On this Monday morning, I am writing against a ticking clock because the first of the month arrives tomorrow, and it will come with a thud of obligations. It’s foggy outside, so it feels more like Sunday than the start of a week taken freshly from its wrappings.

At 7:30 AM, while brushing my teeth in my bathroom, lit by a light bulb that flickers and flashes like the ones I remember from a visit to Havana’s Colina Hotel in 1991, during another era of Cuban economic misery, I fret about the rent. Then bits of memory from this day in 2009 start regurgitating in my mind. It was then that my brother Peter’s health took an irrevocable turn for the worse, and he was rushed back into the hospital he had only been discharged from the day before.

I had begged him not to leave the hospital, as his lungs hadn’t healed from the exploratory surgery he underwent to establish definitively that he had pulmonary fibrosis. The surgery hadn’t gone as well as expected, and the surgical wounds weren’t healing. The hospital had also run out of the adhesive tape used on internal organs to speed recovery. So, the surgeon was waiting for a new delivery of this tape, which he would apply to the lungs in another operation.

Despite my protests to my brother and his doctors that, owing to his schizoaffective disorder, he should remain in hospital, Peter discharged himself and went home to his wife. She had decided to have company over for his return and dinner in celebration. Again, despite my objections and my suggestion that Peter stay with us to recover until his next surgery, I was told not to worry.

But I did.

I wasn’t wrong to, because 17 years ago, on a morning that was also overcast and foggy, my sister-in-law phoned me to say Pete had collapsed on the floor as he prepared for bed. Paramedics arrived and rushed him to the hospital in the city, more than an hour away from their country home. It irritated me, and I said nothing when my sister-in-law said no one had gone to the hospital with him, despite finding this uncaring.

“I’ll go see him now,” I told her.

My sister-in-law responded that she would try to come down in the late afternoon. I gritted my teeth at what I read as nonchalance, rather than considering that it might have been connected to my sister-in-law’s mental health issues.

Before leaving, I told my Dad not to worry and that he could wait at the apartment until I found out exactly what had gone wrong with Peter.

At the hospital, I was informed my brother was in the ICU as his lungs had collapsed, creating subcutaneous emphysema. The air he breathed through an oxygen cannula was also leaking out through the holes in his lungs and accumulating beneath his skin. The nurse at first didn’t want to let me see him because my brother had listed his next of kin as his wife.

Eventually, she relented, and I saw Peter, and he was in a dreadful state. There was so much air beneath his skin that he looked as bloated as a dead sea mammal washed up on shore.

After I said hello and kissed him on the forehead that moved like jelly, Peter asked how he looked.

“I’ve seen you look worse, like when you were 25 and on the lash.”

But it was just bravado; I knew my brother was in a bad state. I was only allowed 10 minutes per hour with my brother, which I did, hour after hour, until his wife arrived late in the afternoon, looking flustered and out of her depth.

When I returned home, I became angry because I still couldn’t comprehend why the two other people at the dinner party who didn’t suffer from mental illness hadn’t accompanied my brother to the hospital. It was also my way of processing what I had feared for the months leading up to my brother’s hospitalisation: that his lung disease was terminal and that he should be getting his affairs in order, specifically what was to be done with his artwork.

Peter, however, would hear none of it because his mental illness produced much anxiety. I told him once he took Clonazepam like they were Maltesers.

When I approached the subject of art preservation, home care and different possibilities for their future, his wife just waved me off with, “Why must you talk so negatively?”

So, I kept quiet when I knew I should have been more insistent.

That night my sister-in-law phoned me after one visit with Peter and seemed blasé about his whole healthcare episode. It was probably a survival technique, but I wasn’t in the mood to be accommodating, and I lost my temper. I told the truth as I saw it and said Peter was dying, or about to, and she had better smarten up, face facts and help her husband.

Although momentarily satisfying, it did more harm than good. She wept, then hung up the phone and called Peter. My brother was fighting for his life in the ICU, but he used his last strength to be a husband and phoned me to give me a bollocking about the way I had treated his wife.

I wasn’t going to argue with Peter, who was struggling for breath, and instead begged for his forgiveness.

