A Letter From Harry: Why the World We Built Is Falling Down, and What We Can Do to Save It by Harry Leslie Smith

Author:Harry Leslie Smith [Smith, Harry Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays, Biography, Letters, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Collections, Political Science, History, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781848317277
Google: 6fCmAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22956248
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2014-06-05T09:49:33+00:00

IV. Work

On the rare occasions when my mum wasn’t blaspheming the austerity measures of Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, she boasted to anyone that cared to listen that I was like a flash of phosphorous in a black coal pit: ‘My boy, Harry, he’s a wonder when it comes to knowing what’s between the cover of books. Given half a chance, he could become a right good scholar.’

My mother’s notions about my scholastic ability were based more on fancy than fact. At school, I was always behind in my lessons because during childhood my family were like early nomads, always in search of a safe place to eat and sleep. It was a lonely existence, except that I found pleasure, escape and enlightenment in reading books. My father encouraged this activity because libraries were abundant even in poor neighbourhoods and membership was a few pennies; another thing we are in danger of losing today. Dad knew that even if I did fall behind at school, reading would keep me from becoming dull and ignorant.

When everything else had been pawned or hawked, my father still held onto a leather-bound set of encyclopaedias called Harmworth’s History of the Ancient World. They were replete with beautiful illustrations and photographs of the Egyptian pyramids, the temples of India, the Parthenon, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. My dad was always kind enough to let me leaf through them. For a small boy those books were like magic, because they transported me far away from the cursed life we led. I was able to let the books lead my imagination to places that were filled with mystery, beauty and wonder.

Unfortunately, whatever intellectual spark I had was savagely blown out by hunger, remorseless poverty and my class, which destined me to work as a horse in a shuck. Besides, by the age of seven our world had become a very desperate place. Much later on in her life, my mother said of those Great Depression years in Bradford that they were ‘like being a rat on a sinking ship. No matter where you hid, the water was going to come and drown you.’

By 1930 everything that we had owned was gone to the pawn shop and my parents still couldn’t pay the rent or put enough food on the table. At the time, my mother claimed that it broke her heart. ‘Got no choice,’ she said. ‘It’s this or the workhouse for us all.’

Shortly afterwards my mum had me indentured to the local off-licence to work as a beer barrow boy. I was just seven, but adults couldn’t find work. However, because there was no wage protection for child labour many young bairns were compelled to scrub floors, work in shops, push market carts, sell their bodies or beg in the streets to keep starvation from taking them and their parents to a premature death. For the children of my era, there was no alternative, it was a work-or-perish existence.

So after school until late in the evenings,

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