got on with its serious business which I was now able to hear about because Bill Moxon had raised enough scratch to purchase a used wireless radio. It was operated by a huge, wet battery. It took central position in our parlour. If I had the chance, I listened to the news with Bill who was eager to hear the match scores. Unless it was about a cut of beef or a Barnsley chop, Moxon was ignorant of most things. Yet, Bill was astute enough to know Hitler was a problem that was not going to go away. During the Munich crisis, Bill listened intently to the deliberations over the Sudetenland while my mother yelled at him to do something productive.

“Get off your arse and clean the grate.”

“These Fritz’s are always mucking about. They’ve always been up to no good. Remember, lad,” he said to me, “no bloody good will come to us from the Germans.”

I was not sure if there was going to be a war, and if there was a war, what would change for me? It seemed to me to be the same old dance; if there was war, the soldiers would be promised better lives and better living conditions after the battle was won. The government had made the same promises to the men who left for the Great War in 1914, but those men got bugger all.

As far as I understood it, wars were conducted for the rich and powerful and fought by the poor and hopeless workers. I was certain of one thing, I did not want to end up fighting in a war because of Hitler, nor because of Czechoslovakia or because those in charge had bungled the economy and society through blindness and greed.

In late September 1938, Neville Chamberlain came back to Britain waving a piece of paper and proclaimed peace in our times, but my mother never received the information because she was in a war without end, with her children, her lover and herself.

After Bill Junior’s arrival and Mary’s departure, my mum hoped I was on her side in her battles against Bill. But it was a bit too repetitive and a bit too much for me with my mother’s boozing and her unfortunate flights into melodramatics. In the past, her theatrics may have worked on me, when we were truly at the workhouse door. Now her pleas for assistance made me cynical, as I was convinced she had failed constantly to attend to my needs to be nurtured and loved.

Moreover, Bill now worked with the same employer as me, where he was well regarded as one of their prized butchers. Yet, my mother insisted on increasing my room and board and refused to understand that I also had to pay for work clothes, my entertainment, and the books for my self-education. My mum’s demands were greater than I could bear because she wanted me to sacrifice my well-being for children that were not of my doing and not from my father. They were from men who had brutalized and victimized my mother.

It was inevitable that as I grew into a teenager the years of repressed anger against my mother were bound to crash to the surface like a tidal surge over an ocean breakwater. In the end, I think both of us were surprised that it took so long for me to lash out, but when it happened nothing could ever be put right again between us.

The breach with my mother occurred at the end of a long Saturday in summer that had begun with twelve hours of work and ended in a neighbourhood pub with me on a date with one of the girls who worked at Grosvenor’s. Her name was Silvia, and at the time she was the sweetest looking lass that I knew. She was alluring and had an accent as soft as English rain. She seemed generally interested in my company and my inane tales about my dreams for the future.

As last orders were near, we did not linger long in the pub. Silvia accepted my offer to walk her home, which was at the opposite end of town in the relatively prosperous environs of Saville Park Road. It took ages to walk her home, but it gave me the chance to woo her with songs, poems and jokes. Before we reached her house, we sat down at a bus shelter opposite the park and kissed. When a nearby church bell peeled the early morning hour, Silvia said it was best that she be off home. I accompanied her to her front door. We kissed and said our goodbyes. As her door closed, I pirouetted.

Gleefully, I began the long trek home to Boothtown. I was elated by the prospect of being loved by someone who I thought might decipher the mysteries of my heart. All of the poverty and degradation that my family had endured had made me a very lonely soul. I feared that I was not worthy of anything but toil and drudgery, and it made me despise my mother and my dad. At that age, I erased any tenderness I might have experienced from them before the maelstroms and disasters pulled my family apart from each other.

I erased any recollection of my dad being in my life or having experienced his love for me and replaced it with anger at him, for not sticking up for himself or me. At that time, any trust or love I had for my father dissolved into anger and despair at his departure, and at our failure to not properly hold on to each other or even bid each other good-bye. As for my mum, I closed my eyes to her hapless love and I denounced her hugs and kisses, for me as fake theatrics from a woman who intended to survive, no matter how dirty the business.

I banished from my mind the fear she must have endured every time there was no money for rent or food. I negated her courage when she begged for a loan or pawned what few possessions she owned to keep the bailiff from our door. Everything that was good in her was forgotten by me as I weighed it against her boozy melodramatics and her boast that she alone and unaided had fought the flood that swept up against our family.

Perhaps my mother did hold back that financial tidal wave that threatened our survival, but at what cost to her or to us? Even though I abhorred her, I still recognized that there were a thousand tiny hairline fractures on her soul from enduring so much pain and so much disappointment in her own life. She never articulated why we made the choices we did to survive the Great Depression, but we did endure the tumult. What I couldn’t forgive her for was the guilt we both shared at being survivors from a great and terrible occurrence.

Still, when I opened up the front door to my mother’s house after spending an evening in the loving company of Silvia, I was not prepared to face or accept my mum’s unwarranted wrath. As I quietly opened the door, I was greeted by my mother’s fist that was the size of a small ham. It cracked the side of my head with such a blow that I stumbled and saw stars for several seconds before I cried out.

“Fuck, what did you do that for?”

“Watch it, or I’ll give ya another one, you cheeky bugger. Where have you been?

“It’s none of your bloody business,” I exploded, trying to get a hold of my faculties and restrain my anger towards my mother.

“Dus thee know the time?” she enquired, her voice leaping an octave.

“Fuck the time,” I replied, struggling to get past her. “You don’t hit me, get it?!” I screamed.

She grabbed a hold of my collar and told me, “I am your Mam. I still can take you over my knee and give you a walloping.”

I struggled free from her grasp and leered at her.

“Fuck you, you boozy bitch. Take a look at me, Mam. I am not on the piss like you’ve been. So fuck you.”

My mother snarled, “On your bike, lad, get on your bike and bugger off.”

“I will,” I answered, but before I could say more Bill opened the bedroom door and bellowed out, “What’s this racket about?”

“Nothing, Bill,” I shouted back. “Lillian’s just been promoted to night watchman. I’m going to bed. I’ll see ya in the morning for breakfast.” I turned back to my mother and added, “Don’t worry, Mam, I’ll get on my bike and not bloody look back, just like Mary.”

The following morning, before anyone had woken I was up and out to work. I mentioned my desire to move out to one of my workmates. He suggested a family whose son had married and moved on. They had a spare room for let near Melville Place, off Gibbet Street, in central Halifax. Gibbet Street, several generations previous, had been the executioner’s ground for traitors, murderers, and thieves. It was on this street that the guillotine was first used, long before France and the Bastille. Common criminals were held in stocks on the side of the street so that the passing citizenry could jeer and mock the condemned. When I arrived at the address, I was greeted by a polite woman in her fifties. She explained that her husband and daughter lived in the house and that they were only looking for a quiet and hard-working boarder.

“I don’t need any troublemakers or drinkers.”

The landlady quickly accepted me after learning about my position at Grosvenor’s and after I presented a written recommendation from the owner.

My departure from Boothtown Road was greeted with less theatrics than Mary’s parting. My mother seemed resigned to the fact that her children were leaving her like rats off a sinking ship and she wished me no hard feelings.

“You are allus welcome eare.”

I sarcastically agreed and went to collect my meager belongings which consisted of a change of clothes, some books, and a handful of silk flags that contained the ensigns of various countries. As I left my mother’s house, I shook Bill’s hand, patted Bill Junior’s head, and said something cavalier to Matt like, “I’ll see ya in the funny papers.”

I kissed my mother’s cheek and handed her the front door key. I left relieved and elated thinking I could kill and bury the past by walking forward and taking the bus from Boothtown to downtown Halifax. I would never look back, I thought. How naïve I was because my past was always lurking and beating the bars of my soul.

As I jumped on a bus which I thought was going to take me to my new residence and far away from my past, I was haunted by a vision of my father alone in his room in St. Andrew’s Villas. I started to choke up and to evade these sad visions of my father’s frustrated life; I climbed to the top of the bus to smoke a cigarette. But instead of finding peace, I encountered a bunch of Oswald Mosley supporters who were on their way to a rally in support of fascism.

Chapter Eight

The Phony War

Across Europe, the summer of 1939 was long, lazy, and filled with abundant sunshine. The western world relaxed and went on holidays because the harsh, decade long winter of the Great Depression was finally over. Even above the rugged hills and dales of Yorkshire, the skies were clear and I felt for the first time in my life safe, secure, and content. So, I indulged and embraced my adolescence and spent my free time chasing girls, making plans, reading books, or hanging out with my friends in People’s Park. I even reconciled with my mother, and on occasion I went to her home for a meal or to spend the odd night amidst familiar arguments and discord. It was a glorious, carefree summer for me and millions of my generation who were ignorant of the drums of war beating against our shore.

For me and the rest of Britain, September 1st was a normal work day. I began my shift at Grosvenor’s at seven in the morning. Everything was so ordinary that morning; orders were taken, jokes were told, and evening plans made. None of us knew or could have guessed that hours earlier our destiny as individuals and as a nation had been altered. Our fates had been placed into the cruel hands of war because at 4:45 a.m. the German Army had launched a ferocious infantry and armoured assault against Poland while their air force mercilessly bombed Warsaw until its skyline was in flames.

It took hours for news of the invasion to reach Halifax. In fact, it wasn’t until late afternoon that information about the German attack began to seep into town. At Grosvenor’s, we heard the news from the lips of harried housewives, who were more worried at the price of Danish bacon than the sound of Nazi Jackboots marching against a beleaguered country that Britain had sworn to protect.

After work, I met up with Roy, Doug, and Eric. We briefly talked about the German offensive but dismissed it as more smoke and shite. The blowhards in government would solve it as they had in the past, through endless talk and endless blather. It would end just like all the other military crises, from Abyssinia to the Austrian Anschluss, without Britain needing to get her hands dirty. Besides, that evening I was more interested in hearing about a dance coming up the following week in Bradford than about war in central Europe.

It was not until Sunday morning that I learned the true scope and ramifications of Germany’s invasion of Poland. I was at my mother’s, huddled around the radio with Bill Moxon. For this announcement, even my mum was quiet as the Prime Minister explained to an anesthetized population that we were now at war.

Bill 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 movements. Barrage balloons obscured the horizon, while below tons of sandbags were positioned around government offices and important buildings of commerce. I was now sixteen and manager of Grosvenor’s Arcade store. I was responsible for maintaining a constant supply of goods and stock in the store. I balanced the day’s receipts, and nightly I delivered the day’s take directly into the owner’s hands.

But I saw that my good fortune was not to last. Those two years older than me were already signing up for the services. They were being trained for death and combat. I knew the war was not going to end before my eighteenth birthday and I dreaded the notion of becoming a government number pushed out to defend our homeland and end up maimed or dead.

As for my friends, Roy said that when he was old enough he’d volunteer for the Cold Stream Guards because he liked the uniform, while Eric, who was more realistic about the vagaries of life and death, said he’d remain in Halifax and continue on as a tool and die-maker because it was considered essential to the war effort. Doug Butterworth desperately wanted to join the fight, but a rheumatic heart caused by poor living conditions as a child sidelined him to the home front.

“What are you going to do,” Eric asked me slyly, “when it’s your time for call up?” I replied that I did not know, but I thought that I’d most likely volunteer for the RAF.

“Why?” asked Roy.

“Because I can’t swim, so there’s no bleeding way I’m going to join the Royal Navy.”

During those first few weeks and months of war, the nation went about its business like it had during the peace. For most, Hitler and the war seemed unreal, a lark to take our minds off our humdrum, safe lives. In Halifax, the population was almost in a party mood as this phony war had altered the city’s drab nomenclature. Our first experience with air raid warning sirens and the blackout were exciting rather than terrifying because Britain so far remained unscathed from serious aerial bombardment. Still, the British government dictated that all buildings of importance were to be guarded against the Teutonic danger droning above the clouds, and that included Grosvenor’s warehouse.

I, along with six other lads, was recruited to be an air raid warden for my employer’s warehouse. We were provided with gas masks, tin helmets, and buckets of sand to battle against the mighty Nazi Air Force. The evenings that I was on duty I spent in the shadows of the warehouse, gazing up at clear, cloudless night skies, waiting for an airborne armada to wreak havoc upon my city.

While the war against Hitler progressed through its phony stages, I continued to work at Grosvenor’s, play air raid fireman, and woo girls down at my local pub. For the time being, I was insulated from the war and its horrors, but still I knew that it would come for me on the day I reached my eighteenth birthday. The prospect of battle frightened me because from what I had seen on the newsreels, this war was serious business and many lads were ending up dead in foreign lands.

So, even though I was told by my betters – politicians, business leaders, and the royalty – that this war was just, I still questioned why I and my kind were being asked to sacrifice our lives for King and country, just like our fathers had done in the Great War twenty-five years previous. After all, I knew these economic and political leaders had forced millions of people into destitution in the 1930s. They had ruined a generation and destroyed my family, and now I was being asked to take up a rifle and defend a system that was bent to favour the few over the many? During those early days of the war, I was torn between the duties my society demanded of me and my own terror. I didn’t want my life wasted by a government comprised of men that never respected my social class or understood the unspeakable privations we endured to build a modern, industrialized Britain.

However, it was my Quaker employer who wished to strike a bargain with me that ultimately drove me to take the king’s shilling with utmost haste. My employer asked me to convert to his creed and have myself declared a conscientious objector.

“Why,” I asked suspiciously, “did he want me to do this?”

The owner explained with penny wise but pound foolishness that he thought his business would suffer because all of his capable managers were being sent to war, which left him nothing but knaves to run his grocery enterprise into the ground.

My employer said that for me to become a conscientious objector was God’s will. For several minutes, I contemplated his offer, but in the end I refused it because I was not going to stand before a military hearing and swear it was the teachings of Jesus that commanded me to refuse the King’s request. I realized that after years of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of nuns and priests, I preferred to take my chances in the amoral world at war.

In the spring of that year, the Low Countries were overrun and German troops poured into France and battled to the death Britain’s Expeditionary Force. Britain was alone, and the early excitement of the war began to wear off as we saw the battered men of Dunkirk return home. Life on our island took on a monotonous routine, where everything was rationed except our unease for the future. People began to wonder whether we were going to be invaded and forced to fight the Nazis in the streets, like Poland, Belgium, Holland, and France.

In the autumn, I asked my mother if I could return home until I was called to war. I told her I was going to join the RAF, which she thought was a wise decision.

“It’s better than the Army,” she responded. “I remember how all those lads suffered in the last war because of all that bleeding gas; they coughed their ruddy guts out.” She then told me in a conspiratorial voice, “You know I had a brother die in that war they said would end all wars?”

“How did he die,” I asked, frightened by my own mortality, “from a gas attack?”

“No, the poor bugger got TB from working in the mines. Still, the bloody Army took him. I guess they thought he’d be of some use to them before he clocked it. He didn’t even get to France but ended up dying in Scarborough, in a Sanatorium.”

When December 1940 came, it was very cold and miserable. But three days before Christmas, I made my way by bus to the Recruitment Office HQ in Huddersfield. Inside, I showed the duty sergeant my resident ID and proclaimed loudly that I was volunteering for the RAF.

“Steady on,” he said, “we’ve got to see if you’re first fit for service.”

I was ushered into another room, where I was given a brief questionnaire about my education, my occupation, my residence, and my religion. I wrote: ‘Left school at 14, Grocer’s Assistant Manager, Roman Catholic.’ After a doctor looked me over and determined that I was five-feet-four inches, 130 pounds, and reasonably fit, the RAF gladly took me as a volunteer. In truth, they didn’t have much choice because our country, at the time, was in desperate straits because our island was being pummeled by the Blitz whilst our merchant navy was being decimated in the Battle of the North Atlantic. In those days, there was a legitimate fear that Britain could be starved into submission because of Hitler’s menacing U-boat war against our supply ships. Moreover, across the channel the lights of a free Europe went dim as the Nazi’s enslaved most of Europe and what remained was in the authoritarian control of Stalinist Russia. During that time of crisis, they would have taken anyone to defend our nation because we were the only ones left standing against the Nazis.

That year, I spent my Christmas at Doug Butterworth’s home because I couldn’t stomach my mother’s drunken antics over the holidays. I reasoned this might very well be my last Christmas, and I may as well enjoy it with a real family. Over the holidays, I saw Mary and I brought her a present of fresh meat from Grosvenor’s, which she was overjoyed at receiving, as she had recently wed a lad from Bradford who was in the Army. “He’s coming home on leave, so a nice joint of meat will go down well with him.”

The New Year passed without excitement, and after the holidays my employer begged me to reconsider my moral opinion on the war. “Stay with us and be a conscientious objector,” he argued. Why should I not be spared? Why should I not be given God’s grace of both a long life and a white smock to serve the overfed of Halifax? I politely declined. I only asked that he keep my job open for me when all this war nonsense ended.

When my birthday arrived, it was a quiet affair because Roy had already left to join the Cold Stream Guards and Doug Butterworth’s rheumatic heart was giving him trouble, so he had taken to his bed. Nor did I fancy spending my birthday alone with Eric and one of his birds, so I declined his offer and said we’d meet up at another time for a drink. “Sure, mate,” he replied, unaffected by my answer. “Tara, I guess we will see ya when we see ya.”

I decided instead to indulge myself with a visit to the public baths. They were located at the bottom of Boothtown Road. I arrived and paid an attendant 50p. It was a privilege to soak in a warm bath rather than a tin tub filled with tepid water in my mother’s scullery. A female attendant led me along a narrow passageway until she found an unoccupied room. Inside the narrow, wood-lined space was a hanger for one’s clothes and a deep porcelain bathtub. The attendant placed a plug into the bath. She turned the taps on until the bath was filled with warm, inviting water. When finished, she closed the door behind her. I undressed and submerged myself in calm, cleansing hot water. I was empty of thoughts or cares until the water grew cold and it was time to dry myself, dress, and depart.

Afterwards, I spent some hours with my sister Mary, who had come down to Halifax to bid me farewell. We did not talk much. We sipped our ale and looked into each other’s faces to see if we could read our shared past upon them. She joked and bantered more than me because I was withdrawn and frightened about what might happen to me in the RAF. When it was time for my sister to leave, she got up, kissed me on the cheek and said:

“Come back safe, Harry. Just come back.”

The next day, I awoke with a jittery feeling, like it was a school morning. I dressed warmly and went to the kitchen. My mother was sitting alone, warming herself by the oven. Bill had already gone to work, and my half-brothers were at school. She made me a cup of tea and cut me a large slice of fresh bread. There was a generous lather of butter and jam on it.