The next morning, Peter was airlifted to the hospital that had performed his surgery to attempt to fix the leak. I remember talking to the surgeon after the operation, and he looked remorseful; I’m not sure if that was because he had dismissed my pleas to keep Peter in the hospital or because he couldn’t fix what was now done.

Either way, Peter was placed into an induced coma to help his lungs recover.

It didn’t, and he died six weeks later, conscious but no longer able to speak. In fact, the last time I really heard his voice was when he phoned me from hospital to give me a bollocking.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote this because it is something that has always lurked in my memory. It is a very quick sketch that needs work. In some ways, it explains the impetus for Harry’s Last Stand and my ambition to preserve the legacy of my father and his work. I couldn’t do it for Peter, and all of his artwork sits gathering dust or decaying at the house he once lived in, which is now like Grey Gardens, a crumbling ruin.

I am at the SOS stage for my rent again, hours before the first, and there is $228 outstanding. Not much, but still looking like a bridge too far.

Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and keep me housed. So, if you can, please join with a paid subscription for just £3.50 a month, or take out a yearly or gift subscription. There is also an option to tip, and yearly subscriptions are 40% off. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful.

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Take care,

John

PS: On the upside, once I finish the submission package for The Green and Pleasant Land, it will be sent to publishers. That should happen by Friday, even if it should happen that I don’t make rent.

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It’s only a few more sleeps until Summer slips out before sunrise with the haste of a regretful one-night stand, and September arrives with autumnal confrontation. You want to look back and grab hold of all those ephemeral seconds when you enjoyed yourself and didn’t have to plot ways to survive. But you can’t go back, because the moment is past. By this point, you’re watching it recede as you sit turned towards the rear window of a fast-moving car.

Life has no reverse gear. Forward, forward, forward.

Summer hardly felt present this year.

All through last winter’s brutality, I longed for its return. But when it came, as it does of late, the air was smoky and poisonous from wildfires burning out of control across the northern hemisphere.

Television news looked more like an Irwin Allen disaster film from the 1970s, with endless B-roll of burning forests and towns being consumed by flames.

When the sky wasn’t stained by smoke that had drifted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres from the forest fires, it was sheathed in a heat dome that was as relentless as a fever that won’t respond to paracetamol.

The ground beneath our feet became arid here and in many other parts of the world. Some trees began shedding leaves early, trying to survive the dry earth. The poor do that too, when they pawn their possessions in the hope of surviving neoliberalism’s cost-of-living crisis.

There were days when I found fragments of past summers—in the look of the sky, or the way sunlight stroked calm water in the nearby bay, whose waters, despite the tyrant who lives south of the 49th parallel, flow into Lake Ontario. On those days, I wondered, because I am 62 and living in dangerous times, how many summers are left to me—or to this reality you and I have called society for our entire lives?

Fewer than one would wish for, is my guess. It’s not pessimism that makes me say this or undue negativity, but just the facts before me, arranged with the grimness of a Travelodge complimentary breakfast at 7 AM.

The West is now stuck fast in the amber of fascism. There aren’t many tolerant or progressive enclaves left anywhere in what was once described as the “Free World.” Outside Russia, China and Iran, no governments raise a finger against the military and economic overreach of the USA. I am not sure if it’s fear, moral decay or cynical nihilism that motivates this cowardice.

When Trump’s allies display any defiance of his actions, it’s performative and limited to assuaging citizens who might be concerned their government has become Vichy too soon. Canada is one of the finest practitioners of performative resistance. Mark Carney has hitched Canada to every geopolitical decision Trump has made, from the USA’s blockade of Cuba, which has brought the country to the point of famine, to agreeing that his war with Iran was both just and necessary.

And yet the average Canadian feels well defended by this government, much as the French did under the Third Republic when they built the Maginot Line.

Canada buys much of its military hardware from America but will continue pretending its elbows are up until it is too late. The USA is as steadfast an ally as Jeffrey Epstein was a friend.

