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Inside Hoyland Working Men’s Club, Harry Leslie Smith is talking about his childhood in the town, close to Barnsley, South Yorks. “It was a terrible experience for a young child,” says the 95-year-old writer and activist.

“We lived in slums and dosshouses. Most evenings my sister and I would go to bed with growling stomachs and no supper.”

For the past 18 months, we have been retracing George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier”, telling the stories we have found along the writer’s route in the Mirror.

Barnsley was Orwell’s last stop. And the places he describes so vividly in his iconic book were the homes Harry lived in throughout his childhood, after his father was injured in a mining accident.

Today, on Orwell’s 115th birthday, we are launching a multimedia interactive story of that trip. It is also the eighth anniversary of David Cameron and George Osborne announcing the “Age of Austerity”, the moment gains for working-class people went into their steepest decline since the Second World War.

(Image: Daily Mirror) (Image: Mirrorpix)

“After my childhood, things improved,” Harry says. “But now I fear we are going back to those times.”

The Gawber Pit that Orwell went down closed in 1988, and the new mines are warehouses shut off from the sky.

The town’s biggest employer is ASOS. Joanne Goddard, 24, worked for the clothing company as a £7.55-an-hour picker at their distribution centre in Grimethorpe, South Yorks, until, she says, she was sacked after collapsing with stress.

Her husband Joe Beckett, 27, did the night shift. Both worked via an agency called Transline, later sacked by ASOS. “You’re nothing to them, it’s slave labour,” Joe says.

(Image: Ben Lack Photography Ltd)

“One time, I rang in to let them know I was going to be off because our daughter was in hospital with appendicitis and the manager told me he needed a picture of my daughter in hospital as proof.

“So I had to take a photo of my sick child, lying in bed, and send it in.

“We had a miscarriage and their reaction was the same. They wanted proof. I’m not sure what they wanted me to show them really. Why would anyone lie about something like that? They said, ‘fine, we’ll let you know if you’re needed again’ – threatening me with the sack three days before Christmas.

“When I went back, they said, ‘you’re a man, why do you need time off? They’re heartless. They want robots not humans. I still went back. I agreed to work Christmas Day night because it was triple pay. No one wants to miss out on Christmas with the family, especially after the miscarriage, but we needed the money, so I agreed.

“When we got paid in January, the extra money wasn’t there. They said that because I’d been off for the miscarriage, I wasn’t entitled to the extra pay.”

In one of our other stories, Arron Baldwin, 25, from Barnsley, who was at ASOS for four years, says working at the company turned him from a “youthful, optimistic proud individual into a clinically depressed, demotivated and pessimistic mess”. ASOS declined to comment on all these stories.

(Image: Bloomberg)

Harry was born in Barnsley, in 1923, his crib a drawer in a dresser, 13 years before Orwell came to the town to interview miners. Now, he is lost in the memory of how his mum would send him, aged five, and his sister Marion, aged three, out to find scraps of coal.

Marion died in the workhouse infirmary of tuberculosis at the age of 10 because Harry’s parents couldn’t afford the doctor. The site of the paupers’ pit where she was buried in 1926 lies unmarked beneath Barnsley Hospital.

Harry remembers “tramping to school and my stomach was giving me so much pain that all I could think of was the small glass of milk waiting at school for children like me”.

Yet in Barnsley in the winter of 2018, we find children still facing the physical pain of hunger. In the 800-year-old market, the Rose Vouchers for Fruit and Veg Project is helping families on low incomes buy fresh food.

A little girl in a pushchair smiles as she shoves a banana bought with a voucher into her mouth.

(Image: Collect Unknown)

Join the Wigan Pier Project For the past 18 months we’ve been retracing Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier through Coventry, Birmingham, Stourbridge, Wolverhampton, Penkridge, Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield, Manchester, Wigan, Liverpool, Sheffield, Barnsley and Leeds and published over 120 stories. You can read these stories, and watch six 5-minute films, in our immersive telling of our journey at www.wiganpierproject.com. New stories are being added all the time.

The slum where Harry lived has long been demolished, but he recalls: “The houses weren’t really homes... They were just places for workers to rest between gruelling shifts at the pit.

“The country was run by the people who owned the mines and the ordinary worker wasn’t seen as a human being. He was an asset used by the companies to feather their wealthy nests.

"With places like ASOS I have a terrible feeling we are going backwards.”

He looks up at the sky. “But I still have hope. People have an inner strength that drives us to survive.”

After a year’s journey across the UK, through foodbanks, homeless shelters, freezing, damp homes, advice centres, bus stops, parks and shopping centres, Harry sums up our modern-day Road to Wigan Pier.

Decades of post-industrial decline – made worse by brutal Tory austerity since 2010 – mean deep poverty has resurfaced in our former industrial heartlands.

Yet somehow, 95 years after being born into Orwell’s bitter Barnsley, Harry still has enough hope for us all.