“Go on, tuck in. Well, lad, this is it. Keep your head down, Harry. Don’t do anything daft because life is short, my boy; life is short.”

I hugged her with mixed emotions. I mumbled farewell, picked up my cardboard suitcase that was fastened together with coarse string, and made my way to the train station.

The platform was deserted while I waited for my train to take me to Padgate for induction. It was cold, damp, and grey; sweet smoke from the McIntosh toffee plant fell like drizzle across the station. I reached into my overcoat and found a near-empty packet of cigarettes.

I placed one in my mouth and furiously struck a match and quickly inhaled the harsh tobacco. In the distance, I heard the whistle of the train and smelled the coal burning off its engine. I tasted it in my mouth, around my teeth, and on my tongue and knew that the soot came from the labour of my father, my grandfather, and all my ancestors who had worked beneath the ground.

As the train drew its way into the belly of the station, another passenger approached the platform. He was a man in his fifties, long past the time for war, and he was whistling the tune, Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…

PART TWO

WAR & PEACE

Chapter Nine

Square-bashing at Padgate

I journeyed from Halifax to Padgate in a third class rail carriage that was occupied by bleary-eyed boys who, like me, were travelling towards the war. On the way, some smoked cigarettes and were taciturn, while others made light of what was to come. As for me, I pretended to read a book of poems but mainly stared out onto winter’s cold landscape that clattered past my window. During the trip, the train made numerous stops at sleepy villages and towns and collected more young men who were about to be square-bashed into soldiers for King and country.

When the train reached our terminus, I grabbed my kit and rushed out of the locomotive. I walked up a road that led to RAF Padgate with a group of fellow volunteers. As I strolled along towards the front gates of the base, a surprising sensation began to well up inside me. It was elation at the prospect of something new and exciting happening in my life. I realized that my whole existence was about to change, once I crossed over that line which separated civilians from those in the RAF.

At the guard house, I presented my papers and was told to make my way to a brick building, “where they’ll sort you out, like wheat from bloody chaff.”

I followed a group of lads who looked as bewildered as me while lorries sped past us and in the distance I heard the ferocious bark of sergeant majors on parade. I felt nervous, uncertain, and utterly alone when I got to the building where we were met by an NCO who bellowed like a wolf hound, “Have your papers ready, stand in a single file, and no bloody talking.”

When it was my turn, the NCO grabbed my paperwork, scanned it, and roared, “In ya go, Smith.” I stumbled to the inside of the building and was led to a large windowless room filled with banks of desks. Corporals and lowly LACs typed, filed, and wrote on long sheets of paper. My papers were assessed, and a clerk looked up and told me, “When you volunteered, you indicated that you wanted to be a wireless operator. Is that what you still want to do?”

I thought for a moment and agreed it was my preferred choice. It seemed like a safe enough assignment and a rather exciting position. The terminology ‘Wireless Op’ filled me with the prospect of learning a new and, I presumed, innovative technology. Considering my only other encounter with a radio was the one in my mother’s parlour, which ran on unreliable, cumbersome wet batteries, I believed I was to be led through an electronic wonderland. The clerk looked down at my enlistment papers and with a thick fountain pen put his initials on them.

From there, I was dispatched to another section of the building where a medical doctor ordered me to strip, bend over, and cough. After I was prodded, poked, and pulled, I was measured and weighed like livestock being lined up for the knackers’ hammer. My pulse and blood pressure were taken, and then the physician motioned for me to get dressed.

As I buttoned my shirt, I noticed a clock face staring down from a bare wall and smirked because it indicated that I had been deemed fit for combat in less than five minutes. Pushed out of the medical exam room, I tumbled down another hallway that was marked with arrows, which led me towards an RAF barber who made quick work of my hair. From there, I met a sergeant who shouted at me to be on the double and get kitted out in a room further down the hallway.

A short, bespectacled boy behind a cage screen door read my measurements off my recruitment papers. He was like a professional clothing salesman. The clerk went from piles of shirts to heaps of trousers, coats, and boots, and then neatly presented them to me. I signed that I had accepted: a pair of trousers, two shirts, a belt, an overcoat, a pair of boots, a hairbrush, boot brush, cap, and a kit bag. I agreed: it was my responsibility to keep, in good order, the clothing and accoutrements given to me by the King.

Loss or malicious damage to this uniform was a breach of regulations, and the punishment was forfeiture of one’s pay. I was also given my service number, which I was to memorize. Upon request, it was to be repeated immediately: “Smith, AC 1777…” From now on, the numbers tumbled out of me, as if they had been given to me at the baptismal font. I was presented with my pay book. It recorded the weekly stipend awarded to me for service to the war. I stammered a very civilian, “Ta,” and left the building.

Outside, I swung round to all degrees of the compass and wondered what I was supposed to do next? It seemed I was not alone in my indecision because ten chaps were performing similar irresolute movements nearby. It didn’t last long because a sergeant found us and howled, “You lot better follow me, and on the double before I put my boot up each one of your arses.”

We were led to a pile of dry straw heaped up in a covered shed and each given a cloth paliass. “Now go on,” said the sergeant, “make your bleeding bed.” I grabbed the coarse straw and began to stuff my mattress and thought, I’ve slept on worse. “At least this straw isn’t ripe with vermin,” I said to a bloke beside me who looked like he was not used to rough living.

Afterwards, the sergeant took us to our sleeping quarters, which was a Nissen hut that housed about twenty men. Inside, I asked the sergeant what bed was mine.

“Sunshine, for you, it’s anyone you can find,” bellowed the sergeant.

I hastily found a cot and threw my straw mattress down onto its thin wire springs and sat down, which caused the bed to creak and sink almost to the floor. Unfortunately, the other recruits followed my example, and when the sergeant discovered us sitting on our cots still dressed as civilians, he lashed out at us in disgust. “Do you think those clothes are your Sunday best,” he asked while marching along the hut and pointing to our new kits? “You are the biggest bunch of gob shites I’ve met this week. Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, you are in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force. You wear that bloody uniform until Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini are on the bloody gibbet. If you die before them because of your own bleeding stupidity, we will put you in the ground wearing your blue uniform. So get bloody dressed, you are air men now.”

After his outburst, the sergeant smartly marched out of the hut and slammed the door behind him.

The lad who stood at the cot beside me started to chuckle and said, “I think that bloke woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

“Mate, I think,” I responded, “it’s every bloody morning with him.”

“Well, I’ll keep my bloody distance from him. Name’s Robbie, I’m from Wigan. I used to peddle fish, but now, l’m the one in the kettle.”

“We are all in a heap of shite,” I said and introduced myself to him while I got dressed in my new uniform.

Robbie looked at me through thick spectacles and said, “So that is what an ACH 2 looks like – in full bloody kit…now that should scare the bleeding Germans into early surrender.”

I laughed and said, “Not bloody likely. Have a look around; all of us are Aircraft Hands, but not one of us looks like we know our arse from our elbow.”

The woollen uniform itched and was tight and smelled of moth balls. The boots cut roughly into my feet. They were more suitable to a Chinese woman with bound appendages. I placed the cap on my head while the others in the room played soldier with each other. They bantered to one another and greeted each other with sloppy salutes until the sergeant reappeared and gave us a bollocking for being tardy and not properly dressed. Our belt buckles were askew, our caps not at the proper tilt and angle, and we were utterly and as hopeless as “tits on a bull.” We were told to stand at attention, at the front of our beds.

The sergeant strode across the room like an ominous battle cruiser and stopped in front of Robbie and me. “You two,” he smirked, “look like you know the end of a shovel, so you both can be mother and fetch some coal for the stoves. We wouldn’t want you lot to catch cold on your first night away from your mothers’ tits.”

As we walked to the coal shed located at the far end of the camp, Robbie confided in me, “I’ll be buggered if the RAF is going to get me killed. I’m getting out of this war in one piece.”

“How you going to do that,” I asked sceptically?

“Rule number one: volunteer for nowt. Rule number two: keep stum. And rule number three: don’t give the buggers a chance to remember you.”

“Mate,” I said, “I don’t think we’ve been that successful if on our first day we’ve been already volunteered to haul coal.”

Robbie re-joined, “Crickey, this is nothing as long as we stay to the back of the room from now on.” Oi,” he asked, “did you volunteer, or did they nick you for service?”

“I volunteered,” I said, not sure how he would take it.

“That’s bloody brilliant,” he said energetically. “I did the same thing because you can never tell where they’re going to put you if they have to come looking for ya. If I had waited until they called me up,” he put a finger to his throat as if it were a knife, “I’d have been either drowned in the North Atlantic or mucking about in Libya, knee high in sand. This is the only time, Smith, that volunteering might save our lives because I want to get out of this war with all my fingers and toes and get home to Wigan, and then I am going to shag every bird in town.”

We returned to the hut with our ration of coal and received cheers from the other recruits. The sergeant returned at five o’clock and marched us to the mess hut, where we were fed a watery stew that consisted of boiled meat parts and spuds. Robbie wolfed it down and said, “It’s a horrible business when the RAF can’t even do a proper fry up.”

To me, having had both worse and less, I consumed it without complaint because I knew food was a blessing for those who had lived through a famine. As I ate, I observed my dinner companions, who were boisterous and carefree as if they were on a school holiday. They joked, they laughed, and they told stories about their life in the civilian world.

I felt at ease in their company because my past was now a memory. Besides, I thought there was no one at Padgate that knew of my family and their hardships during the 1930s. Although, judging from the thin, ragged-looking men who sat at my table, they all looked like they had tales to tell about their own scrapes during the Great Depression.

After completing our indigestible meal, a sergeant herded us back to our sleeping quarters, whereupon he hammered the fear of God into us for what was about to happen to our lives.

“Get your heads down, on the double,” he ordered, “’because life as you know it is over for the whole lot of you. Come tomorrow – and for every day after that – from sun bloody up until sun bloody down your bloody miserable lives are in my fucking hands. So from this instance, there will be no more fucking about with your fingers shoved up your arses. It’s time we made men out of you useless bunch of lazy sods, and it is going to take more than a bit of spit and polish to turn you lot into something the RAF can be proud of. So tomorrow, my sunshine’s, we are going to test your skills to see if you can handle a radio or a shovel. After that, ladies, we squad bash all fucking day. So, lights out and pull off your socks – and keep yer hands off your cocks. It’s night, night for you gobshites,” he barked, and then he doused out the lights in our tin shed and marched into the darkness.

I easily closed my eyes, and as I fell asleep I tried to remember what it was like to be a civilian with liberty of movement. I tumbled into a dreamless sleep while all around me lads from my unit farted, snored, or restlessly tossed on their uncomfortable straw mattresses.

The next morning, we awoke to our sergeant’s explosive shouts as he kicked the side of our beds and exhorted us to get up. Bed covers were torn from us, and our skinny legs and arms emerged out of our warm cocoons un-co-ordinately. I dressed quickly, and along with Robbie I made my way to the outdoor privies.

I swung open the door and saw a man shitting who looked up at me and said congenially, “In this bog, there’s always room for another,” and then he pointed me over to a spare hole.

“Ta,” I said and loosened my trousers and took my place on the squat. While I emptied my bowels, I lit up a Woodbine, which slightly camouflaged the stench of a thousand airmen’s turds, piss, and vomit.

Afterwards, I met Robbie at the washing up hut, which was in an old brick building. Grey lights cast shadows against row after row of metal wash basins that had long copper taps hanging from them. The water was cold and fell out sharply. The soap was hard on my face as I tried to lather up and shave with an RAF-issued razor that made my face bleed. Robbie who stood beside and me and shaved mocked his newfound indentured servitude to the RAF.

“They think this is hard? They say this is difficult? This is a walk in the bleeding park compared to living in Wigan when your dad is out of a job and the dole has run out. I had four younger brothers and we all kipped in the same bed like snug fucking fish in a tin. Now those were blighted days, nowt for breakfast, nowt tea and it is a bloody good thing that I was good at nicking stuff from the local shop or else I’d be dead from bloody hunger. This war is a right bloody mess and you know what that bloke Churchill is going to balls it all up anyways. Fight them on the beaches, my arse. So I am going to do as little as possible and hope the bastards forget about me.”

Inside the mess hut, I grabbed my breakfast of fake eggs, a rasher of greasy bacon, and toast. I washed it down with watery tea that my mum would have referred to as “witch’s piss.” We ended our meal, and Robbie and I went outside to walk towards the parade square. I tried to finish my Woodbine that I had started in the bog, but the sergeant marched up towards us. Quickly, I dropped the cigarette and hid it underneath the sole of my boot.

The sergeant screamed, “You lazy good for nothing layabouts. Follow me to the testing section.”

We marched haphazardly into another building where a different NCO upbraided us as to our slackness and shuffling appearance. There were fifteen of us, and we were ordered to sit on a wooden bench that straddled a long table. The NCO placed in front of each man a series of blocks, cubes, wooden circles, and pieces from a jig-saw puzzle. We were ordered to arrange, attach, and connect these asymmetrical designs within three minutes. I found the exercise perplexing and somewhat complicated. It was as if I had been asked to reassemble a dismembered human skeleton back into its proper form in one hundred and eighty seconds.

“Time’s up,” said the NCO.

He walked down, inspecting and marking our ability to make spatial judgments. I looked at Robbie and asked him how he did.

“Piece of cake; I just copied you.”

The sergeant frantically marched us out and directed us down the hallway to another similar-looking room. In this room, there were rows of headsets on the tables. Another NCO explained this test would determine if we could proceed to wireless school or if we had to find another calling in the RAF. The NCO made us listen to Morse code over a loud speaker. It was a cacophony of noises, scratches, beeps, and blips to me. “That, lads,” he explained after a long impulse emanated from a speaker on the table, “is a dash. The short blip is a dot. Simple, isn’t it? One long sound, one short sound, and we are making music.”

“In a moment, you are going to place your headset on and I am going to send out some Morse code. I just need you to count the dashes and dots. It’s easy peasy, like counting sheep in a pen,” said the NCO self-assuredly.

My confidence deflated because I was never good at exams and I feared tests. If I failed this assignment, I dreaded that I’d be considered an imbecile and made the butt of everyone’s jokes. At that moment, I would have preferred to have walked out of the room and said “this was all a mistake; I really wanted to be a bomb loader.”

Robbie, however, who noticed my unease, said, “It all sounds Japanese to me.”

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 and then with an explosion of electric notes, the test began. The sounds rained inside my skull at an almost indecipherable speed, and for a while everything went white inside my mind. Then all of a sudden each impulse sounded distinct and unique and I was able to visualize them as they floated inside my mind and distinguish which one was a dash and which one was a dot.

When the quiz was terminated, we were told to wait outside while the NCO marked our tests. After ten minutes of shuffling and nervous jokes, the NCO came out. In alphabetical order, he called out the names of those that had passed. I was the last one to be called, but I had passed. Robbie also advanced. “See, I told you; it is all Japanese,” he retorted.

For the rest of the day, a sergeant marched us up and down the quod and used threats and verbal abuse to teach us the proper way to about face, right turn, and march on the double. By tea time every man was shagged out and ate his meal in silence. My legs and feet ached but I reasoned if this was all the war had to show me, it wasn’t going to be too much of an ordeal.

Even Robbie agreed with me and before lights out remarked. “I’ve had harder ways of earning a pound. We get food, beds, and clothes. Outside of a gaol, this is the next best thing for staying safe,” he mumbled in a sleepy voice.

It certainly was better than civilian life for me. At least in the RAF, I was hidden by a number. My past was blurred and unseen, like everyone else in the Nissen hut; I was anonymous. My old life was obscured and unimportant to anyone but me. Here, my present existence was identical to everyone else’s and no one judged me as poor or rich. Happily, I was just a small part of the machinery in the giant engine of war.

Our third morning at Padgate was a mirror image to the second morning. We woke from warm beds and placed our feet onto cold floors. We pulled on our uniforms and rushed to the latrine to shit and shave. We ate the same breakfast and fell out for inspection at the exact same time. The sergeant taught us how to salute and what to salute.

“If it moves, salute it.”

Outside, it was barely above freezing, but we ran until sweat dripped down the cracks of our asses. We about faced, stood to shuffled and then formed neat identical lines. Each day the sky above us remained a constant wintery grey that was spotted with spitfires and Blenheim bombers practicing flight manoeuvres. Each day was the same as the last: we woke, we dressed we ate and we squared bashed until tea time.

In the evenings we were afforded some leisure and many of my hut mates used it to indulge in their passion for card games or as an opportunity to boast about how many women they had fucked in civilian life. I, however, kept to myself and preferred to read which made some of them call me “professor.”

The fourth morning, afternoon, and evening fell like the third and second morning, afternoon, and evening. Our lives were as routine and as anticipated as the moving of a loom at a mill in Halifax or Bradford. We followed a predictable pattern, as if our marching, saluting, and shitting in meticulous order would protect this island from Teutonic efficiency. By the tenth day, we were presented with wooden guns. We were taught to march into battle with timber as a weapon. Later on, we were given Lee Enfield rifles that were relics from the First Great War and bereft of ammunition. The RAF believed it made our square-bashing more realistic. Our ultimate purpose, after all, was to attack, defend, or run away with dignity. By the second week, I was all for running away with dignity. There was a dull tedium, like a headache that never left you, to all this walking up and down a parade square with five men abreast, ten men deep.

I pointed out to Robbie that, “I joined the RAF because my feet are flipping flat, and that is all I bleeding do. Up and bloody down, across and bloody back; I could have walked to fucking Manchester and back on this parade square,” I moaned.

Thinking that this war would have the same horrors as the First Great War, our sergeants trained us to work whilst wearing gas masks. My squad was taken to a windowless cement building and told to go inside and place our breathing apparatuses on over our faces. A smoke flare was discharged into the confined space and then the door was sealed. As the smoke grew thicker, I found the sensation of inhaling and exhaling through a gas mask became very difficult. My eyes began to sting from the flare and I began to feel claustrophobic as if I was drowning without being in water.

I and several others began fiercely banging on the door, demanding to be let out. When the sergeant opened the door, we stumbled out of the building like Saturday night revellers leaving their local, weak-kneed and giddy. I pulled off my mask and sucked in fresh, cold March air that felt brittle in my lungs and noticed that Robbie was the last man out of the building. He sauntered out and seemed unaffected by the exercise which I deduced was because of his nocturnal bed-sharing with four brothers. That exercise taught me that I did not want to die in fire or by gas, but in my bed, very old and very content.