So instead of meaningful resistance, Canada will instead get Ontario’s Premier starring in his own version of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, only without Frances McDormand, erecting signs proclaiming, “Lake Ontario. Now and Always,” while selling state infrastructure to American hedge funds.

Everywhere and everyone in power is doing some form of abasement to Trump and the machinery of totalitarianism. The greatest proof of this is the West’s reaction to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Instead of putting its foot down, the West provided Israel with military arms, financial aid and moral cover for the elimination of Palestinians as a people with the right to self-determination.

Our doubling down with Israel has made this not the West’s collective “Vietnam”, but our Götterdämmerung. We no longer have any moral currency that gives us ethical clout among other nations. Our belief system, democratic principles, corporate news media, education systems and much of our creative arts stand for nothing but might makes right.

We can’t extract society from this dysfunctional dystopia, which is both terrifying and banal, until we account for what has been done in the name of Western civilisation in Gaza.

The road ahead into autumn and winter is going to be a brutal slog, and if there is a reckoning on the horizon, it will take, with the gluttony of an all-you-can-eat buffet, the innocent as well as the guilty. We are not even at the end of the beginning, but at least we as individuals walk on the right side of history.

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As always, thank you for reading my Substack posts. Rent for September is due in 48 hours. I am fighting to make sure I can pay it, but I have a shortfall of C$280.

Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and keep me housed. So, if you can, please join with a paid subscription for just £3.50 a month, or take out a yearly or gift subscription. There is also an option to tip, and yearly subscriptions are 40% off. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful.

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Take care,

John

PS: On the upside, once I finish the submission package for The Green and Pleasant Land, it will be sent to publishers. That should happen by Friday.

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Summer Is Sinking Fast

Summer is sinking fast by the bow into the vast, crisp ocean of Autumn. The season’s last Bank Holiday weekend is here, and yet few of us have the luxury of putting the daily grind on a time-out.

Nothing feels the same anymore because it isn’t. The weather has been extreme, and so have our politics, leaving little space for rest or escape.

Our present feels haunted by the past because the errors and corruption of neoliberalism have come home to roost. The wealthiest convinced society that the Welfare State was a needless expense, and now we have income inequality levels that would feel familiar to 1930s working-class citizens. Xenophobia manufactured by the corporate news media, which does the bidding of the 1%, has created Nazi-level hatred against refugees and migrants. It’s a world of Robber Barons, with Trump at the lead. Only yesterday, America’s president announced an energy deal with Venezuela that effectively gives all the profits of that nation’s resources to the USA and its corporations. It may as well have been called the “I Drink Your Milkshake Accords”, in the spirit of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character in There Will Be Blood.

I believe my dad’s past is now our present, which means the future will have to worry about itself until we sort this.

The Harry’s Last Stand project seeks to use my father and his generation’s struggles—and triumphs—as a blueprint to revive a Welfare State fit for the 21st century. Harry Leslie Smith’s unpublished history, The Green & Pleasant Land, is part of that project. I’ve been refining it to meet my dad’s wishes, and it’s now ready to be sent to publishers.

Your support keeps my dad’s legacy alive—and keeps me housed. Please subscribe if you can, share these posts far and wide, and consider the Tip Jar if you’re able, because rent day is near.

Below is another story of my father during a Bank Holiday weekend in 1928, when his family enjoyed a small moment of joy on the eve of the Great Depression.

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A Day at Southport

It felt like the fourth day of creation when my family went to Southport for a day’s adventure during a Bank Holiday. The land around the sea was in firmament, struggling to be formed into a perfect summer’s day. Above me, fat, grey clouds floated like barrage balloons, while seagulls darted between them as deftly as barnstorming pilots. They screeched in pleasure over their acrobatics and their command of the world above the land.

However, once they spotted my mum, dad, sister, and me resting by the sea wall, they spiralled down with menace in their thoughts. A gust of wind thwarted their attempt at harassment, blowing them back towards the horizon.

My mother raised a fist at the birds and promised them hellfire if they dared to shit on her, which made me laugh. She shooed me away, but being five, I ignored her ill temper. Instead, I ran in circles around her, pretending I was one of those majestic birds bestowed with the gift and freedom of flight.

