The courage to live

Dirty old town

Ordsall, Salford, UK 1938. Imagine the harsh life this grandmother would have faced. Born in the C19: before women had the vote, when the workhouses thrived on the labour of the poor, well before the welfare state, when the infamous ‘Poor Law’ and the idea of the ‘undeserving poor’ were still commonplace. This grandmother would have lived through the slaughter of WW1, the Spanish flu which killed millions, the general strike and the build up to WW2.

……and we’re terrified of a fucking virus.

Here on a door-step crouches some shoeless child, whose day’s begging has not brought it enough to purchase it even the twopenny bed that its young companions in beggary have gone to.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I — The Metropolitan Districts.

The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I — The Metropolitan Districts.