I felt the ennui of the drills and drab skies, cold bunks, and strange young men around me. But it was also comforting to me because I felt responsible to no one but myself at Padgate. I marched, I drilled, I ate, and I shat and no one was able to find fault with me because I was doing my duty to my country.

But after having fought through my childhood, for food, for clothing, and for shelter, I found this present game of toy soldiers was, for me, pure escapism. Looking at the others on the square, it was probably no different for them because there were worse things we could be doing. I could be serving pork pies to Halifax’s middle class. Robbie could be flogging fish in Wigan. Or each one of us could have been unemployed praying that the dole was enough to keep us alive, until we found work. Politics, democracy, Poland, and Hitler never entered our heads, except as a cliché. We were here because we were here and it was different from where we came from; it offered us a vista on new prospects and new beginnings. We were eighteen and had not read the fine print of our contract with the King. He could use us until we were dead if he so wished.

Three weeks into square-bashing, and our squad was informed that we were moving to another base in a week. If we had any letters to write, we better do it now but we were warned that anything we wrote would be seen by the censors before being posted. Several days previous, I had gone into town and had my photo taken in my new uniform and had the photographer make a dozen copies for me. I sent one to my mother as a birthday gift and another to my sister. In my letter to her, I wrote without much conviction that if she met up with our dad, Tell him that I am in the RAF fighting the war for England.

On the morning of March 18th, we lined up on the parade ground and were presented with our travel warrants. We were going to RAF St. Athan in Wales for further wireless training. We marched to the rail station and on the way the men and I joked and made light of the fact that we had advanced through our first stage of life in the RAF.

However as our journey moved from morning to late afternoon, our optimism waned as the end of our journey seemed to have no end. In overcrowded corridors men dosed on their feet while in a tightly packed sweaty compartment, I listened to the weary sound of the train wheels clashing against the tracks. After a while, I pulled open a small square of the blackout curtain draped against the rail compartment’s window and looked out. It was dark and the villages, we clattered past seemed deathly empty and still of life.

Chapter Ten

St. Athan, Wales

Our long and unruly train slowed down to a trot and then stopped abruptly when we reached Cardiff. Momentarily, the train lights were doused and sergeants moved from carriage to carriage and clamoured for us to listen up. Once the railway doors opened, we were ordered off the train and told to form into our assigned units.

“Stand at the ready,” screamed an NCO, “and await your instructions. You are to leave this bloody railway station with some discipline; you’re not to fall out of here like waste from a washer woman’s bucket.”

“We are always awaiting instructions,” I said to Robbie, who grabbed his kit bag and looked back at me as he hopped from the locomotive and said, “It’s going to be a bloody cock up; I can just feel it in my bones.”

Outside, Robbie lit up a Woodbine, but in the distance a voice screamed, “Put that bloody cigarette out. There is a blackout in effect.”

Robbie groaned and stubbed the heater out with his thumb, and then the two of us mutely moved along to where the vehicles awaited us. It was a thirty-minute journey to our camp at St. Athan, and when we arrived everyone was tired and morose. Driving through the new camp gates, it was apparent this was a bigger and more industrial type of base. It was more like a small town because the camp sprawled out over many acres and was comprised of numerous annexes, warehouses, and workshops, along with an armada of Nissen huts for sleeping quarters.

We were ushered out of our lorries and ordered to march over to the first building on our left. We presented our travel documents and assignment orders. Being moved about like a snooker ball irritated Robbie, but it left me unimpressed. I had been banged around and made midnight dashes all through my youth. At least in the RAF, I knew I’d always find warm food and a bed waiting for me at the end of any journey.

Inside the building, an orderly greeted us and said, “You must be knackered. I’ll have someone show you to the mess hut and then to your billets. Tomorrow, lads, you are on oliday. Get familiar with St. Athan because it is probably bigger than most villages you were born and bred in,” said the friendly NCO.

The mess hut was four times the size of Padgate, but their kitchen served up the same dog’s breakfast as our previous camp. Still, it tasted good, as we had not eaten since leaving Lancashire. After our tea, I lit up a fag and felt sated and comfortable until I was told by an NCO who passed by our table that Portsmouth, London and Glasgow had been recently attacked by Luftwaffe forces which caused innumerable civilian casualties. “We’ve got to kill all those Nazi bastards before they kill all of our women and children,” he barked.

Fed, we marched gingerly to our billets, which were not much different from Padgate. One of our crew stoked the stove with generous portions of coal to lessen the damp, Welsh chill blowing into our hut from the nearby sea. Until today, the furthest I had ventured was to York and to Blackpool as a boy, and now I was in the southern coal-belt of Glamorgan as a reluctant warrior.

In the morning, I awoke to the strident voice of a sergeant who bitterly antagonized us to rise from our dark slumbers and make ourselves presentable.

“Some oliday,” I remarked to Robbie.

“Some war,” he answered back.

Breakfast was a busman’s feast of seemingly unlimited bacon and scrambled eggs. We poured tea freely into our RAF-issued mugs. We smoked liberally as we talked amongst our mess mates about our proud home towns and villages. I was the only one who found no urge to boast about Halifax, Bradford, or Sowerby Bridge.

“It’s all right,” I would say generically.

If prodded for more information by my RAF mates, I invented my home life. I made it sound as broad and humdrum as the rest of their pictures of home. My life to them had the football pitch, the pub, the dance hall, the cake shop, and the prettiest girls in town. I also told them I had a mum that made a Sunday roast that did herself proud. If someone asked about my father, I said he was a butcher and we had a normal and happy home because I wasn’t going to let anyone know that my life’s true narrative was one of want and privation.

Following our fry up, a veteran LAC came to our table and said, “You lot are new, aren’t you?”

Robbie responded and said, “We might be new to these parts, but we aren’t wet behind the ears.”

The LAC laughed and said, “You’ll get your bollocks bashed in if you think you can act like that around here, mate. Word to the wise, lads: I’ve been stuck at ST Athan for the last three months, so I’m a bit of an expert on this camp. So take some of my friendly advice because it won’t cost you a farthing, but if you ignore it, by tomorrow you’ll wish you’d paid me a pound because you’ll be in a world of shit. If you just keep this one thing under your hats, you’ll live to see another posting.”

“What is it, then?” I asked.

“Every officer, sergeant, or NCO at St Athan is a proper bastard. They will put you up on charges for any shoddy displays of discipline. Be alert,” the NCO told us, “and be prepared to work your backsides off. Don’t sod off, or it is the glass house for you because there is a war on. From now on, your job is to get trained as quick as you can ’cause Jerry is giving us a good thrashing.”

“How bad is it?” I asked.

The LAC looked at me as if I’d asked about a football match where there are only seconds left and our team was down two goals. “Christ, its bad out there and it’s bloody miserable for our mates in the air who are taking a real beating.”

Like a sibyl portending evil days, the LAC told us that Bomber Command squadrons took off from airfields all across Britain and returned in battered formation, their flock thinned and damaged by fighter plane attacks or anti-aircraft barrages. The ratio between life and death in the air was thin and the casualty rates were amongst the highest for any British fighting force, during the war.

“So learn your courses,” the LAC warned us, “and follow the rules, and you will be done right by the RAF.”

Afterwards, the LAC took us on an extensive tour of the camp. He explained that St. Athan was the largest training base for signals, wireless operators, bomb aimers, navigators, and other journeymen in the business of delivering death to our foes.

Finally, the LAC showed us the building where we would spend the greater part of our days; it was where we would earn our keep by perfecting Morse code.

“Are we in school all day?” I asked.

The NCO snorted and said, “Not bloody likely.” He explained that the remainder of our time would be spent in square-bashing drills. He said that we would train until our names were cleansed from our memories and only our service numbers remained. That night when it came time for lights out, I had an uneasy sleep because I was fearful that I was going to bugger it all up and end up in a front line fighting air division.

The next day, we met our wireless training instructor. He was a cynical chain smoker with deep nicotine stains that ran up and down his left index finger. There was an overwhelming damp stench about him, as if he were dragged from a coal cellar every morning to provide us guidance. Our instructor informed us that he was the best at his job and that it was necessary that we learn our vocation as quickly as possible. “We must get you out of the classroom and into your true purpose, which is to fight and win this war.”

For us to become fully functional as Morse code wireless operators, he said it would take six months; however, he warned that for those who failed his course more lethal professions awaited them. It was a clear inducement for me to study and master this innovative technology. So, from my first days of lessons to my last I set to work learning, memorizing, and studying the intricacies of this new electronic language.

My knowledge of Morse code advanced day in and day out as our instructor took us through the monotonous world of keyboard work, signal identification, speed, and message retention. It was slow, repetitive, and painfully dull progress. Yet outside of my classroom, in the real world of the war there were thousands of messages being transcribed, sent, and coded each day. They detailed bombing missions, troop advancement, and endless Bomber Command casualties. They were coded lists of men lost over enemy territory or terse reports about crashed aircraft. They spoke of planes being too shot up to land safely and men dead upon impact.

In my dreams each night, I bashed against an imaginary keyboard and made long and excruciating dashes and dots. I sent out distress calls to release me from this infernal camp, this idiotic war, this pallid life. My sanity was only retained by a weekly piss up with Robbie and our other mate named Brian, who was originally from Salford. Every weekend, we headed off to the village pub located on the edge of our camp. There, we drank watery ale and smoked harsh cigarettes and caroused with other members from our unit.

During those early months of my war, I felt free of personal responsibility. I felt more connected to these strangers who shared a hut with me than I did with my own family. I felt more of an attachment and a greater sense of community to the rest of those blue-uniformed blokes than to anyone from my youth. I eagerly plunged into the river of uniformity because the RAF for me was an institution where I felt wanted and respected.

After my six months of wireless training was completed, I wrote my exams, passed the course, and was made LAC WOP, which was a land-air crew wireless operator. My marks were above average, but not to a degree that would have set me out as anyone special. I was awarded a signal badge for passing the exam. It meant I now had something to place upon the left sleeve of my uniform. Proudly, I sewed on my new designation and jauntily marched off to the nearest photographic shop. I got a handful of photos made to send to a group of shop girls I had romanced back in Halifax.

After graduation, I was granted leave, but the thought of returning home to Halifax left me cold because I dreaded going back to my mother’s house and being reminded of my former life.

Robbie called out to me as I stood on the back of the lorry which was to take me to the rail station, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I laughed and yelled back as my vehicle sped away, “There is a reason why they say in Yorkshire that there is Hell, Hull, and then there is bloody Halifax.”

It was winter when I’d left to be square-bashed by the RAF, and when I returned to Halifax it was autumn. The city looked as grim and forlorn as when I had departed it. On the day I came home, it was raining; miserable, sad Halifax rain. At the rail station, I longed to turn around and head straight back to my mates, the RAF, and my life at St. Athan.

I decided that before I went to kip at my mother’s house, I’d get some Dutch courage by having a beer at Halifax’s grandest hotel, the White Swan. Along the way, I glimpsed at newspaper headlines that were written on chalkboards and cried out about Luftwaffe air raids against Britain, the encirclement of Leningrad, and the fall of Kiev. The news left little doubt, in my mind, that we were losing the war.

In the gleaming bar room of the White Swan, I lingered and savoured my half pint of beer for as long as I could. Vainly, I hoped that a stray civilian would pitch in and buy a serving man a proper beer; however, on that day the hotel bar was sparsely populated with men of commerce who ignored my blue serge uniform as easily as they had once ignored me on Commercial Street when I plied my barrow and wore a worker’s cap and coat.

After the bar man eyed my half pint glass with growing disdain, I left the hotel and caught a bus to my mother’s house. When I arrived on her street, I was disappointed that it was deserted because I wanted the locals to see how my family had finally righted itself. I wanted my mum’s neighbours to take note that I was in RAF blue and that they could all get stuffed because I was now part of a war machine that was fighting for their safety.

There was no welcoming committee to greet me at my mum’s; only my mother and my youngest brother Billy, who was indifferent to my arrival. After a quick hello and “What ya got for your brother,” he was out the door to find things that were more amusing than me. I was not disappointed by his exit because he was twelve years my junior and the product of a liaison that I wished my mother had avoided because it spelled the end for my father.

When my mum saw me, she noted that I looked well, fed and fit. The RAF, according to her, had cleaned up my slouching attitude. My mother informed me as she put the tea on the boil that my sister Mary was doing as well as could be expected.

“It’s tough for the lass,” my mother said, “as her man’s in the Army and she’s got a wee one running her off her feet.”

In the early part of my training, Mary had sent me a brief note that said she had given birth to a boy. I sent congratulations, but I didn’t understand the enormity of her problems. It was daunting having a baby in war time, with few resources and a husband in the services. While I was square-bashed, I wrote Mary three times at most, and I received from her the same amount of post. Our letters were banal, stilted attempts at hiding our emotions and distorting the present with clichés and pleasantries.

My mum served me tea and a biscuit, and I pensively drank the strong brew and looked around the scullery. I thought everything appeared as worn and cheap as I remembered it, but now it was like looking in at a stranger’s house. It was as if my feelings of both affection and remorse for my family had shifted about in my heart, like an uneven load on a lorry.

I smugly thought that after six months of keeping in step with a parade sergeant I had escaped my childhood and its painful memories. As I looked coldly at my mother, I thought in a day I’ll be gone, and I won’t come back again until this bloody war is done.

My mum somehow sensed my emotions and said, “You’d do right to go and see your sister and your nephew because blood is always thicker than water.”

I laughed sarcastically and said, “That’s why, Mam, you’re always visiting your own sisters.”

“Shut it,” she said. “You know your sister is different from mine; that lass has been your rock in tough times, and she’s loyal to you as the day is long.”

I agreed but knew in my heart that no matter the bond Mary and I had, we both wanted to escape our shared history and the horrors we witnessed as children in the hardscrabble world of the Great Depression. As for my mother, who was defiant to either triumph or tragedy, I grudgingly and resentfully mustered up some love for her, but it was a conditioned and suspicious affection. I was loathe to forgive her for her transgressions, her failings, and her strength of character that led us through a time when the world went mad and millions drowned in economic despair.

My homecoming with my mother was expediently interrupted with the arrival of her man Bill.

“Let’s have a look at you. You did all right, lad. There’s no muck on you, Harry.”

Afterwards, my mother fished around in a kitchen drawer and presented me with a spare key.

“Door’s always open for thee at any time of night, as long as it is not past bloody midnight.” As I stood up to leave, my mum and Bill said in unison, “Tara.”

Outside, Bill Junior was playing with a toy lorry and making loud engine noises. I stepped over Billy as if he were the family cat and walked straight up the road and took the bus back into town.

I ended up in a pub popular with my crowd and was fortunate to meet up with my mate Roy Broadbent, who had been granted leave from the Guards. Roy and I spent the night comparing our training, our sergeants, our grub, and our new mates. Roy’s schooling in the vocation of infantry and cannon fodder was near complete. Broadbent said without much enthusiasm that he and his unit were to be deployed overseas to take up the fight against Germany.

When we left the pub, I walked part way home with Roy and implored him, “Be careful, and don’t stick your neck out for nothing and no one. We have to come home safe. We can’t let Eric have all the birds for himself.” We said goodbye and wished each other luck.

“Next time we see each other,” Roy said, “this ruddy war will be over and things will be back to normal.”

“I don’t think anything is ever going to be normal again, “I said. “This war has changed everything in Britain. Nobody is going to want to go back to their old life of fighting to keep a roof over their head after they have fought Hitler all the way back to Berlin.”

Roy left me, and I thought to myself while I walked back to my mother’s house, If I cheat death and keep my head down, will life cheat me? Will it just throw me back into the dung heap from which I came?

The following morning, I was up early to catch a bus to see my sister, who lived on the outer reaches of Bradford, in Low Moor. Her terraced house was situated on an angular steep street that looked out onto barren fields and pastures. It was a bleak and desolate place, but she was content because it was far enough away from our days of doss house living. I knocked on her door and called out, “It’s your brother. Open up, love, and get us some tea.”

When the door opened, I was shocked by my sister’s appearance. She looked gravely ill, and her hair was shorn. Still, she managed to give me a radiant grin and hugged me affectionately. Behind her I heard a baby cry, and she said, “You better get yourself in here before the little nipper wakes all of the flipping neighbours.”

She took my hand and led me to a crib and said, “I’d like to introduce you to the youngest and newest member of our traveling circus, Derek.”

“He looks like a fine, healthy lad,” I said. “The little bugger has a good start in life with a mum like you,” I added.

Mutely, she agreed, picked up her son, and held him tenderly. After a while, she put him down to sleep and made us tea. Over several hours, we made small talk as Mary seemed reluctant to discuss what was ailing her.

“I’m perfectly bloody fine,” she said defensively when I pushed her about her health. “Stop fussing. Nowt is wrong with me that a bit of sleep won’t fix. Besides,” she said, “who is going to listen to my complaints now that war is on? It’s all about you bloody men, but when hasn’t it been about you bloody men?” she said cryptically.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s nowt but thunder in my head,” she said. “But why is it that you men get all the bloody luck and glory? It’s a life of adventure with no dull days down at the mill for you, but for us women, we’re always cleaning up after the mess you make. We make sure everything is right and proper on the home front, but no one ever gives us a ‘thank you’ very much.”

At the time, I did not fully appreciate my sister’s frustration, but later I realized that she was trapped in a world she could never escape from because she was a mother who wasn’t going to let her child go without, as we had done

When I was leaving, she told me, “If you need something, just holler. I will help.”

“Ditto,” I replied, kissing her cheek.

Sadly, I left knowing that neither of us would call upon the other if we needed help. We both believed, wrongly, our problems were burdensome and added weight to the other’s responsibilities. So we parted, loving each other but no longer able to share ourselves with each other. For that stupidity, we were both rendered far more desolate and lonely.

I departed early the following morning to catch my train back to Wales. On the kitchen table, I left a scribbled note for my mum and apologized for the brevity of my visit, but I was now under another’s command.

I rode the train back to St. Athan. It was overflowing with the weary, dejected faces of soldiers, sailors, and airmen returning from leave. At the railway station near Cardiff, I grabbed a bus that took me directly to the base and was happy to be back safe in RAF anonymity.

When I went to sleep that night, I tried to forget about Halifax and the despondent emotions it created in me. Morning came quick and brutal like cold water, but it didn’t upset me because I felt relieved that I had survived my leave and wouldn’t have to face a trip home for a very long time. Besides, it was our last day of square-bashing because we were transferred to White Waltham, near Maidenhead, that afternoon.