“Pack it in,” my mother urged.

My dad told her to steady on and scooped me up into his giant arms, hardened from years of hewing coal in the pits below Barnsley.

I scanned the deserted beach, wet from the rain, and rested on my father’s shoulders. In the distance, the tide washed against the shore, but the sand seemed to stretch to forever. Far away on the promenade, the noise from a merry-go-round whispered a delightful tune in my ear.

Excitedly, my dad exclaimed,

“The air tastes as fresh as morning! Can’t you smell it, lad? It smells of adventure and freedom.”

Just as a heavy gust of wind blew grit into our eyes, my sister cried out,

“Where is it then, this sea you promised?”

My mother added,

“If we’d gone to Blackpool, there’d be more to do than a march towards the sea. Blackpool has more amusements than Aladdin’s Cave.”

But I held fast to my father’s dogged trek through the cold August sand.

“It’s all right, Da; you’ll show them, won’t ya?”

“That’s right, lad,” said my father optimistically. “It’s not much further. Don’t fret; we’ll be knee-deep in the sea, just like I promised.”

With me riding like a young prince on top of my dad’s shoulders, and my mother and sister in pessimistic tow, we followed a strong scent of salt and fish, hoping to find open water.

Suddenly, my sister cried out,

“What about me? Why can’t I ride up high?”

“Because you are older, lass, and your brother’s legs aren’t as strong as yours,” he said, consoling her.

“Why can’t you carry us both?” she asked defiantly.

“Would that I could, but I just don’t have the strength to lug both of you about,” he replied.

When we reached the shoreline, he took me down from his shoulders and said,

“Remember it well, for there is nothing like a day at the beach.”

When my mother and sister joined us, we stood on the edge, watching the white caps rage atop an angry sea.

It was the only holiday I ever had with my family. The Great Depression was an economic and social drowning of the working classes. I was lucky to have survived it. After the Second World War, because my generation won it with our blood, I found happiness and peace through the Welfare State.

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Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.

The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent. 4 new subscribers should cover it.

Get 40% off for 1 year

A Legacy Nearly Complete

It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.

It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.

I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.

Take care,

John

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Apart from a final read-through, The Green and Pleasant Land is ready to find a publisher. A few small houses are interested, but I hope Icon picks it up, as it complements Love Among the Ruins. Soon, I will find out. I still have to finish the “pitch” package that goes with the manuscript, which is always the most loathsome part of this whole process. But that’s what the next few days are for.

It’s certainly worth the effort, but it has also been emotionally exhausting because this whole endeavour has been going on since 2010 for me. I believe Harry Leslie Smith deserves this final say with The Green and Pleasant Land.

When the book comes out, I will celebrate by finally laying my father, mother, and brother’s earthly remains to rest. I will scatter their ashes on a lake where, long ago, we spent our summer holidays together.

The excerpt below is from a chapter that deals with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. It’s apt because September is near, and our society feels like it is also on the brink of war.

It’s the end of the month, and rent day looms. It is a small gap, but a gap nonetheless.

Cheers,

John

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Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Coming Storm Announced on the Wireless

In 1938, Grosvenor promoted me to assistant shop manager, and for the first time in my life, things were looking up. I had money in my pocket and savings in the bank, albeit never anything more than a pound or two.

As a favour to Mum, I found work at Grosvenor’s for Bill. His main job was making mince in a bathtub above the shop. He liked working up there because he didn’t work well with others. On his own, Bill’s temper only exploded if the owner’s cat sneaked up the stairs and attempted to devour the mince he was making.

With his wages, Bill bought a used wireless that ran on a wet battery, which he lugged to a shop every few days for charging. After that, Bill spent any spare moment he had listening to football or cricket matches whilst puffing on shag cigarettes that clouded the parlour in blue smoke.

But sport took second place in September when Britain was gripped by the Munich Crisis. Chamberlain flew to Munich, desperate to prevent war as Hitler pressed his claim to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. After each BBC news bulletin from Munich during the Hitler-Chamberlain Summit, Bill grumbled and swore the way he did when Grosvenor’s cats got into his mince at the arcade.

