What Christmas was like for my generation during the Great Depression

It was December 1930, and the Great Depression had settled upon Britain with the virulence of a medieval plague that only targeted the poor, the vulnerable and the struggling middle class.

As the cold weather closed in upon us, I traversed the streets of my neighbourhood hawking beer from my barrow and feeling an immense loneliness because I knew there was no adult who was going to rescue me from the hell of my waking world.

When Christmas morning came that year, I awoke like too many children across Britain with hunger in my belly and the realisation that there was no Father Christmas for the poor. I remember crying in anger and desperation. My dad tried to calm my agitation as best he could by hugging me and saying: “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 a few bits of penny sweets that I ate for my breakfast. Afterwards, I went down to the cramped room my mother shared with her boyfriend. She told me there’d be no Christmas lunch but, because we were Catholics, the church would provide us bairns with a bit of turkey and some comfort and joy down in a hall near the cathedral.

In a state of subdued despair, I attended mass and gave thanks like all of the other indigent children to the mercy of Jesus and his benevolent church, which was about to feed us.

Afterwards, we were led into a gymnasium where a Father Christmas with a tubercular cough gave me a pair of socks and an orange speckled with decay.

After I finished my Christmas meal, I walked home with my sister to our doss and tried to avoid looking into the windows of the houses that were along the way. I suppose I was afraid that I would see families unlike mine able to afford and celebrate the season. At home, I found my father upstairs in the attic, chewing on a pipe starved of tobacco, reading a book in the grey light leaking into the room from a small window. He smiled at me and said, “Happy Christmas, lad. Sorry there weren’t much for thee and thy sister. Next year, hey son, next year.”

However, by the first week of 1931, my dad was forced to move out of our lives at the request of my mum’s new boyfriend. One morning he was with us in the garret and by evening when I returned from work at the off-licence, he was gone.

He wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye because, I guess, my mum believed that it was best for him to just leave. Five weeks shy of my eighth birthday I was told to forget him as if he had never existed or had died. So, he became like my dead sister Marion: a ghost that haunted both my waking and sleeping life.

Now in the twilight of my life, I know why my dad left my sister and me in January 1931 without even a wave goodbye. It’s because he realised he couldn’t feed his wife or children; he left our dosshouse in the hope that without him we’d have a better chance to survive.

I never saw my dad again and during my adolescence didn’t know for sure if he was alive or dead; he just disappeared into the wastelands of Bradford that were ravaged by the sadism of unemployment and virulent poverty. 13 years after he left, I was informed in a letter from my sister that our dad had died. It was 1943 and I was stationed with my RAF unit in the south of England.

After reading the contents of that short letter I got drunk alone in a pub. I tried to mourn a man who I had been told to forget about as a boy, and it hurt me so much to think that he’d been betrayed by everyone, including me.

After the war, his two sisters tracked me down to a flat I shared with my wife in Halifax. They’d come to give me my inheritance. You see, he’d died a pauper, but had asked his sisters before he succumbed to pneumonia to sell the painting of their father and give the proceeds to my sister and myself. He had been dead many years by the time they had found me, but they wanted me to have my share of his legacy, which amounted to ten shillings.

Those coins when I held them felt as precious to me as a king’s ransom. These horrors of economics, of betrayed love, I relate to you are not unique to me – millions of my generation suffered the same or worse during the Great Depression.

It is what mobilised us to fight and build a Britain we could be proud of and where our children could flourish after the Second World War. My only hope is that the similar pain that many people experience today will anger them as much as it did me, and help forge a new nation from the ashes of grave injustice.

‘Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future’ by Harry Leslie Smith was published by Little, Brown on 14 September (£14.99 in hardback)