Chapter Eleven

White Waltham

White Waltham was a welcome change from my previous postings because our new camp was situated in a wooded area about two miles from the airfield. At first it looked peaceful to me, but I learned quickly that the bucolic surroundings were seldom quiet because the aerodrome was a hub used to marshal aircraft and airplane parts from around the nation. The landing fields were operational around the clock, and there was an incessant drone from aircraft engines as aircraft taxied onto the runways to take off or approached overhead to land.

“Does this racket ever stop?” I asked a cook at breakfast after a Lancaster made its landing approach directly above our mess tent.

“Never,” he said, “except last year when we had a spot of bother. The winter was so wet; it turned the aerodrome into a bog. One of our officers tried to requisition a bunch of elephants and a mahout.”

“Come again?” I said, thinking he was pulling my leg.

“He wanted the animals to pack down the ground to make it safe for our planes to land, but the air ministry turned him down.” At this point, the cook started to laugh. “The RAF was afraid that if there was an air raid that the pachyderms would bolt and cause mayhem in the surrounding villages.”

The sergeant major who was in charge of our unit was a chap named Meade and he was a proper bastard who made us do full kit marches that lasted from sun up to sundown. Within a week, my feet were blistered and bloodied and my legs felt like they could take no more punishment. But strangely, the more Meade screamed the further I marched because I was more afraid of his wrath than my body breaking down.

So for days, we marched down country lanes, through farmer’s fields, and onto pasture land until our bodies and souls were numb. I surrendered to the rigors of the marching and accepted the pain and the monotony because I knew that this was my role in the RAF. Come what may, I thought, it is far better this than civilian life.

Then one day, midway through our march, Meade ordered us to halt and to listen up “Take a good look ’round, lads. Take a good, long look at those green fields. Paint a pretty picture in your heads of England’s green rolling land because pretty soon all you are going to see is miles of sand.”

Robbie looked at me and said, “I hope, he means Brighton, but I think our sergeant is talking about Egypt and I am no fan of that land of camels.”

I recoiled in dread at the sergeant major’s words. The notion of searing heat, no water, and being face-to-face with the enemy was a dismal prospect. It was not a destination that emboldened me with confidence.

Hectoring, Meade told us that until our departure, we were to expect, “Full pack marches because we’ve got to toughen you lot up, before you go and see Jerry and his Eyetie cousins, in the desert.”

That day, we hiked back to camp in a dejected mood, our imaginations boiled over with images of combat and death. Even Robbie was morose during tea, but my other mate Brian was philosophical about our proposed transfer and said, “I guess, we’ve got to earn our keep. So if they say it’s the desert for us, I say it could be a lot worse.”

Later on that evening, we were introduced to a new addition to our unit: a lad named Clementine, who was an eccentric. He was from London and from an upper middle class family. How he ended up with us was a bit of a mystery because he had wanted to fly spitfires; however, the RAF believed Clementine was too odd of a duck to be in charge of an expensive airplane, so he was relocated to wireless ops.

On the following morning, we were assigned another NCO because Meade was required to break in a newly arrived unit. Our new sergeant was named Greene, and he was built like a farmhand who on first appearance seemed to be as brutal and heartless as Meade; however, I learned quickly that he was a different sort of leader because as we marched with full kit along our regular route, the sergeant had us halt in front of a cake shop.

“Right, lads,” Greene barked, “time for a brew up. Get your kits ready. If you want to buy a bun or a biscuit, go inside the shop and get it from the lady.”

We then walked over to a meadow with our cakes and biscuits and brewed up some tea. Afterwards, we used our kit bags as pillows and smoked cigarettes. It seemed to be more of a picnic than a march, and some of my mates became a bit boisterous and the sergeant had to reprimand us.

“Steady on, lads,” called Greene. “Keep your voices down. Gather round,” our commander announced. “Let me give you the lesson for today’s sermon. I don’t much care for walking. I don’t much care for marching and I don’t much care for trouble. So if anyone tries to grass me out, and spoil, our afternoon holidays, I will crucify the bastard and have their balls thrown to the camp dogs to eat.” He paused to let us digest his words and then continued. “Secondly, the most important rule of marching is to always keep the effing load light.”

He opened his kit bag to show us that it was full of straw.

“My kit,” the sergeant noted, “is like a lot of our leaders: filled with bloody straw. If you want to carry the weight of England on your back, so be it. If you want to get through these days lugging the least amount of shite- then understand this; Straw is not only good for cows and horses; it’s good for us airmen because it’s as light as a fucking feather.”

I wasn’t too sure if he was serious or if this was some intricate manoeuvre to get us all into trouble. However, every day, our marches ended exactly at this juncture, in a comfortable meadow drinking tea and eating biscuits. After a while, Robbie and Brian deduced that the sergeant had a relation in the shop.

“He’s just making a quick bob or two because we are a lazy bunch of buggers.”

Greene was the complete opposite of Meade, and he seemed to take the war and his rank in stride. “Enjoy your fags,” he once told us, “because who knows where you’ll be next year?”

He kept us busy and fit, but he wasn’t prepared to make our lives miserable while we were under his command. He even allowed us, when we were not on parade, to visit Maidenhead, which was situated on the banks of the river Thames and located several miles from camp. The first time I saw it, I was with Robbie and Brian and thought it was the most beautiful town I’d ever seen in my life.

Its charm was so delicate it could have been constructed out of blown glass. This town was so unlike the villages and cities, I knew in the North which had been constructed with brute force for utilitarian needs. Maidenhead whispered to you and beguiled you with its allure. The town was gentle to its inhabitants and its population showed their affection back to the village with appreciative civic pride.

However, I did wonder how these inhabitants would fare if they were forced to change places with the people of Sowerby Bridge. I was equally curious as to how Sowerby Bridge would cope in the tender breezes of Maidenhead. I thought the Northern folk would muck it up like a farmer walking into a fine house with shit on his Wellies. As for the southern residents, if forced to migrate north they would need to be hospitalized for apoplectic shock after breathing in the foul industrial air and seeing damp grime peeling off municipal buildings, housing, and ordinary residents.

On one of my trips to Maidenhead, I met a young woman who accepted my offer to go on a date with me. So the following weekend, we went punting down the River Thames as if I were a privileged boy from the South. Elocution classes may have taught me to soften my vowels. However, they did not instruct me on how to steer and chart a course in a flat-bottom boat with a pole employed as a propellant. After much frustration and curses, I managed to tip both of us into the river, where we thrashed about like two polecats being drowned in a bucket of water.

While I fought to keep my dignity and myself afloat, I heard laughter coming from the river bank. At the water’s edge, I saw an airman who I didn’t know but recognized from White Waltham.

“Oi,” I called out, “quit laughing and lend us a hand.”

“Sure,” he said and waded into the water to pull out my enraged date, who stormed off without even a goodbye.

As I shook myself dry, the airman lit up a cigarette and said, “Mate, you made my day. It was better than going to the pictures and watching the Marx brothers.”

“It’s not bloody funny,” I said. “I had to rent that punt, and it cost quite a bit of money. Look at my uniform; it’s buggered. I’ll be up on charges.”

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll help get you cleaned up and back to camp without a hitch.”

On our way back, he introduced himself. “Jack Williams. My mates call me Taffy, seeing that I’m from Wales.”

Taffy was the most open and honest person I had met thus far in my life and on our walked he told me about Wales and his life before the war, near the docklands of Cardiff. Taffy spoke of his family, who for generations had been dock workers. As his story continued, his voice sang in the dulcet manner of his countrymen. Even sad and harsh tales rolled off Jack’s tongue in a cadence that was beautiful and haunting. Even though Taffy, like me, came from a callous environment, he had a wonderful appreciation for poetry. By the time we reached camp, I was dried off and felt fortunate because I’d found a loyal and true friend.

Over the next few days, I did not encounter Taffy, as our unit was scheduled for assault training. Sergeant Greene had us forge into a river with a rope strung overhead. We were to cross this limpid but deep stream as if we were in the wilds of Borneo. The rope was to be used to propel ourselves to the other side. Our feet were wrapped around the suspended cable like the tails of marmosets gliding down jungle vines. I warned Robbie and Brian to tie their money into their handkerchiefs; otherwise, it would fall into the water. Brian, however, balked at my suggestion and said, “How do you know that were you Tarzan of Halifax?”

“Take my word for it because that bloke Taffy who I met in Maidenhead had to cross the river last week.”

“You’re daft, Smith,” responded Brian. “I’ll get across that river without losing my brass. You know the problem with you Yorkshire lads is that when things get tough, you’re always losing your dosh while uz men from Salford can hold onto both our beer and our brass.”

When it was Brian’s turn to shimmy across the river, he grabbed and swung onto the rope like an acrobat, but when he was halfway across I saw his coins drop from his trouser pockets like it were an offering to the ancient gods of the riverbed. Brian screamed out, “Bugger!” and then let go of the rope and plunged into the frigid water.

“What’s that joker doing?” asked Greene.

Robbie said to the sergeant, “He’s our resident tight arse, and he won’t be parted from his money for love or gravity.”

But the sergeant didn’t see the humour in it and screamed at Brian to get out of the drink before he pulled him out by his ears.

After we had all crossed the river, Greene congratulated us on another mindless and pointless task accomplished for the air ministry. “If you are in the RAF and crossing streams, it means you got no bloody plane and it’s time to put your hands in the air because the game is up.”

In the following days, our training progressed and we learned to bayonet straw men. We acted as if they had angered us by being enemy straw men out to rape our country women. Enthusiastically, I ran up and energetically tore open the bowels of the scarecrow tied to the wooden plank. “Good work,” said Greene. Yet when it was Clementine’s turn, he showed too much homicidal determination for Greene’s taste.

“Steady, on lad. You want to kill Jerry, not cleave him in two.”

Later on, our unit was provided with loaded Lee Enfield rifles to fire at targets many meters away. For me, it had a similar feeling to being at a Blackpool amusement booth where I shot at milk bottles and left with no stuffed animal. On this target range, however, I did receive a stern lecture from Greene.

“Bloody brilliant, Smith, I am really going to have to thank you when my kids greet me with Guten Tag, Papa, because you were left defending the beaches.”

However, I improved my standing with the sergeant when I demonstrated my acumen for hand grenade tossing when we were at the munitions range. With quick resolve, I pulled the pin and chucked the weapon into a hole barricaded with sand bags several yards in front of me, where it safely exploded.

“Bloody marvellous, Smith, you have just killed a German paratrooper,” Greene said to me proudly.

Robbie looked at me and said, “More likely the milkman.”

The sergeant then called out for another lad to follow my example, but he was not as deft as me because although his hand grenade hit the target, it failed to go boom. It was in the parapet, but there was no bang; only an embarrassed quiet that made someone in our group comment, “It’s like a wet fart no noise but lots of mess.” The banter seemed to upset the lad because he went to retrieve his hand grenade and jumped from out of our secure trench and walked over to the repository for exploding grenades.

The sergeant screamed, “Fuck!” and sprang up and dragged him back to our trench before the device exploded.

At White Waltham, we were also charged with learning the witless task of guard duty. I was not the most effective defender of Britain when posted as a sentry. We were ordered to stand motionless with a rifle slung over our shoulders. However, the rifle’s purpose was rather questionable, as it was unloaded and everyone was aware of this fact, including the local dogs that frequented our rubbish tip.

During my shifts, I stood as stiff as a mummy and surveyed the open road ahead of me for the approach of suspicious traffic. I stared so intently that I almost developed the tantric stupor of a charmed snake. When a lorry came, I’d stop it and demand to see the driver’s papers, which I inspected with theatrics diligence. But honestly, I could not and did not care to differentiate between what might be actual papers and what might be forged documents. As far as I was concerned, if someone was mad enough to want to be let into this base rather than let out, it was their problem.

During one of my ill-equipped shifts as an RAF sentinel, a slightly intoxicated airman approached and requested entrance. With a nod, I let him pass. In inebriated friendliness, he attempted to strike up a conversation but I told him to move on.

“You better be in your bunk quick, as its Sunday tomorrow and Church parade comes early.”

“I don’t have to do that.”

“And why not,” I queried?

“Because,” he mumbled, “I’m Irish and Catholics and Jews get to stand down for English Jesus on the Sabbath.”

He was right; Jews and Catholics were excused from attending Sunday church services and could avail themselves of their papist or Hebrew past times. It was a revelation, and until that moment I had concealed my Catholicism. In my mind, my faith was another indication of my family’s oddness and lack of conformity with proper and well fed British middle class ways. But from that occasion until the end of the war, I wore my allegiance to Rome brash and bold and reaped the rewards of Heaven on Earth: to wake late on Sunday and read at my leisure.

My absence from Church parade was noted by Sergeant Meade, who seemed to take it as a personal affront because I was now on his radar for any infraction of camp regulations. It did not take long for me to run afoul of Meade. Within a fortnight of my proclamation of the faith, I was in a pub in Maidenhead with Robbie where we entertained a couple of local girls. While we wooed these young women we drank too much and lost track of the time which meant that we were out well past our curfew. So, when we arrived back at base, we decided it was best to avoid the main gate and instead entered the camp from an open field. From there, we stumbled up over a drainage ditch and came onto a compound, near our sleeping quarters. Suddenly, Robbie turned to me and whispered, “Fe Fi Fo Fom, I hear a Sergeant Major on the run.”

“Let’s split up,” I said hurriedly. “You go left, and I’ll go right.”

Robbie agreed and said as he trotted away, “I’ll be in Scotland before yee.”

I made a dash for it, but as I turned a corner towards two long rows of Nissen huts I collided right into Meade, who barked, “Name, rank, and serial number?”

I stumbled and hesitated, wondering if I could provide another name when the sergeant interjected, “Smith, I know who you are, and I’ve got your number. Orderly office, first thing tomorrow morning, report there,” he commanded. “Now be off with you. You are in a load of trouble.”

When I got back to my hut, Robbie said to me, “How’d it go?”

When I told him, he said, “That’s rotten luck. You won’t tell them about me, though, will you?” he pleaded. “You really should have followed me because I’ve dodged coppers before.”

The next morning, I made sure that my buttons and boots were shined like a polished diamond and presented myself to the orderly’s office. Beside me were two other airmen on similar charges. An NCO brought us to attention. He told us to quickstep into the adjutant’s office. I was first in formation in the punishment file. Once inside, the adjutant officer received our salutes and stood up from his desk. The officer cleared his throat and read out the charge against me. It was as if I had committed the capital crime of murder instead of breaking curfew.

“LAC Smith, do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No, sir,” I responded smartly.

The NCO came alongside me and demanded that I turn towards him. I snapped around and faced him directly. The NCO slapped my RAF cap off my head with as much force as my mum had used to strike me when I broke her curfew. The NCO demanded that I retrieve my blackballed cap from the ignominious floor. The officer moved from behind his desk and he was about to pronounce sentence upon me, as if he wore the black cap of justice served. I thought he was about to intone, “You shall be taken here to a place of execution, where you shall be hung by the neck until you are dead.”

Thankfully, the sentence was more lenient, but the declamation was as ominous as a capital sentence.

“Two weeks confinement to the camp.”

After having learned to march with straw in our kit, scale inconsequential streams, bayonet bound dummies, shoot World War One rifles, and toss grenades, the RAF rounded out our squad’s military preparedness with lorry driving instructions. At a morning assembly, we stood to attention for an achingly long time. A slow-moving Leyland lorry from the First War pulled up beside us. It stopped in a jerky fashion, with steam brewing out of its bonnet. An NCO hopped out of the antediluvian cab and approached us.

In a weary voice, he announced, “You’ve got seventy-two hours to learn how to drive this lorry.”

Mastering this ancient combustible beast was akin to handling a team of horses if one had grown up in a modern metropolis. I sat in the lorry’s cab, where I was given scant, vague information as to where the clutch, accelerator, and brake were. The gears were manipulated with a cumbersome lever that could have changed gears on the Titanic. The clutch was located at the base of the floorboard. The driving column was an enormous wheel created without the slightest suggestion of suspension. Once I got the beast started and propelled forward, it felt as if I were Steam Boat Willy from the Buster Keaton film.

The Leyland bounced from one side of the road to the other, as if it were a drunk lurching home at midnight on a country roadway. It made me, the driving instructor, and Robbie nauseated from the undulating, uncoordinated movements. To change gears, you had to double de-clutch, which caused a deafening grinding sound like it was coming from a medieval torture chamber.

Days later, more lorries arrived because we were to be taught to drive in convoys. It was chaos because before these lessons most of us had been pedestrians in civilian life without any driving knowledge. So our first attempts at driving lorries in a convoy generated innumerable collisions and curses from us against the RAF and British Leyland. We damned these vehicles for their uncooperative nature and their primitive springs that left our necks sore and arses aching. However, after many hours we were gradually indoctrinated into the mysteries of these ancient mechanical petrol driven beasts that we referred to as “Bollocks Busters.”

After we had received the minimum amount of instructions to make us roadworthy, our commanding officer dispatched us on a mobile exercise. It involved us driving around the local countryside and locating landmarks through map coordinates that had been transmitted to us in Morse code. This exercise was orchestrated to determine if: one, we could find our way in the dark from the privy; and two, if we could send a signal to camp informing them that we had returned safely from the privy.

When our parliament of lorries set out from camp, each vehicle was given different orders and dissimilar locations to detect and report back from. The vehicles were outfitted with an RCA radio transmitter, bedding, and provisions for two weeks, along with a large bucket to be used as a lavatory. For our comfort, the bucket came with a detachable seat. If there were any bashful or self-conscious ones aboard our vehicle, a canvass wrap was included. It could be erected around the bucket to protect one from the blowing winds. It also shielded us from the incredulous stares of farmers who stumbled upon RAF men defecating in their fields, resplendent with grazing sheep.

There were five in our lorry: Robbie, Brian, Clementine, Taffy, a cook, and myself. I was designated the chief radio operator. Our vehicles trundled off like the beginning of the Dakar-Paris road race. However, unlike the French road rally, we were wholly ignorant of our destination or a true and exact explanation by the RAF for this weird navigational foray.

It took us the better part of the day to find our first map reference. The grid location was dead center in a church cemetery. It proved our superiors were as useless as us when it came to fighting the war. Clementine noted, “Perhaps the RAF is giving us a sign as to our ultimate destination with them.”

As we were supposed to set up camp at these coordinates, Robbie and I decided to go to the vicarage. We wanted to inform the padre of our intent but it did not go well. The vicar adorned in his vestments, greeted us coldly while beside him an inhospitable dog growled at me. The padre had a long grey beard and a thin, unsympathetic face. He clearly disliked us and didn’t hide his disdain for the RAF.