“No good will come from this. Fritz is a right bastard. Harry, you’d best decide now which branch of the service you will be joining at 18 because Hitler will have his war with us, if not today, tomorrow.”

During the crisis, Bill put eight-year-old Matt into the Sea Cadets, so that when the time came, my brother would be ready to fight the Nazis. Then in late September Britain sighed with relief when Chamberlain returned from Munich and emerged from his plane at Heston Aerodrome. On its tarmac, the Prime Minister waved a piece of paper to the newsreel cameramen present and proclaimed, “Peace for our time.”

Bill and I felt like we were there because we listened to this bit of history being made on the wireless.

After the news brief, Bill blurted out, “We scraped out of that by the hair of our chinny, chin, chin. But a banging big bloody war is coming, lad.” His talk ended as abruptly as it began when my mother told us both to get off our arses and clean the fireplace grate. Life carried on as if peace might last forever, until 1939 arrived with the thud of a bailiff’s knock.

After the Munich Crisis ended with Britain appeasing Hitler, many people thought the danger had passed. The year trundled on, and Britain for the most part showed its backside to Europe and its problems, especially the growing number of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

The last summer of the 1930s was long and lazy. I worked, chased girls, went to anti-fascist lectures, or loafed with mates in the city parks. I was sixteen, and had begun to free myself of a past that included extreme poverty, hunger, homelessness, the dissolution of my family from death and the Great Depression. Everything we had known and taken for granted disappeared at the end of that summer. The future became a dark landscape of battles, carnage and annihilation.

On September 1st, I was at work, preparing the food displays for the end-of-week customers. At eight o’clock, the arcade opened and lower-middle-class housewives, pensioners and servants of the better off crowded in front of Grosvenor’s counters. The smell of cheese and smoked meats intermingled with eau de toilette and perfumed soap.

Neither the customers nor the workers at the arcade knew that earlier in the morning, when it was still dark, the German army had launched an unyielding assault against Poland.

As I wrapped sliced ham into wax paper for customers, handed their change, made a quick joke, and wished them good day, Stuka bombers tore apart Warsaw, whilst Nazi panzer divisions chewed up the Polish cavalry like it was me grinding meat into mince.

Then, while on a morning cigarette break outside of the arcade, I saw my mate Roy running up to me.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Hitler has invaded Poland.”

I didn’t know what to say except: “I’ve got to get back inside to man the counter.”

It wasn’t until Sunday that the penny dropped for me about how devastating Hitler’s invasion of Poland would be for us in Britain and Europe. At home, Bill, Matt, Mum, and I huddled around the wireless. This time, even my mum stayed quiet as the Prime Minister declared that we were now at war. After he spoke, Mum said, “Chamberlain certainly spilled the milk. We will be mopping this up for a lifetime.”

Moxon said, “We’re in the shit now, lad, we are in the shit.” Outside, I heard neighbours opening their doors as if the cold-water shock of war’s declaration drove them to be with their fellow citizens on the streets.

Within weeks, we were issued national identity cards, which allowed the government to keep a register of where everyone lived, their occupation and age. We were told it was to make our war effort more efficient but Mr Grosvenor said, “It’s what Hitler and Stalin did to their people. With this in place it’s a short bus ride to dictatorship.”

Barrage balloons went up over London but in Halifax only heavy rain clouds blowing in off the moors protected us from German bombers. Someone in government saw fit to sandbag Halifax’s council offices and my mother, while skirting the new fortifications, wondered out loud, “Are they taking the Mickey?” But they weren’t because war had come for all of Britain, and young men were already volunteering for the services and being trained for combat and possible death.

The Phoney War gave Halifax a carnival edge it had never known, blackouts, air raid drills, sandbags, and yet no bombs fell. Like all businesses that owned food warehouses, Grosvenor’s Grocers organised civilian air raid wardens to protect their warehouse against fire and destruction caused by explosives dropped from the sky. My employer recruited me to be one of Grosvenor’s air raid wardens. I was provided with a gas mask, a tin helmet, and buckets of sand to battle against the mighty Nazi Air Force.

The war progressed through its phoney stages while I managed the store, played fireman, and wooed girls at dances on Saturday nights.

I did my air raid warden duties three evenings per week at the company’s warehouse on the moors overlooking Halifax. I scanned the skies watching for the airborne armada that never came for Halifax. But when dawn came, I returned home for a short kip, before my shift started at the Arcade.

In 1940, my sister married an infantryman named Charlie who thought the war would be like a brawl outside a pub. He went off to basic training while she remained at Low Moor, working at the mill. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France. It didn’t go well for our army. Charlie found himself like thousands of others at Dunkirk waiting to be rescued by a flotilla of small boats, while being relentlessly bombed from the air. A shell exploded near him and my sister’s husband suffered shrapnel wounds but Charlie still made it to an evacuation ship on his own two feet.

People who knew Charlie said after he returned from Dunkirk, “he wasn’t right in the head.”

While I waited for the inevitable letter from the government calling me to do battle for the King and bloody country, I couldn’t help but think about what happened to Charlie and wonder if that was going to happen to me?

And yet, I was also drawn to what I thought the war offered me, an escape from a life that was fettered by poverty, limited opportunities and a family too broken to mend.

Alone in my thoughts I wrestled with my past, present and future. Did I want to fight and possibly die? Did I want to sacrifice my life for a country that had made millions destitute in the 1930s and destroyed my family?

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Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.

The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent. 5 new subscribers should cover it.

Get 40% off for 1 year

A Legacy Nearly Complete

It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.

It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.

I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.

Take care,

John

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From the struggles of the Greatest Generation, the modern Welfare State was born, only to be destroyed by neoliberalism over the last four decades.

My father’s experiences in the Second World War were not about being patriotic or dutiful. They were about surviving it and returning to a peacetime that included the construction of a modern Welfare State. It’s evident that the reason why our working-class history during the Second World War was rewritten by popular culture is to keep us obedient in an increasingly unequal and authoritarian society governed for the benefit of its top income earners.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy and me alive and housed is greatly appreciated. With rent day approaching, your assistance is always welcome. If you can, please subscribe because it literally helps pay my rent. But if you can’t, it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. I have also added a tip jar for those who are inclined and able to.

Below is an excerpt from my father’s The Green & Pleasant Land about his experiences at the end of the 1930s as war with Hitler loomed. It’s terrifying that, as this August ends, the West is morally rudderless and sailing towards war with Russia while Trump sabre-rattles against Canada.

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Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Coming Storm Announced on the Wireless

In 1938, Grosvenor promoted me to assistant shop manager, and for the first time in my life, things were looking up. I had money in my pocket and savings in the bank, albeit never anything more than a pound or two.

As a favour to Mum, I found work at Grosvenor’s for Bill. His main job was making mince in a bathtub above the shop. He liked working up there because he didn’t work well with others. On his own, Bill’s temper only exploded if the owner’s cat sneaked up the stairs and attempted to devour the mince he was making.

With his wages, Bill bought a used wireless that ran on a wet battery, which he lugged to a shop every few days for charging. After that, Bill spent any spare moment he had listening to football or cricket matches whilst puffing on shag cigarettes that clouded the parlour in blue smoke.

But sport took second place in September when Britain was gripped by the Munich Crisis. Chamberlain flew to Munich, desperate to prevent war as Hitler pressed his claim to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. After each BBC news bulletin from Munich during the Hitler-Chamberlain Summit, Bill grumbled and swore the way he did when Grosvenor’s cats got into his mince at the arcade.

“No good will come from this. Fritz is a right bastard. Harry, you’d best decide now which branch of the service you will be joining at 18 because Hitler will have his war with us, if not today, tomorrow.”

During the crisis, Bill put eight-year-old Matt into the Sea Cadets, so that when the time came, my brother would be ready to fight the Nazis. But when Chamberlain returned from Munich in late September, we learned there was to be no war, yet. The Prime Minister waved a scrap of paper and proclaimed, “Peace for our time,” to the newsreel cameramen. Bill and I heard the announcement on the wireless.