“Permission, permission,” he grumbled, “to set up a circus tent in my church cemetery? I certainly do mind. In fact, I take umbrage at the notion. You boys think that my cemetery should be used as your lavatory? Certainly not, goodnight to you, and please be off my property this very instant.”

“Where are we supposed to kip?” I asked defensively.

“Use a farmer’s plot, use the common, responded the exasperated vicar. But do not molest my church yard.”

After the door closed, Robbie said, “I bet that dog of his has had a bleeding leg up on every grave stone in the cemetery.”

I signalled back to HQ that enemy forces were being uncooperative, and we reconnoitred to a new position. For the first few days, the exercise proved to be a disaster for us, and the majority of positions radioed to us were placed in the middle of streams, pubs, or in woodlots, and all of them were totally inaccessible. But by the second week, it got worse when our transmitter conked out.

Without radio contact, we were lost but continued on with our mission and aimlessly meandered around the back roads of southern England. It was odd, I thought, but no one came to look for us?”

“But Robbie and Brian said,“ who cares? At least we are free from the camp and Meade.”

Later on, I borrowed some paint from a farmer and painted on one of the canvass sides of the lorry: ‘Fred Karno’s Army.’

On many afternoons, we parked our Leyland in a meadow beside a brook and had a picnic with tinned corn beef and beer bought from an off license. We were fortunate that Clementine had a gramophone and some record disks, which we listened to while we ate. Unfortunately for Robbie, the 78 RPM were mainly classical recordings of Mahler and Chopin. He was never happy with the selection and grumbled, “Sounds like the cat got caught by the dog with the canary still in his gob.”

As for me, I loved to listen to Chopin because I had never heard music played so beautifully before those afternoon picnics. After our meal, I’d rest my head on my kit bag, close my eyes, smoke my cigarette, and let the melody playing out from the gramophone guide me towards a feeling of bliss. One afternoon, Clementine played selections from the opera Samson and Delilah. The female lead was sung by Marian Anderson, and her voice was painfully beautiful to me. My own heart broke when I heard her sing “Softly Awakes My Heart.” After it was over and the disk, spun empty of music, all of us were quiet, afraid to speak and break the thin emotional strand that attached us to that moment of beauty.

A week later, we finally returned to White Waltham, unshaven, dirty and irritable. Sardonically, Sergeant Greene greeted us.

“We were beginning to get worried about you lot. Some even asked if we should contact the Navy to see if you and your lorry were floating out in the channel. For sure, this is another fucking cock up. Unless I lead you by the bleeding hand, you lot couldn’t find yer arse for lemons. Get yourselves cleaned up before the CO catches you and puts us all on charges.”

While we were away, we found out that the German 7th Army was being asphyxiated at Stalingrad with a dense pincer movement from the Soviet Army. We also heard that in the African desert, where, in ancient days, Hannibal once roamed with impunity, Rommel was on the run from Montgomery’s Desert Rats. It seemed to us that the allies were finally starting to push back at the Nazi juggernaut but the outcome with far from certain and our home front was still prey to carnivorous Messerschmitt bombers. That night as I slept, I heard a nearby AK- AK battery fire angrily into a moonless sky, in an attempt to quell the ferocity of an air raid that was about to cause havoc on London’s East End.

Chapter Twelve

Chigwell

In the month of December 1942, my unit was posted to RAF Chigwell which was situated in the heart of Essex’s Epping Forest. Before our arrival, Chigwell was utilized to deploy barrage balloons across the London skyline. Often, it was a futile attempt to thwart Luftwaffe attacks on the city. When I arrived, the base was a conduit for transmitting coded messages to other military installations across the country. Our billets were located several miles from the main base, which turned out to be far more pleasant, as we were encamped on Sir Felix Cassel’s private estate.

We erected tents on the grounds of the estate near the manor house and gardens and were then forgotten about by our superiors. So, for the first few weeks we did as we pleased, and that generally meant getting up to no good. Robbie, Brian, Clementine, Taffy, and I became regulars at the infamous Red Lion Inn that was located in nearby Loughton. It was said by the town’s inhabitants that the pub clientele included the most unattached attractive women in the area.

With a reputation like that, the pub was a magnet for service men looking for carnal romance before seeing active duty. So, every night The Red Lion was engorged with rank and file from the RAF, Army, Royal Navy, colonial forces, and the dreaded Yanks who everyone thought were overpaid and over here. As there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of beer, there was no shortage of fights. Brawls at The Red Lion could be divided into two categories: those about women at your table, and those about women at the table yonder. If a young woman glanced at the wrong time, at the wrong man, fists flew. If a local girl happened to sit at a table filled with our American allies and paid too much attention to one of our richer cousins, it generally got the goat of at least one liquored up male from the British Isles, who went over and threw a punch at a character named Tex or Slim.

However, to quell any animosity or mayhem between allies or branches of the armed forces, The Red Lion employed a six-foot-tall female bouncer who resembled a beer keg. The female bouncer deftly hauled out any miscreants that had pushed the boundaries of civility. She would grab their collars from behind and drag their bodies across the floor like a dog being pulled maliciously by a chain. Pissed service men saluted her as she passed them on her way to the door with a subdued customer who was heaved onto the road outside with the force of an artillery round.

Afterwards, the giantess warned the guilty party with, “you better be’ave yerself, or next time I’ll give ya a right bollocking.”

The first month at Chigwell seemed to be a terminus for our training as we were given no orders except to make ourselves scarce from officers and NCOs. Those in charge appeared to have no knowledge as to what to do with us and they seemed loath to find a solution to our idleness.

The Baronet, whose estate we gladly loafed on, tried as best as he could to keep us occupied. He attempted to instil us with a bit of culture with a weekly piano recital that balanced out our boozing in Loughton. The recitals were performed by his first son, Francis, whose desire to play well was greater than his talent. Having more money than acumen, the aristocrat’s son yearly booked Albert Hall and filled it with unwilling guests who were compelled to attend by social pressure and being natural ass kissers.

Francis had a caged audience with us, as we were his father’s guests and it was hard to refuse an invitation from a baronet’s son. It was, however, an opportunity to experience all types of composers, from Bartok to Saint Saens. Francis was a very accommodating host, if a less than perfect pianist. It was said much later on that he was so eccentric, he boasted to have taught his horses French, German, and to count to ten backwards.

I found the concerts stimulating and a diversion from our usual routine of beer and birds. Besides, when the evening concerts ended we were invited for tea in the NAFFI, where I enjoyed the company of attractive WAF’s who served refreshments and conversation to us LAC’s. However, it was rumoured and believed by the majority of airmen that the tea was laced with bromide to reduce our testosterone and threat to the good name of young women everywhere.

At Chigwell, there was no inspection, no parades, and no work ever done by us. Even Robbie found our absolute freedom cumbersome and uncomfortable.

“It really is like the lunatic asylum where the inmates are running the place,” he noted wearily. Sometimes, we slept late. Discipline was so non-existent that when a pay officer came to settle our weekly wages, he found us hung-over in bed.

“Get up, you lazy bastards,” the officer screamed.

Full of sleep and beer from the night before, we shuffled over to the paymaster. We were like hospital residents receiving their medication. We yawned and mumbled our appreciation when we signed for our pay. The RAF may have left us with the illusion that we were at play and forgotten, but just as soon as we were almost lulled to sleep by the drab beat of purposelessness, we were posted back to White Waltham.

Our group felt forlorn as we returned by train to our former base. It was as melancholic as leaving a favourite holiday camp knowing that drudgery awaited one at home. In our absence, White Waltham had not changed, except it was now winter – but Sergeant Meade’s memory was piping hot.

When we sauntered through the camp gates in broken, cynical individuality, Meade chided us and said “So, you ladies have returned, to complete your finishing school.” Within days, he had us sorted and we returned to our former discipline and marched, saluted, and slept when ordered. While in our hut, we groaned and complained as to the cruelty and whims of the RAF. One moment we were deluged by purposeless sloth, and the next moment we were inundated by the dullness of activities designed without rhyme or reason.

However, our imprisonment under the watchful and punishing eyes of Meade was not to last for long because we were sent out on another orientation mission that was to encompass a wider grid on the map. Moreover, this time we departed at nightfall, and so our lorries groped the roads like old men fumbling to take a piss at midnight.

Within a week, we were lost from the convoy and at day’s end dejectedly, we set up camp in a farmer’s field. I strung up a makeshift transmission cable across the roof of the lorry and sent a distress message to our base. As it was cold, Clementine made a fire and we tried to keep warm by rubbing our hands and whining about the RAF.

Suddenly, a staff car pulled up and I thought we were in the shit. An aristocratic captain of about twenty-four approached us and enquired as to our success in this training mission. It turned out he was also attached to White Waltham. In a friendly manner, he asked us if we fancied a drink, which we all eagerly agreed to.

“There is one spot of bother about this drink business,” said the captain. He touched his nose with his right index finger and explained, “The Indian chiefs don’t like us running about with cowboys. So does anyone have a spare LAC jacket? Much better to go native than in full mufti,” he said. “No one minds our boys having a bit of rum, but everyone gets bent out of shape when they see an officer raising a glass.

Brian handed him his coat, and we all piled into the officer’s car and drove off to the nearest pub. The captain stood all of our rounds. He showed complete disregard for the RAF except to say, “Mind you, we are now winning this match, but a lot of blood was spilled to get us this far.”

Exhaling smoke from his cigarette, he continued, “And more is going to be shed next year, and the year after that, but we are showing Jerry what we are made of.”

The officer put out his cigarette and excused himself to go to the toilet as he left our table; I noticed he walked with a limp.

“What’s up with that,” asked Taffy?

“I suspect,” I said “that he was wounded in action.”

“Crickey, said Robbie “and didn’t he say he was going out on bomber escort, this week. You wouldn’t find me going up in the sky, not for all the bloody tea in China, especially if I got a game leg, for all my bother.”

“That is why they are the so few,” Clementine said laconically.

The captain returned and announced, “Right, lads, time to go and fight the war.”

For the better part of a year, the RAF divided our time between White Waltham and Chigwell. In the former, we were trained as a mobile transmitter signals unit. In the latter, we were schooled in indolence and high culture provided by the imperfect recitals of Sir Fredrick Cassel’s son, Francis.

During the early winter months at Chigwell, I observed my squad mates play endless games of cards. They played sometimes for an entire month’s wages, which were staked on hands dealt whilst lady luck was out powdering her nose. Fortune never sat beside me. The only occasion I was foolish enough to join in, I lost half my week’s pay. From then on, I retreated from the mocking aces and gambled my time away by reading books.

While card decks were shuffled infinite times and deuces were dealt, the Russians destroyed the German Seventh Army at Stalingrad. In the air, the RAF continued its night time bombing missions against Germany and attacked their industrial factories in the Ruhr. However, Bomber Command sustained enormous casualties during these raids and it began to affect aircrew morale because life expectancy for a thirty tour mission was a dismal one in six.

During those winter months, my sister sent me a quick cryptic letter which indicated something was not right. At first I did not break the cipher which was veiled in the commonality of her phrases but she was in turmoil because her husband had gone absent from the Army.

I never knew why Mary’s husband deserted from the Army, nor did I think it was my business to ask her for an explanation. His actions, however, had dire consequences for my sister because she was harassed on a regular basis by the military police. They came to her work and made trouble for her with her manager as they thought she had information about where her husband was hiding. They even came to her home and made a ruckus to insure that all her neighbours knew that her man had done a runner. Unfortunately, my sister didn’t know where her man was and even if she did, I doubt that she would have grassed him out to a society that had treated her like an animal during the Great Depression.

Once, the military police even rapped on my mum’s door to enquire about her wayward son-in-law. When questioned, my mother, who was as patriotic as the next person on Boothtown Road, crossed her arms and said to the strapping police officer, “Come again?”

The policeman repeated his interest in the whereabouts of her son-in-law. My mother told him to “Sod off, and go find yerself a real criminal, maybe a black marketer. Mary’s man is none of my bloody business and certainly none of yer ruddy business. Better yet,” she added derisively, “up the street is a recruitment centre. Sign yourself up, lad and do us all a favour; get thee off to the front.”

As my mother waged war, in October 1943, against the local military police, British and American troops fought their way into the strongly fortified port of Naples and the RAF made bombing sorties over Hannover, Stuttgart, and Berlin. By land, air and sea the allies battled and continued to loosen the ferocious grip the Nazi’s held over occupied Europe.

Yet, while total war raged across the continents of the world, Albert, my father, was dying in inches in the small room he let at St Andrews Villas. After years of earning his crust as a miner his lungs were destroyed and he developed bronchitis and pneumonia. When his racking cough became too much for the other doss house residents, he was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital where he asked a hospital administrator to contact his younger sister, Mabel.

My dad’s sister arrived shortly before he died and he asked her to “do right by me, even though we have not been close.”

He told her to hock whatever was of value in his room at the nearest pawnshop and burn the rest of it.

“Wha’ ever thou gets from shop, giv to wee kids, Mary and Harry.”

On Oct 11th 1943, Albert Smith, loyal son, devoted husband, and caring father, died. Three days later, he was buried in un-consecrated ground in a plot stacked ten-deep with other forgotten people. Even in death, the poor shared eternity as if it were a cramped terraced house.

On the morning my father died, I was, far away, being trained in wireless ops orientation and I did not find out about his death until I received, two months later, a letter from Mary.

She wrote: Our Dad died in October. His heart gave out. Happy Christmas, Love Mary.

So that was it, I thought, while I sat on my bunk. I tried to remember what my dad was like but I couldn’t because too much time had transpired, since we had last been together. His death only reminded me about our days of hunger and my pain at watching him disappear from my family’s life as if he were a stranger. There was nothing I could do to change the past or his hard days after he was forced to live apart from his children. The night I received Mary’s letter, I got drunk alone at a pub and with each mouthful of beer; I hoped I could wipe the melancholic memory of my dad clean from my conscience.

Chapter Thirteen

Invasion

By the start of 1944, the tide against Nazi Germany had begun to turn in the Allies’ favour. On the eastern front, the siege of Leningrad was relieved and the German Army was driven from Soviet Russia. However, as Russian forces recovered lost territory in the Ukraine and Belarus; they unearthed, like gruesome archaeologists, a wasteland of death. They discovered the mass graves of massacred Jews, partisans, and anyone else the Nazis deemed beneath Germanic humanity. Whole villages were expunged, submerged, and buried underneath the blood of the executed. The fields in Eastern Europe were moist with the blood of the dead, and Russian armies moved west ward towards Germany with cries of revenge, on their lips, for their murdered comrades.

Meanwhile, the air war against both German industrial and civilian targets continued around the clock with coordinated bombing raids conducted by the USAF and RAF. The air raids were relentless, and in one month the RAF dropped close to three thousand tons of explosives on Berlin. German cities were obliterated; their skylines reduced to rubble or burnt out brick skeletons. However, peace was still far off for Europe because in underground government bunkers the Nazi high command vowed that the fatherland would never surrender and if the enemy crossed onto sacred German soil, they were to be met with weapons of mass destruction and the furies of Gotterdammerung.

Despite the Nazi’s pledge to enact a scorched earth policy the Western allies were not deterred from landing at Anzio beach and doing deadly combat with the Axis for dominion over Italy. Nor did it discourage Britain and America from making invasion preparations against the continent of Europe, which turned our island into an enormous marshalling yard for the largest invasion force ever raised in the history of mankind. By early spring, Britain was swollen with Allied troops and equipment while our nation waited for the order to cross the channel and liberate Europe.

Yet, while the rest of the armed forces prepared for invasion, my unit continued on in its manoeuvres in Southern England. I knew that the invasion was soon, but our routine wasn’t altered and we persisted in our duty to traverse from map coordinate to map coordinate, which was as dull and hurtful as repeating the multiplication table out loud for one’s entire waking hours.

I started to wonder if our unit was going to be called upon to do something for the big push against Germany. “Surely,” I asked, “they can’t expect us to just drive from one end of the island to the other until the war is over?”

Brian said that was probably the case because “we are just spare parts in case the invasion is a failure.” However, “If they fuck it up,” he continued, “then it’ll be all hands on deck for the horrendous bloodbath to come.”

Whereas Robbie cautioned us that it was probably best to keep our heads down and our mouths shut at this juncture.

“No point drawing any attention to ourselves. Keep to the back, lads, with the light well away from your faces. We don’t want anyone getting any strange ideas about dying.”

We knew in May that the invasion was near because road diversions were commonplace to allow convoys of lorries packed with armament and field supplies to assemble at the invasion marshalling areas which dotted the coastline. Besides, there was nervous electricity amongst our officers that told us that the push was about to get underway. When our ramblings were halted in the middle of May and we were confined to our base, we knew that the hour of reckoning was nigh.

When the invasion finally got underway on June 6th, it was like the release of a violent orgasm. The skies grew dark as bomber upon bomber migrated towards their targets in France. From the comfort of England, we remained subdued and humbled by the news of hand-to-hand fighting occurring on Normandy beaches. I felt lucky that I was safe in England, while British, Canadian, Polish, and American boys the same age as me inched from beachheads to hedge groves with a curtailed life expectancy.

My mate Brian had a brother who was part of the third day wave of invaders and although their landing was easy compared to the men who went first; a German sniper killed him inland, after they left Gold Beach. When Brian found out about his brother’s death he said to me, “He probably wanted to show me how grown up and responsible he was by volunteering for the Army. Wanted to do his part, wanted to be part of the action and have tales to tell his grandchildren.”

We were confined to base until the end of June, when the South of England was attacked by a new weapon, the V1 rocket that terrorized the inhabitants of London. It caused enormous panic amongst the civilian population, along with extensive damage to the city, and reminded Britain that the war was far from over; in a little over two months, it claimed close to 10,000 lives and left thousands more maimed.

The RAF felt so overwhelmed by the rocket raids that they outfitted our unit’s lorries with primitive mortars and ordered our team to roam the countryside and stalk these new weapons of terror. We patrolled rural areas far from the outskirts of London and when HQ, informed us by wireless radio that a flock of V1’s were in our vicinity, we went to battle stations, assembled our mortars and scanned the horizon for the rockets that sped towards the capital.

Once the deadly missiles was in our sights, we lit the fuse on our cannon and within several seconds, there was a loud pop as a flare shell burst upwards into the sky. Up there, it exploded into an array of brilliant colours which allowed airborne spitfire fighter planes to mark its trajectory and shoot it down before it did any harm to the capital.

Our doodle bug search team was created by the War Ministry as an inexpensive and perhaps useful method of destroying the winged bombs. Unfortunately, the law of gravity was a great impediment to the ministry’s concept, as the signal flare was held in a giant metal canister. Inevitably, once empty of its starburst the heavy container plunged to the ground at an extreme velocity.

Prosperous farmers were not amused when their prized herds of cattle and sheep were felled by spent canisters crashing into their fields. One farmer approached us, outraged at our role in the death of his beloved bull. He said he would have the local constabulary lock us up for willful murder. Our commander deduced that our efforts to stem the flow of human life being killed by the rockets should be left to the spitfires because our assistance left an unacceptably high casualty rate for non-combatant livestock.

It was late autumn when my unit’s caravanning across England was halted and we were recalled to White Waltham. I was thankful that this venture had finally concluded because I longed for a new assignment. I wanted something that was more connected to the battle for the liberation of Europe because I believed we had trained long enough to be ready to be put into action in the final struggle against Germany.

Upon our return our mobile unit was disbanded and Taffy, Brian, and Clementine were immediately transferred to another camp while Robbie and I remained at White Waltham and wrote a report about the usefulness of our manoeuvres.

After the report was presented to our superiors, I was seconded along with Robbie to 13 ATSU, which was a fully functional air traffic signals unit, near Luton. It was responsible for the coordination and transmission of RAF cipher messages to our UK airbases as well as newly liberated airports in Europe. There, my responsibilities included rapid transmission and reception of encrypted signals sent from or to RAF bases in the theatre of war.

I worked in an enormous windowless brick building that contained innumerable rooms filled with the RAF’s most modern radio equipment. My work station was buried in the basement of the building, and to get to it I had to follow a confusing path through a leviathan of unmarked passageways that were poorly lit and always packed with clerks, WAFs, and young men like me scurrying about with sheaves of unreadable coded messages held tightly in their hands.

Much to my surprise, two weeks into our assignment Taffy, Brian, and Clementine arrived at our new base. Robbie, the first to notice them, called out, “I’ll be chuffed – look what the cat dragged in.”

Clementine explained, “Our transfer was buggered up. The bastards dispatched us to be bomb loaders until they realized we didn’t know our arse from our elbow unless it was sent to us in Morse.”

Shortly before Christmas, our squad of wireless operators was called into a meeting in the mess hall. A captain told us in senatorial sentences that Christmas leave was cancelled. We were to form into a new MSU that was to be transferred into the theatre of war, across the channel. The news that we were to be sent to Europe caused our unit to send up a cheer. The war was drawing to a close, but finally we were going ashore into the newly liberated countries. At last, we were going to demonstrate our worthiness to this war, this cause, and to Britain. I was grateful that holiday leave was cancelled because Christmas in Halifax with my mother and Bill Moxon was a dismal, festive cracker I dreaded to pull.

The captain said, “Lads, you can expect to leave England in a very short time, but remember that the Royal Navy is a funny lot who sometimes mucks about. So be patient; the time for us to leave maybe near or far away, but whenever it is, it shall be our time to go and do our duty.”

At the news, the men in my unit became frantic with excitement, and many began clapping their hands while others like Brian and Robbie spoke out loud about their desire for foreign romance. “A bit of parlez les vous, if you know what I mean, is just what the doctor ordered,” said Robbie in a loud voice.

The commotion began to irritate the captain, who told us to pipe down.

“Men, this is an important endeavour we are undertaking for England. We will occupy newly liberated airfields behind the front lines and make them operational for our wing command. There will be more risk to your person than you encountered here at this airbase, but the rewards of service will also be greater because the fighter planes deployed from our patch will depend upon us for ground defence, air traffic control and accurate information regarding enemy troop movements

Over Christmas, we were confined to base, where we awaited our orders to deploy to the continent. However, our channel crossing was delayed because of Hitler’s last offensive gambit in the west, when he attempted to retake the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut off the Allies’ main supply route. It was decided that our unit could not be transferred overseas until the Battle of the Bulge was finished, as there was a fear that the western front might collapse due to the Wehrmacht’s last military gamble.

So, Christmas for my unit was a dour affair that consisted of a few tots of rum being served with our yuletide meal in the sparsely decorated mess hut.

After I finished my meal, I excused myself and said that I was going outside to get a breath of fresh air. When I got out into the open, I discovered that it was snowing.

The ground looked clean whereas my mind was cluttered because divergent images played in my head from past Christmases. I recalled the sorrow of past holiday seasons when my family starved and my sister and I depended on meagre hand outs from the church to keep our spirits bright. However, despite all those past hardships, my memories kept returning in fondness and in longing to that one Christmas when I was a very small boy and my father played carols on our piano and I was warmed by a giant coal fire burning in our hearth.

“It’s all water under the bridge,” I whispered to myself and cleansed myself by taking in deep breaths of the brisk December air. Suddenly, a snowball cuffed me in the head.

“Come on, you lazy sod,” Taffy called out, “it’s time for target practice.”

From the edge of the cookhouse, my three other mates appeared and I was ambushed in an avalanche of snowballs.

Confined to camp on New Year’s Eve, we sang Auld Lang Syne at the chime of midnight and toasted the year to come. During the first days and then weeks of January, we waited in disjointed apprehension to deploy to Europe. After a while, we thought our captain had played a cruel prank on us. He promised us in December a mission to Europe and a greater role in this war, and it now seemed as fanciful as Meade’s desert premonitions. We waited and asked our sergeants. “You’ll know when you know,” was the answer.

So, we waited impatient, ignorant and callow for Europe. Yet, as we waited, news reached us that Warsaw had been liberated by the Russians and that they were about to cross the Oder River and enter German territory. As we loitered and marked time for our orders to depart for Europe, the people of Holland were reduced to eating tulip bulbs and shoe leather as they endured a famine created by the retreating German Army. As we waited, chaos erupted across Eastern Europe as the dying remnants of Nazi Germany’s armed forces fought the Russian Red Army to the death, along a front that stretched from the Baltic’s to Danzig. However, for us in the west it was still a brutal and grim battle front as we ferociously battled our way into Germany through Italy and the lowland countries.

Chapter Fourteen

Europe

It was mid-February and bitterly cold when our deployment orders were finally approved. My unit was herded onto sixteen lorries and in the early grey light of a winter’s morning transported to the port of Harwich. As we travelled to the coast, my mates and I smoked cigarettes, sang dirty songs, and took the mickey out of the RAF while we were pitched around in the back of an unheated lorry. Each one of us was gripped with excitement and dread over our European destination because we weren’t quite sure about what we were going to encounter when we crossed the channel.

When we arrived at the port, we joined an enormous queue of military transports and men being shipped abroad. While we waited, I got out and stretched my legs and saw that it was complete bedlam. The noise was deafening as ship whistles blasted, winches screeched, and an army of stevedores cursed their jobs. In the distance, I saw an array of ships in their moorings that were being fed a cargo of guns, crates, and food by a symphony of cranes suspended in the air that gently lowered the stowage onto the decks of both freighters and battle cruisers.

While we waited to board our ship, a frigid boredom ate away at our patience and Robbie complained, “If Noah had taken this much time loading his bleeding animals onto his fucking ark; he’d only have had two bloody baboons for company.”

As the night wore on, our lorries began to inch towards embarkation until an NCO cried out, “Let’s get cracking” and we jumped off our vehicles, so that they could be stored on board.

We, the human cargo, were sent up a gangplank and packed below the main deck like steerage immigrants on their way to the new world. The compartment was damp, cold, and airless and we sat in uncomfortable positions because the ceiling was too low for us to stand. Lights on the side of the wall flickered and cast a weak yellow light around the vestibule

At three in the morning, our ship left port and I felt the vibration from the ship’s screws as we made our way to open water. Down below, we sat morose, smoking, huddled in our great coats while smells from the ocean mixed noxiously with the heavy odour of diesel oil.

That night the channel was rough, and the swells moved the ship around like a water logged bar of soap in an agitated tin bath tub. I felt a nervous unease as I started to wonder if there were U-boats hidden underneath the cold, grim waters waiting to torpedo us. If the ship were hit, I surmised we would sink like a brick tossed into a river without a chance to get to the lifeboats.

I mentioned my disquiet to Robbie, who said, “If it happens, it’ll be a quick death because we are too far below deck to have any hope in hell of beating the rats out of here. We’ll drown in the first wave of water, which I suppose is better than knowing what hit you and dying. Besides,” he said in a reassuring tone, “if Jerry is underneath us, you’ve already had your chips, Smith – ’cause you can’t swim.”

I managed to fall asleep, but it was a jerky, uncomfortable unconsciousness that was filled with strange dreams about my childhood and my father. At around five, I opened my eyes and asked Clementine, who sat slumped beside me, “Where are we going?”

“To Ostend,” he said in a sleepy voice.

“Where is that?” I inquired.

“Belgium,” he replied.

By six in the morning, our freighter sailed into its berth in the densely packed port. Overhead, I heard the vehicles move out as they hit the ramp and jetty beside us; it echoed in our compartment. After a while, an NCO marshalled us from our pen. It was an effort to stand, as our legs were cramped from the hours we were packed away like toys in a box.

Getting up, we were like tired children at the end of a long journey, and we cursed everyone in our path. We moved down the gangplank like pack animals coming to auction. When we were outside, a blast of cold Belgian sea air burned my lungs. We marched away from the pier and moved to an open area, where we found our vehicles and a Red Cross Tea Unit.

“Go get yourself warmed up,” an officer encouraged us.

So, I headed off to the refreshment van, where I was served a strong cuppa by antiquated Belgian ladies who had friendly and sincere smiles etched onto their faces.

While I sipped on my tea, I looked up at the sky that was shrouded in a frozen, pallid light. Although it was early, there was maniacal activity trembling all around me. It was like Harwich, except everything was reversed and ships were being unloaded rather than loaded.

Eventually, we boarded our lorries and began our journey into Belgium. I jostled to be at the end of the vehicle by its back gate. I realized it would be colder there, but I was curious to catch my first glimpse of a foreign country. The lorries rolled out of the port, and we travelled onto a dual carriage way that was empty of traffic. From the back of my lorry, as the sun scrambled up over the horizon I saw more than I wanted. Scores of dead horses littered the roadside that were bloated and grotesque in death. Along the road way, I encountered refugees that could have been part of a Brueghel painting because of how dejected they appeared as they tried to find a route that would lead them home.

As morning wore on, we drove past villages and small towns that lay in ruins from fearsome hand-to-hand combat and aerial bombardment. The fields around them were flooded and littered with derelict German tanks while the road we were on was jammed with Allied convoys moving towards the front. By midday, we had driven past Antwerp and an hour later arrived at our destination: an aerodrome on the north coast that had been hastily abandoned by the Luftwaffe. However, before they left the Germans had done their best to smash all of the electronic and telephone equipment, break every window, and they even tried to set the main buildings ablaze.

As I dismounted from the lorry, a cold and miserable sleet fell across my face and I pulled my great coat collar up around my ears to protect me from the wind blowing in from the North Sea.

“It’s a bloody mess,” said Clementine after he jumped from the vehicle and had a quick look around.

Robbie agreed and said, “It looks like Wigan after New Year’s Eve.”

Suddenly, a door leading to the air traffic control tower was blown open and shut by a strong breeze. Robbie wondered out loud if this place was booby trapped.

“Don’t be daft,” I responded. “The royal engineers cleared this airport of explosives and traps a fortnight ago. We just have to keep our eyes open for danger.”

Suddenly, Clementine disappeared into one of the storage sheds while we screamed after him to return to the safety of the parade ground. However, a few minutes later he emerged with two carbon rods, both capped and connected by about a foot of insulated wire.

“What the hell is that?” I enquired.

“If the Germans have paid their electric bill, it’s our new tea kettle.”

Afterwards, we located the deserted mess hut and rifled through a heap of discarded rubbish that the Germans had thrown onto the floor before their hasty departure. In the refuse, Clementine found a large empty jam tin that he cleaned out and then filled up with water from his canteen.

He stuck the rods into the container and thrust the wire ends of the carbon rod around a discarded plug he had found. He inserted the plug into a wall socket. There was a tiny cascade of sparks shooting from the outlet. Then the power heated up the coils sitting in the water to the boiling point. We drank our tea, grateful for Clementine’s ingenuity.

An officer found us in the kitchen and advised us to quickly find a place to kip.

“Jerry’s not the cleanest of customers,” he said. “Better go now before the others find the most comfortable berths.”

I located a room that had not been vandalized, for all of us, in a former Luftwaffe officer’s lodgings while Brian and the others dragged in some battered chairs that we used for beds. Afterwards, we lit a fire in a kachel oven with scrap wood and had a fag break until a sergeant told us to, “Get a move on, there’s a van on the parade square that has field rations for your supper.”

After tea, our commanding officer a man named Gibb told us that, our sojourn at this abandoned airfield was to be short but in the interim we were permitted to travel to nearby Antwerp.

Gibb said, “You may visit the city in groups of five, but for no more than a couple of hours at a time.”

The officer warned, “If you think you will find any booty in Antwerp, you are sadly mistaken because the Germans stole anything that wasn’t nailed down tight and what they couldn’t take back home with them, they dumped into the sea. So, the Belgians have suffered a great deal during these last few months of the war and they don’t need us causing them any trouble. Please remember, you are members of the RAF, so try to behave like Englishmen – and not like some half-craved morons.”

Afterwards, we returned to our makeshift sleeping quarters and Brian broke up bits of a door to keep the fire going. For good measure, he tossed a picture he found of Hitler into the flames.

Clementine in his wanderings had discovered an unopened bottle of German schnapps, which kept us content before bed. Outside, a barrage of artillery and anti-aircraft thundered into the sky, and Robbie and I decided to step outside to investigate.

We watched with chilled awe as flashes of light roared and punctured the night time sky. A sentry walked by and told us that, “this happens every night and it’s brighter than Blackpool’s illuminations but it doesn’t last as long.” I learned from him that the guns were used in an attempt to destroy then innumerable V2 rockets sorties that the Germans launched to terrorize civilians in Belgium and Britain. “Those Nazi’s,” said the sentry, “are mad buggers and they are going to try kill every last one of us before we break down Hitler’s door and shoot him dead.”

The following morning, my mates and I rode into Antwerp in an RAF lorry and as I sat in the cab, I noticed that the driver carried a side arm. I asked him if the gun was loaded.

“Not bloody likely,” he replied. “It’s just to scare them away. The toffs would be in a right mess if I shot at a civilian for trying to steal His Majesty’s tires.”

We drove into Antwerp’s main thoroughfare, and it was easy to notice the erratic nature of the V2 attacks. A block of flats had collapsed onto itself while the house beside it appeared unfazed, as if sheathed in a protective coating. The driver told me that the city had a ring of anti-aircraft batteries around it to try to prevent the killer missiles from creating even more civilian casualties or damage to the vital port facilities. “Those bloody rockets have killed almost 30,000 innocent Belgians in the last little while. They’re deadly buggers; I’d rather take my chance in the blitz than with one of those pilotless rockets.”

The lorry halted on an attractive baroque street that was lined with shops and raggedly dressed civilians. The driver said he would be back in three hours, but he expected there to be five us waiting for him with no surprises. As he left, he yelled out, “Make sure you bastards don’t catch the clap. The Belgians are riddled with it because they are dirty beggars.”

For twenty minutes, we walked around and tried to get our bearings in this strange new territory. Belgian civilians ambled by brusquely and chatted in guttural Flemish as they mocked us. Across the street, teenage girls passed and we waved to them and called out in English, “Come on, love, over here and show some lost Tommies the way around town.”

They giggled and hurriedly moved on while an old man with a wooden leg hobbled up to me. He gesticulated with his hands and mimed the act of smoking. I reached into my coat and pulled out a pack of Woodbines. He smiled and said, “Ja, sigarette, bedanket sigarette.”

Handing him one, I tried to light it for him but he shrugged me off and limped down the street.

Robbie declared, “This town is as boring as piss on a Sunday after church.”

Taffy suggested, “We should try to find a place that sells beer.”

We agreed and eventually found an establishment that looked promising. So we stuck our faces against the window to investigate further. A heavyset woman well past her Rubenesque prime peered back and then with sign language invited us inside to her small café. It was occupied by a few elderly men who sat around tables and smoked their pipes.

“Come, come,” said the woman who directed us to an empty table.

“Zitten, zitten,” she gestured.

We sat and pulled off our caps.

“Eten? Drinken? Eten, Drinken?”

“We’ll have a beer,” said all of us.

“Ja, biere goed,” she said with a laugh.

The woman then turned to the other customers and made a joke at our expense, which made the old men laugh. But we didn’t care because afterwards, she came back with five cold bottles of beer. Quietly, we sipped our beers and it felt like we were visiting distant relatives who were monitoring our every gesture. Outside, miles off, a V2 rocket exploded and my friends and I jumped at the proximity of the violent noise. The old men at their tables laughed and said, “Bom, bom,” over and over.

In the far corner of the café, an old man, who sat alone, called out to us, “Jongen.”

We turned and then he put two of his fingers below his nose, miming Hitler’s moustache.

“Einde,” he continued and wiped his hands in the air, as if they were covered in muck.

When my twenty-second birthday arrived, my mates and I stayed on the airbase drank beer and ate tinned rations. In the evening we went outside and watched the army’s artillery duel V2 rockets in the winter sky. Robbie noted, “It’s probably the first time you had fireworks for your birthday.” I laughed but wondered how much longer the war was going to last because it seemed to me that my generation had seen more than its fair share of blood and heart ache.

While we were stationed in Belgium, the Allies prepared for their last big push into Germany by securing key bridges across the Rhine River. As well “The Big Three” – Russia, The United States, and The United Kingdom – met at Yalta. At the conference, the Great War lords established the continent’s post-war boundaries, sealing the fate of Eastern Europe for generations to come. Soon after their meeting, Dresden, the birthplace of princes, the crucible of Germanic culture, was sacrificed as homage to Joseph Stalin. It was retribution against the nation that had precipitated so much violence upon the continent. In one night of bombing, the city – teeming with refugees from the east, forced labour, and allied POWs – was offered as recompense for Germanic sin; over one hundred thousand lives perished in the firestorm.

At the end of March, on a very cold and wet morning we decamped to our new outpost located in Wassenaar, outside of Den Haag, Holland. Before we left, our convoy stopped and my unit was issued loaded rifles by a no-nonsense sergeant. He informed us that British troops had come into contact with stragglers from the retreating German army.

“Jerry isn’t done with us yet,” said the sergeant. “It looks like some of their chaps don’t know when the game is up and are out to sabotage and cause mayhem behind our lines. So, if you see any of them don’t hesitate to shoot.”

We scrambled away from Belgium and the ruined aerodrome that had been our temporary base with haste and indifference because we knew that there was more we could do for the war effort from our new location. “It’ll be a damn sight better for us in Holland,” said Brian as we sped along the coast of Belgium to our new command.

“Why do you think that?” I asked him as I stared out onto the side of the roadway which contained dead German soldiers and burnt out military vehicles.

“We will be closer to the action,” Brian replied.

“Not too close, I hope” Clementine interjected, “I’d like to keep well enough away from any half-baked Nazis who are out to make a last stand.”

“Look at all the mess those madmen caused,” I said to no one in particular and pointed out towards an endless stream of refugees who wearily walked on the roadside towards safety.

Suddenly, a man in my unit stood up and walked to the back of the lorry and contemptuously tossed bits of a sandwich out to the refugees, who scrambled to grab the bits of discarded spam from the ground. The airman said flippantly, “It’s like feeding fucking ducks at home.”

Outraged, I grabbed him by his collar and screamed, “You piece of shite! You fucking bastard!”

Enraged, I pushed him aside, took my rifle off my shoulder and aimed it at his chest.

“What’s so funny now, comedian? What’s so fucking funny now?”

Taffy and Robbie pulled me away from him. They got me to lower my rifle. I breathed in long, angry mouthfuls of air.

Late in the afternoon, our lorry arrived at a deserted airfield that was to be our base while the rest of our convoy proceeded to our billets in Wassenaar.

“Why did everyone else get to have a kip but us?” I asked our sergeant, who laughed at me and said, “Because you lot are the best shots in the unit.”

“What?” I asked, growing concerned.

“We’ve got some Germans holed up in the aerodrome hangar, and I need you and your mates to take them prisoner.”

“Fucking hell,” exclaimed Robbie.

The sergeant told us to divide ourselves into two groups. “Fan out, locate, and capture the German soldiers. Shoot the buggers dead if necessary.”

“How many are there of them?” I asked nervously.

“Less than a division,” said the sergeant with a smile, “so you should have them with hände hoch before tea.”

“Bugger me,” Robbie declared, “I’m not going to get nicked by a Nazi when the game is almost over. So I’ll follow your lead, Smith.”

Trying to recall my training days at Padgate and White Waltham, I drew a blank. We were never provided instructions regarding detection and seizure of enemy forces from newly liberated military bases. I remembered tuck and roll if landing with a parachute. I also recalled the catchall phrase “Be prepared, and always carry a condom.” But smoking out desperate Nazis was missing from our wireless textbook. While we reluctantly approached the hangar, I told Robbie and Taffy, “Let’s do this with a lot of noise. If there is anybody in here, they are probably scared shitless.”

“Like ourselves,” replied Brian.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Maybe we can bluff them out by saying there are more of us here.”

Robbie screamed out by the hangar’s entrance. “We got the whole fucking British Air Force out front, so you better come out. Even Winston Churchill is here, smoking a big, fat cigar.”

We pulled open the door to the hangar, which squeaked on its pulley. Sunlight flooded into the darkened, stale space and startled a pigeon that flew up and out. We jumped back, shaken, our rifles raised. I realized that we were not going to make it into dispatches; so I suggested that the safety to our guns be kept on rather than starting a firefight. We agreed. Our team entered the hangar, and it was a shambles of debris and sabotaged equipment.

Robbie whispered, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“Oly, Oly oxen free,” I responded.

To the far right, behind metal shelves we heard a paint tin drop with a thud. Beside it was a brown tarp that slithered to the far end of the building. Robbie and I charged forward towards the camouflaged movement. We put our boots onto the end of the cloth. Suddenly, two teenage boys in German Wehrmacht uniforms wriggled free from their cocoon.

“Hands up, lads!” I screamed out, but the teens were frozen in terror and began to speak in rapid German to us.

“Up, up,” Robbie encouraged them with the tip of his rifle.

At gunpoint, we marched them into daylight. They were no more than fifteen or sixteen. They were the last great hope of the German war machine; Hitler’s child-soldiers. The two boys began to sob, and I put my hand on their shoulders and tried to comfort them, but at that moment our sergeant reprimanded us and warned us that they might be booby-trapped. I laughed and said, “These two are more likely to piss themselves than explode.”

Robbie agreed. “Yeah, look at ’em, still fresh off the teat.”

The military MPs were called to take them for interrogation and processing as prisoners of war. Satisfied that our airport was now secure, we continued on to our billets that were situated ten minutes from the landing field in Wassenaar.

When we drove into the area where we were billeted, you could see it was a rich town, but the hardship of occupation was evident in the faces of the children that lined the street to greet our arrival. They were as thin as urchins, and although their clothes looked clean, they were ragged from years of wear.

“It’s a crying shame to see kids as hungry as we were during the Great Depression,” said Robbie quietly to me.

“It’s a crime,” I said, sickened and horrified by this famished parade of youth.

We drove onto a small crescent possessing a dozen homes that resembled large elegant Dutch sugar cookies. The pleasant homes and the street had a dream-like element to them. It was as if the war had passed by this neighbourhood, spared by a biblical pharaoh. Everything was unmolested, with fresh paint and clean windows. In the middle of the street, a tent had been erected to act as our cookhouse. The rest of our squad was milling about the tent, standing in groups of three or four. I found our sergeant and asked him who these houses on the street belonged to.

“No one now because most of the owners were collaborators and they are either on the lamb or in the nick.”

“Where are we to kip?”

“The commander wants you to sleep in the cookhouse.”

“But look at all those lovely empty homes around us,” I lamented.

The sergeant sighed and said, “Smith, do what you bloody well want. Just don’t muck about and treat them like a one-up-one-down in Manchester. Remember, I didn’t give you permission if anybody asks.”

I gathered up Robbie and Taffy, Clementine and Brian, and we proceeded like Goldilocks to find the bed that was just right. All of the houses on the crescent were detached villas. We requisitioned the most eye-appealing home. It possessed a giant entrance, massive full kitchen, vaulted ceilings, and bedrooms that I had only seen on the movie screen. I took as my own an upstairs room that overlooked a wooded park. It had an enormous window that swung open gently, allowing a beautiful, warm spring breeze to traipse into my room. I could hear the nearby sounds of birds nesting in the trees.

Robbie clambered upstairs and told me, “When I fucking die, St. Peter better send me here because this is fucking paradise.”

Taffy screamed out, “I’m bollocksed they have a bog inside. These Dutchies really are clever, smarter than us by a mile. I’ve been shitting in the garden since I was a wee one.”

“Oi,” said Brian, “there is someone at the door, and we haven’t had time to unpack and I’ve got me curlers in my hair.”

I rushed downstairs to answer the loud knocking. I opened up the door to find three RAF blokes whom I did not recognize. The first man asked in a Welsh accent if they could kip with us and Taffy yelled out, “He’s a Welsh man. Let him in. He’s family come for a visit.”

He stepped and bent his head upwards.

“Blimey,” he said, “sure is posh for Swansea.” He turned to me and said, “Jack Bruton, glad to be your neighbour.”

I shook his warm and kind hand and I knew, instantly, I would become fast friends with this quick-talking Welshman.

Eventually, we made our way to the mess tent for our tea and found a gathering of small children who looked like they hadn’t eaten a proper meal in years.

Some were shoeless; others wore wooden clogs. The smell of food had driven them from their hungry houses and towards our encampment. They had been beguiled by aromas absent for far too long in their lives.

Looking at their helpless, hungry faces, I asked the mess officer if we could do something about their situation.

He told me that no child would be refused food as long as he was in charge.

“Let’s get to it,” he said.

Jack, Robbie, Taffy, Clementine, Brian, and I opened up the flaps of the tent and ushered the neighbourhood children into the dining hall. The kids devoured the food like I had done so long ago in the soup kitchens of my boyhood. After eating the children laughed and played games with us and kissed our cheeks in appreciation at being treated humanely. That night I ate nothing for my tea overcome by my own joy at having been part of something good in the war, when there had been so much cruelty. I also recalled with sadness my own hungry boyhood when I snuck into a kitchen with my sister and ravenously dipped my bread into another woman’s stew.

Later on, I went outside and smoked a cigarette when a pretty sixteen-year-old girl came up to me. The girl had long, tightly braided blonde hair adorned with colourful ribbons. She stood shyly a little distance from me and in halting English said, “I live on this street.”

“You do?” I asked. “Show me where.”

The girl pointed to the largest and most magnificent villa.

“I live there. We are the Koenigs,” she claimed proudly. “My Papa is an artist. Please come and visit us sometime,” she requested.

The girl disappeared quickly into the throng of children who were still licking their lips from their meal.

The following morning, we were sent to the airfields to take stock of the equipment the Germans had left behind. We assessed when the airfield could become functional. I asked an officer if we were to be permanently stationed at Wassenaar. He said it was most unlikely, as our group was destined for Germany to maintain an airport there.

“What about our job here?” I asked.

“Don’t break a sweat,” he warned, “because it will be all for nowt. Germany is when your tasks really begin.”

By early afternoon, we returned to the splendour of our villa and lounged on fine wicker chairs on the back porch. We smoked cigarettes, and our new flat mate, Jack, strummed on his guitar. The young teenage girl from the day before appeared from the woods, situated behind us.

“Hello,” she called to me.

I went over to talk to her.

“My brother and sisters and Mama and Papa would like to meet you Tommies. Would you like to come for tea tomorrow?”

I agreed without asking the others, and then the girl began to leave when I cried out, “I don’t know your name?”

“Wilhelmina, just like our Queen’s name.” She then disappeared back into the woods.

The following afternoon, I showed up at the Koenigs’ residence with my friends. A servant greeted us at the door, and led to the back garden, I observed the stultifying wealth of the occupants which was evident by their art deco furnishings, marble floors and art work that adorned their walls.

Out back, Wilhelmina was present, along with her brother and sisters. We brought presents of food and coffee, but the Koenigs looked like they had been fed well during the German occupation. We spent a pleasant afternoon in diverting banter, light-hearted jokes, and stories. I realized they were wonderful people who seemed untouched by the war. Later on, I wondered if they showed the same amount of friendliness to our German counterparts when they ran the airfield.

Over the weeks I spent at Wassenaar, Wilhelmina was my unofficial guide to Holland. She eagerly awaited my return from base to take me for walks in the woods. She told me about her favourite actors and authors. Wilhelmina was at an age where she was neither a child nor a young woman; she was a chrysalis.

She developed a crush on me. It was more an infatuation for an ideal: youth, the liberator of her country. It was far too great an honour or reward to bestow upon me. I liked the attention Wilhelmina paid me and the friendship we developed, but I wanted no more from her than her absolute chaste adoration.

Later on, Wilhelmina encouraged us to go into Den Haag and wander the city. She wanted us to see the majestic seat of the Dutch government. So early one morning, my friends and I along with Wilhelmina as guide went to tour the city and I noticed that certain sections of the town were heavily damaged from aerial bombardment. Later on, I learned that Hitler had designated the city part of the Atlantic Wall fortress and also used it as VI and V2 staging area for rockets into England and Antwerp.

In the centre of the city, near the royal palace, the boulevards were filled with Allied soldiers and black marketers who sold stolen goods for cartons of cigarettes. As the day wore on, we walked to a less commercial part of town where an enormous crowd had gathered and chanted as if it were a sports match. Wilhelmina warned us that we should go no further, but we pushed into the crowd.

“Stay close to me,” she cautioned.

When the scene came into focus, I was horrified and terrified. The crowd dragged women up onto a wooden platform, where they roughly shaved their heads and doused them with orange paint.

“What are they screaming?” I asked.

Wilhelmina explained, “They are not good words; they are very cruel words to describe a Dutch woman.’’

The women on the platform were being beaten while the crowd laughed at their plight. I thought it was ferocious and barbaric punishment for having a German boyfriend. The crowd’s rage sickened me as I saw more young women beaten and tortured by this group of vigilantes. It reminded me of the picture books I had seen of France during the revolution when justice was in the hands of mobs and blood soaked the streets like rain water.

Wilhelmina tugged my sleeve and nervously said, “We must go now.”

I was about to leave with her when the crowd began to chant at us.

“Why are they doing that?” I asked.

“Don’t ask; let’s get out of here,” Robbie said.

A group of men in the crowd, turned and saw us, screamed curses at us in Dutch and then broke free of the hooligan mass and charged at us.

“Run!” Wilhelmina cried out.

We quickly dispersed and ran up the street and past stunned bystanders. We found a side street and turned onto it. The mob quickly followed us, and the sound of their wooden shoes hitting the narrow cobbled streets sounded like a charge of horses. Out of breath, we found another side street where a shop owner standing outside noticed our distress. He waved us inside. Quickly, he closed the shutters and put his fingers to his lips. Wheezing, we heard the angry mob rush past us and down the street.

“What was that about?” I asked, petrified and shaken?

“Some people in the town are very angry at the British because last month your RAF dropped bombs on us and killed five hundred innocent people,” responded Wilhelmina.

“We were dropping bombs on this town?” I asked, puzzled.

“Yes, bombs. They thought they were hitting a V2 site; instead they just killed a lot of Dutch boys and girls. The next day, you Tommies dropped leaflets that said England was very sorry for the damage they had caused. But for the mothers who buried their children, they still can’t forgive you for killing their families,” she said accusingly.

As March rains readied the continent for spring, the Allies prepared to take the war into the heart of Germany with a concentrated military attacks on both the eastern and western fronts. By the first week of April, Vienna was encircled by soviet forces while in East Prussia the red army blasted its way through Prussian cities on a merciless march to Berlin. Generals, politician and ordinary young men like me believed that Hitler and his Nazi’s followers were prepared to fight to the last bullet, the last man everywhere in Germany.

On the western front, American and British forces breached the Rhine River, and our armies fought their way towards Munich in the south and Hamburg in the North. Along the way Buchenwald, Dachau, and other concentration camps were liberated and men with Kodak cameras recorded for news reel consumption and for history; bull dozers pushing the corpses of the victims of Nazism into mass burial pits. However, no film or language was able to describe the evil and hollowness that was uncovered in these camps as they were extermination factories for Hitler’s final solution- the planned extinction, of the Jewish race. In total, six million Jews were murdered by Hitler and his followers with technocratic efficiency.

The scope of Hitler’s hatred was so immense that not only did he sanction the destruction of the Jews, but also ordered the elimination of Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, Gays, Communists and anyone that defied his rule. In the end, his enmity metastasized to include the German people who he deemed unworthy of life because they lacked the will to continue the war to its bitter end.

After five years of war, Germany, its cities, its industries, its cultural landmarks lay in ruins from war in the air and battles on the land. Her capital Berlin was ravaged by a Red Army assault that turned the metropolis into a charnel house.

In the end as soldiers, boys and old men were slaughtered in close quarter combat; Hitler shot himself in his command bunker situated deep below the unrecognizable streets of the German capital, rather than face the wrath of the Russians.

The following day, we were ordered to proceed into Germany and assume control of an airfield in Hamburg. I was sorry to be going because I had gotten use to Wassenaar.

At the moment when I was just about to board my lorry and leave, Wilhelmina arrived.

“Harry,” she cried out, waving.

I smiled and I was pleased that, she had come to see me off and I told her so.

Wilhelmina trembled and said with deep emotion, “I have something for you, Harry.”

She presented me with an exquisite gold and silver pen and pencil set.

“It is so you can write me.”

“I will,” I said.

I kissed her on the cheek and said “I will never forget you.”

Robbie called out with his hands cusped around his mouth, “All aboard, who’s going aboard to Hull, Halifax, and Hell.”

“I have to go,” I told her, breaking away from her smile and her unharmed life in this oasis surrounded by privation.

Chapter Fifteen

Hamburg

The Road to Hamburg was a long and melancholic journey that carried me across a desolate countryside and onto a dual carriage way that was littered with migrating, dishevelled refugees. In every direction I looked, I was presented with ruin, carnage caused by this war. It made me morose because I thought nothing can heal this wound that was around mankind’s soul. In that world suffering was infinite and human kindness was rationed.

I wasn’t political, but I knew that something had to change after the war; civilization just couldn’t go on like this, where the weak were at the mercy of the powerful. I realized that even in Britain we had to change so that people like me might get a chance to get a proper education, a decent job, and a life that was worth living.

Our convoy halted at the border so that we could stretch our legs and eat lunch. While we collected our grub, an officer informed us that on the previous night, at precisely 18:20, Allied Forces accepted the surrender of all German armies that were in the northern part of Germany. However, the rest of the Third Reich still continued to fight – even with Berlin and Vienna gutted and under Russian control.

“Does this mean the war is over?” somebody asked.

“No,” replied the officer, “but it means that we should be safe to assume our new command without fear of attack by German forces.”

My mates and I found a quiet area and ate our meal and drank lukewarm tea while making small talk about our new assignment in Hamburg. We also discussed whether the Nazis, even with Hitler dead, would make a last but bloody stand before being smashed into Valhalla by the Russians on the east and us on the west.

After a while, our conversation drifted into the silent fields, and we quietly reflected to ourselves about our past, present, and future. All around us, I felt spring return as the air was rich with the scent of lilac blossoms and the horrors witnessed in the morning dissipated like the smoke burning off the end of my cigarette.

I listened to cattle lowing in a far off meadow, and then I turned my attention to the nearby River Rhine. I watched its swift current ebb and flow around scuttled barges and damaged bridges and thought of the British soldiers who had died forging it only a short time ago. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer of thankfulness for my survival, but suddenly the calm around me was broken by frantic screams of men in distress.

“What is it?” asked Clementine with alarm. “Are the Germans on the other side?

“I don’t think so,” I said, “but let’s investigate.”

So, I picked up my rifle and made my way to the water’s edge, where a crowd from our unit had gathered. I pushed my way through the throng, and at the river’s bank I discovered what all the commotion was about: a sergeant had just pulled two drowned men from the water who were part of our unit.

“Mad bastards,” said the sergeant in an angry voice. “They must have been a bunch of mad bastards to go for a swim in this river after the Germans dumped all their ordinances and their vehicles into the drink to make it a hazard for shipping.”

Not long after the dead men were pulled from the water, we resumed the trek towards our new base. As we sped through Germany, I felt the warm sun on my face and observed the endless columns of captured Wehrmacht prisoners marching along the side of the road to POW camps.

It was late in the afternoon when I saw for the first time the ruined city of Hamburg. It was a tortured mess of rubble, bomb craters, burned out buildings, wrecked cathedrals, and homeless troglodytes. The city looked like it had been put to the sword by the crusaders, but its destruction was caused by an RAF air attack in 1943 that was so brutal it caused a catastrophic firestorm.

At the raid’s peak, 133 miles of street footage burned as hurricane force winds swept fire across the city and consumed ten square kilometres of apartments, shops, hospitals, and civilian homes. Two years later, as we drove through the ruins like Romans marching past Carthage, it still smelled of fire and the decaying bodies of the thousands who were entombed underneath shattered buildings.

As our convoy snaked its way through the downtown core and towards our base that was located in Fuhlsbüttel, a northern suburb of Hamburg, I was quiet as I tried to absorb the sheer enormity of what I’d witnessed. I realized I’d never seen a city so horribly damaged; literally wiped off the face of the map, and it made me sick to my stomach, but I still hated the Germans for what they had done to Britain during the Blitz or to Holland under their brutal occupation that caused “the hunger winter.”

So, I was glad that when we arrived at our billet we were confined to base because I didn’t want to see any more horrors that day or confront anyone from the so called master race. Our restrictions to the airport compound remained in effect until the eighth of May, when we were paraded, in dress uniforms to Fuhlsbüttel’s main square to commemorate Germany’s capitulation. A wooden platform had been constructed, which was in front of us and crammed with a military band, RAF officers, our Wing Commander, and padre.

While we stood at attention, I heard the wind whisper through the linden trees and discerned songbirds in the distance. It was deathly quiet except for the sound of a stray dog barking on a side street who was perhaps displeased with the change in masters. On the dais, an officer strode over to the microphone and tapped it, causing feedback to revolve across the square. He introduced the padre, who asked us to bow our heads for those that had died in this brutally long conflict.

I found it ironic that we marked the end of this war in the same manner as its beginning: with a speech, a prayer, and a benediction. Afterwards, we sang God Save the King and concluded with three cheers for Britain, The RAF, and our unit. Finally, a military band played We’ll Meet Again, and the men in formation broke into song.

“Don’t know when, don’t know how, but we’ll meet again…”

Our wing commander congratulated us for a job well done, as well as our commitment to Britain and freedom. Finally, we were dismissed with a blessing that God would keep our country safe. The ceremony was like a school leaving because there was nostalgia for shared memories and happiness at the thought of a new beginning.

At the conclusion of the service, an officer invited us to a victory party across the road, which caused us to applaud and cheer. Once we were dismissed, my mates and I walked over to the building, a primary school, where the victory party was held. Entering the school, we made our way to the gymnasium, which had been hastily decorated with streamers and pictures of the royal family and Churchill.

The bar was an Aladdin’s cave of looted drink from a Wehrmacht officer’s mess; it included calvados, French champagne, German wine, beer, and schnapps. We were told by the barman, “all the beer and all the food is on the ouse today cuz of the end of the war.”

I drank copious amounts of beer while I pounded the table to music played by an RAF band forced to entertain witless wireless operators and their ilk. As there were few women in attendance, airmen danced with other airmen in abandon and youthful joy. They knew that they now stood a chance to die in their beds as old men, decades hence. The day wore on while the beer, the wine, the calvados, and the schnapps were poured and drank in a ceaseless torrent, like a race to Lethe. Endless sentiments were espoused.

“No, I was the better friend.”

“No, he was the biggest shit.”

Others on the table made blind promises. “As soon as I’m de-mobbed, I’ll marry her.”

The heat inside the schoolhouse singed our words, which were now slurred and full of trite sentimentality. However, everyone there and everyone at every other Victory in Europe celebration knew that a day like this comes once in a lifetime. We were part of history, just as much as those who had lived through the Penopolesian War, the Hundred Years War, the Napoleonic War and the Great War. Whatever happened to us in our individual lives, this first day of peace and the emotions it created would be embedded in our consciousness until we were dead and buried.

The band never seemed to stop playing, and they appeared to know only five, maybe six tunes. Every time I was conscious of their melody making; it was Roll out the barrel being beaten to death by a tuba and a bass drum.

I went outside to get some air, as I was feeling sweaty and confused. With heavy hands, I felt through my tunic for my lighter, which I could not find. Propped up against the outside wall of the school was another airman with a cigarette burning down on his unconscious lips. I pulled the fag away from him and uselessly attempted to light my cigarette from his, but my hands could not make the connection.

“Sod it,” I slurred to myself and started smoking the passed out airman’s fag.

It was now dark, and in the streets I heard catcalling and whistling from drunken servicemen. I discerned stray gunfire in the distance, from RAF men discharging their guns in the air. I drunkenly lurched away from the school to have a piss against another building. After I buttoned up my trousers, I stumbled around the square and felt joyous at being alive, at being young at having a chance for a future. In the shadows I saw Clementine, and I beckoned him over. He approached sheepishly.

“We did it, old chum, we did it, and we lived to see the war finished. Brilliant, isn’t it?”

“It is, Harry,” he responded. “It really is good to be alive.”

“Have a drink with me, Clementine.”

“Can’t,” he responded. “I’ve got things to do,” he added in a sober tone.

“Do? What the fuck do you have to do except drink with me?”

“I’m looking for stray dogs,” he noted mysteriously and left me.

I returned to the schoolhouse and sat down at my table. I felt very drunk, and the room spun while the gymnasium’s interior resembled a kaleidoscope to my eyes. Other people’s words were as intelligible as rapidly transmitted Morse code. Slow down, I silently begged the room.

Jack and Taffy took one look at my jellyfish appearance and noted, “You’ve had your chips. VE Day is done for you, mate.”

They carried me back to base as if my body had been found wounded on a battlefield. To their laughter, they had to stop to let me vomit in a row of bushes. Back at the airfield, they dumped me into my bed. Hours later, I felt damp across the right side of my face and thought I must have passed out in a puddle of beer. But I hadn’t because when I opened my eyes, I discovered I was face first in an open urinal. I was taking shallow breaths of stale piss and wondered how I got into this mess. I lay there until I heard the voice of a sergeant major above me.

“Lad, unless you get up right now, a wee bit of Scottish rain is going to fall onto your head.”

I rolled over and stood up slowly, as I was unsteady on my feet.

“Get cleaned up,” he said to me. “The war might be over, but not your time in the RAF, and there is work still to be done.”

Chapter Sixteen

Love in the Time of Occupation

The peace that came to Europe in 1945 was not quiet; it was loud, chaotic, imperfect, and sometimes deadly, but it was a damn sight better than war for most of us. Even the Germans didn’t complain, or at least not to their occupiers about the peace, despite their hardships, their hunger, and their grief. They took peace as it came and set to the task of reclaiming their shattered communities that had been bombed back to the Dark Ages. Teams of women scoured bomb sites and cleared them brick by brick of debris, while their fathers, brothers, and husbands were de-Nazified behind barbed wire encampments by American and British political officers.

For the vanquished Germans, their lives were as cheap as chips, and whether one lived or died depended on luck and street smarts because misfortune was always a step ahead of the defeated master race. The streets of Hamburg were rife with refugees, orphans, and spivs, and the only law that was enforced was that of the jungle: eat or be eaten. The city was awash in fly-by-night black markets where everything was for sale, from sex to family heirlooms, and the only currencies accepted were cigarettes, coffee or precious metal.

On every street corner in Hamburg, there was corruption, larceny, greed, and raw desperation as people tried to keep afloat in this brutal post-war world. Beneath shattered street lights and fire-scorched building facades, the German citizens of Hamburg bartered what was left of their souls to cynical Allied soldiers. Too much blood had been spilt in this war and too many innocents had been sacrificed during this conflict for the Allies to show mercy to Germany. In fact, both Britain and America agreed that Germany was to be neutered and stripped of its industrial might and its citizens reduced to agricultural chattel so as to prevent them from ever again becoming a military threat to the civilized world.

At the beginning of my stay in Hamburg, I agreed with those that thought Germans were evil, and I distrusted and despised the lot of them. I hated them for the Holocaust. I despised them for suffering they had caused in Holland and every other country they had conquered and I never hesitated to demonstrate my loathing for them.

But after I saw one too many half-starved, saucer-eyed German kid who reminded me too much of myself and my hardscrabble past, I stopped hating them. I started to understand that all Germans weren’t Nazis. From then on, I judged Germans by their individual merit and left the responsibility for their collective guilt to moral philosophers. It was time, I thought, that I learned for myself who these people really were, so I started to acquaint myself with the German language.

However, the more I travelled down the rabbit hole of life in an Occupation Zone, the more I feared being sent back to Britain as a civilian. Demobilization was my inevitable fate because the RAF just didn’t need the excessive manpower in peacetime. In fact some members of my unit were sent packing almost right after we arrived. Gradually, even my mates started to go home.

Robbie was the first to leave, and he went without sentiment. “ If you ever get to Wigan,” he told me, “you know you’ve taken the wrong turn.”

After he left, I missed his company, but his departure only reinforced my conviction that I didn’t want to return to prospect-less Halifax. I wanted something more for my life than a rock and chips existence. However, I think three quarters of Britain was also of the same mind because when Churchill’s coalition government collapsed and a General Election was called, the majority of the country cast their ballot for the Labour Party, including me.

I reasoned that Britain should no longer be ruled by the few who enslaved the many to a lifetime of poverty and hopelessness. I thought it was about time that ordinary citizens of my country, like me, deserved the right to work for decent wages, the right to live in proper housing, the right to free medical care and to a decent education. In short, I demanded the right to live my life with dignity and purpose, which was something that had been denied me and millions of other British citizens before the war.

Still, Clement Attlee’s absolute victory over Churchill, the patrician class, and the older order didn’t spur me to leave Germany and resume my life as a manager at Grosvenor’s grocers because the owner informed me by letter that my place had been taken by a conscientious objector while I was away and in uniform. The government might have changed, but the way of doing business hadn’t, so it was best to bide my time in the RAF. Besides, my sister wrote and warned me that despite the change in government, rationing was still in effect, housing non-existent, and the North of England was a dog-eat-dog world for anyone who wasn’t well connected.

Despite the hardship many Britons faced, my friends one by one chose home over the RAF, which always guaranteed you a meal, a bed, and the security of a weekly pay packet. When Brian left, I gave him some coins wrapped in a handkerchief and reminded him of that day during training when he plunged into the River Calder and told him I didn’t know what I was going to do now that all my mates were leaving.

He said, “You should head home because that is where everyone’s heart should be.”

I lied and said, “How right you are,” but I knew that since the great famine of the Great Depression, my heart had been broken and home was where I could lay my head and feel my stomach full.

After Brian left, there were only Taffy, Clementine, and Jack Bruton, and they were all determined to go home as soon as possible. But in the meantime, we continued to drink at a local club and enjoy our remaining time together over a beer at the NAFFI. I told my mates, “You know what? I am going to stay on.”

“You’re joking,” responded Bruton while Clementine laughed.

“No,” I said, “it’s no joke. I’m staying because, as they say, ‘It is better the devil you know.’”

Taffy looked at me suspiciously and said, “Life before the RAF must have been no picnic for you if you think this is paradise.”

Only Clementine was in agreement with me because he, too, wanted to stay on, but for more motives of profit rather than survival. He believed he had found a lucrative business in requisitioning Volkswagens and selling them to buyers in Britain. However, the government had banned their importation so as not to depress the domestic car market. Clementine was not deterred, as he had devised an idea for us to take a fleet of VWs and drive them across the North Sea in winter. He was under the impression that the entire sea froze from Germany to England during the month of January. He wanted me and a team of drivers to make a seven-hundred-mile trek across chilled arctic waters until we reached the beaches at Bridlington, where we were to drive them ashore and sell them. No one would be the wiser, he reasoned, as we were coming by sea.

After I explained to him that the North Sea didn’t freeze over, he grew despondent and requested immediate demobilization as he said he “had bigger fish to fry on Civy Street.”

As more and more of my mates departed, I took to exploring the ravaged city of Hamburg and the streets around our airport. One day, I loitered outside one of the makeshift black markets in Fuhlsbüttel. In front of the bazaar was a young woman who had jet black hair that fell flirtatiously to her shoulders. It looked like she was in the market trading cloth to buy meat for her dinner. I watched her skilfully negotiate with the mobster who ran the bazaar. From my vantage, the black marketer tried to cheat the woman over the value of her fabric, but she held her ground and her body language intimated that she was uncompromising and not going to yield. Eventually, the seller relented and traded the portion of torn meat for an equal amount of torn cloth, and the young woman left triumphant. The woman strode up the strand like a carefree schoolgirl who had just aced her examinations.

I was across the street, and I do not know why, but I began to follow her. I broke into a jog to catch up to her. She must have heard my footsteps because she stopped and turned around to face me; she looked startled, but not alarmed by my actions. I introduced myself in imperfect German, which I had picked up by spending an inordinate amount of time in German cafés talking to the barmaids.

“Frauline,” I asked, “could I carry your bags and escort you home?”

She stopped and surveyed me to see if I looked dangerous and asked, “Are you Canadian?”

“No, I am British.”

“Gut, you may take my bags up to the next street, but you can come no further.”

I tagged closely beside her. I found out that her name was Elfriede and she lived with her mother. She did not seem interested in knowing my name, but I told it to her anyway. She laughed and said, “You Englanders are always Tom, Dick, or Harry.” We reached the end of the street, and she said, “Well, Harry, this is your stop. Danke, for being so kind, danke, for your company. Now, I must go home.”

I felt I needed to see her again. Frantically, I pleaded for another meeting. She hesitated and then responded, “All right, Tom, Dick, or Harry, I will see you next week on Sunday at the park. Bring lunch for four because my girlfriends will be with me.”

Elfriede turned and disappeared up the street, and for the rest of that long and impatient week her words lingered like perfume to my ears.

I was able to convince Taffy and two other airmen to accompany me. Taffy was sceptical and dubious and kept on repeating the same warning: “She’ll never show up, mate.”

I purloined supplies from our cookhouse for the luncheon, and I made sure we had an excess of smoked meat, cheeses, and good Riesling wine. As all things in Fuhlsbüttel, the park was not far from our billets. We walked eagerly to the park, and I was insistent with them that the raven-haired girl was mine. Taffy responded, “What if they all turn out to be dark-haired?”

“Well, then I guess they are all mine.”

When we arrived Elfriede was there with her friends. The women lazed in the sun like elegant cats in a luxurious garden, and they stared up at us as if we had disturbed their rest and sanctuary.

“Guten Tag,” I said reverently to Elfriede and her companions.

Elfriede took off her sunglasses and introduced her friends nonchalantly.

“Please sit down and join us,” she said.

On the ground, we spread out a tablecloth and placed out our lunch. I opened the bottle of wine and poured a glass for everyone, and we began to dine. It was a long, sensuous meal filled with broken conversation in indecipherable German and English. I watched Elfriede, in-between our laughter and light-hearted conversation devour cheese and savour the wine. Around us in the park were small groups of Germans who were enjoying the free sunshine but were too destitute to eat a meal. Elfriede suggested we share our dessert with two small boys playing near us.

She called them over and fed them a portion of our cake, which they hungrily devoured, starved of sweets from years of war. With our meal finished and our wine bottle emptied and lying on its side beside us, Elfriede invited me to walk alone with her.

For a short time, while we walked, Elfriede made small talk about the park, the weather, and the meal until she asked me suspiciously, “I need to know: are you one of the terror bombers that murdered my city?”

“No,” I replied. “I was on the ground on manoeuvres and far away from harm when those raids occurred. But if you saw what Germany did to Holland and Belgium, you might not call them terror bombers.”

“I know,” she said softly, “but underneath the rubble, my friends and my schoolmates are buried. So I am not going to be your friend if you did such things to my beautiful Hamburg.”

I sheepishly walked beside her as she was, for me, utterly unique. I had never met anyone who embodied such intelligence, class, and sensuality; like a child, I was in awe of her beauty and what I thought was an exotic upbringing.

Elfriede recounted to me some fragments about what life was like for her in Germany before and during the war. “My mother and father had a love affair but never married, so I was born out of wedlock. It was a hard time for my mother when I was a baby; my father couldn’t support us, and I was sent to live with a foster family. But my Mutti’s a survivor, and she found another man to take care of her during the war.”

Elfriede grew quiet and said, “You know, my mother and I fight like cats and dogs, but she’s the best because she went through hell for me.”

Elfriede then ran ahead of me and stopped and said sadly, “I hate talking about the past because it is dead, and there is nothing that can change it. The present, however, can always bring something new and wonderful. Besides, there is no past for Germany anymore; there is only now and tomorrow. Give me a cigarette,” she asked politely, and I lit both of us one. Elfriede inhaled on the cigarette and said, “It tastes good...it tastes like peace.” She smiled and said, “We should get back to my friends, or they will think we have run off and got married.”

As she put out her cigarette, Elfriede said, “If you like, you can take me out again. Just remember, I don’t want any hearts broken, mine or even yours. So come visit me, take me for dinner, take me dancing. You can even take me to the moon, and we will see what happens; maybe there will be sparks, or maybe nothing. ”

Afterwards, I walked back to base with Taffy and the other two airmen. I asked Taffy how his time went with the other girls.

“Bit of a waste,” he answered. “They liked chocolate more than me. None of them have heard of Wales. What about you, Harry?”

“I think I’ve finally left Bradford and Boothtown road behind me.”

“What?” Taffy asked, puzzled.

“Nothing,” I whispered.

When I got back to the airbase, I wrote a letter to my sister Mary:

Do you remember a time when we were small, fed, and happy? Do you remember a time, as children, when we weren’t scared and lonely? I don’t. I no longer want to remember hunger, abandonment, and fear of violence. I want a meaningful life, and I think I have found someone who shares my dream. I have decided to join the peacetime RAF and remain in Germany for as long as possible.

Hope you are well, happy, and free.

Your ever-loving brother,

Harry

<<<<>>>>

Go back to Contents

Table of Contents

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter One  The Beginning

Chapter Two  Birth and Death

Chapter Three  Bradford

Chapter Four  Arrivals and Departures

Chapter Five  Sowerby Bridge

Chapter Six  King Cross

Chapter Seven  Moving Out

Chapter Eight  The Phony War

PART TWO

Chapter Nine  Square-bashing at Padgate

Chapter Ten  St. Athan, Wales

Chapter Eleven  White Waltham

Chapter Twelve  Chigwell

Chapter Thirteen  Invasion

Chapter Fourteen  Europe

Chapter Fifteen  Hamburg

Chapter Sixteen  Love in the Time of Occupation