After the news brief, Bill blurted out, “We scraped out of that by the hair of our chinny, chin, chin. But a banging big bloody war is coming, lad.” His talk ended as abruptly as it began when my mother told us both to get off our arses and clean the fireplace grate. Life carried on as if peace might last forever, until 1939 arrived with the thud of a bailiff’s knock.

After the Munich Crisis ended with Britain appeasing Hitler, many people thought the danger had passed. The year trundled on, and Britain turned its back on Europe and its problems.

The last summer of the 1930s was long and lazy. I worked, chased girls, went to anti-fascist lectures, or loafed with mates in the city parks. I was sixteen, and had begun to free myself of a past that included extreme poverty, hunger, homelessness, the dissolution of my family from death and the Great Depression. Everything we had known and taken for granted disappeared at the end of that summer. The future became a dark landscape of battles, carnage and annihilation.

On September 1, I was at work, preparing the food displays for the end-of-week customers. At eight o’clock, the store filled with customers who were generally servants for the well-to-do, shopping for their masters’ lunch and tea.

They were a silent army of servants, hair wrapped in kerchiefs, hands tightly gripping mesh bags filled with victuals for their employers.

Neither the women nor I knew that earlier in the morning, the German army had launched an unyielding assault against Poland. While we prepared for our weekend, Stuka bombers tore apart Warsaw, whilst Nazi panzer divisions chewed up the Polish cavalry like it was me grinding meat into mince. It was not until late afternoon that news about the German assault seeped into Halifax and Grosvenor’s. The implications were still uncertain to us.

After work, I met up with my mates Roy, Doug, and Eric. We talked about the German invasion but dismissed it as more smoke and shite. We thought the blowhards in government would solve it as they had in the past, through endless talk and endless blather. I was more interested in hearing about a dance coming up the following week in Bradford.

It wasn’t until Sunday that the penny dropped for me about how devastating Hitler’s invasion of Poland would be for us in Britain and Europe. At home, Bill, Matt, Mum, and I huddled around the wireless. This time, even my mum stayed quiet as the Prime Minister explained that we were now at war. After years of state propaganda that Britain would always be at peace with Germany, it was like trying to wake someone from a deep, drugged sleep.

Moxon said, “We’re in the shit now, lad, we are in the shit.” Outside, I heard neighbours opening their doors as if the cold-water shock of war’s declaration drove them to be with their fellow citizens on the streets.

Within weeks, we were issued national identity cards, which tracked our residences and our movements. Barrage balloons obscured the horizon above, while below, at street level, sandbags as tall as hills were positioned around government offices. War had come, and young men were already volunteering for the services and being trained for combat and possible death.

As for my friends, Eric knew that, being a tool-and-die maker, he was deemed essential to the war effort and wouldn’t be required to don a uniform. Eric tried his best not to upset any managers, as he preferred to remain at his lathe grinding the instruments of war for the Army, Navy, and RAF, rather than hold a gun.

Doug Butterworth wanted to join the army. But childhood rheumatic fever weakened his heart. Even the Home Guard didn’t want him. Roy, who was six feet four inches, insisted his only choice was the Coldstream Guards.

When my friends asked me, I said I leaned towards the RAF. I couldn’t swim, which made a stint in the Navy seem to me a prescription for death. As for the army, my feet were flat.

However, I was adamant that I would not rush into the war; I would wait for it to come to me. “If I am drafted, I will go when told to, but if I am allowed to volunteer, I will take my sweet bloody time.”

I dreaded being pushed out to defend Britain, risking maiming or death. I wasn’t convinced that dying for a society where the few exploited the many was the best use of my existence. I remembered too many soldiers from the Great War who shared rooms with us in doss houses, who had been gassed or driven mad by the pounding of artillery for me to have any romantic notion of regimental life.

The Phoney War gave Halifax a carnival edge it had never known: blackouts, air raid drills, sandbags, and yet no bombs fell. By government decree, Grosvenor’s Grocers organised civilian air raid wardens to protect their warehouse against fire and destruction caused by explosives dropped from the sky. My employer recruited me to be one of Grosvenor’s air raid wardens. I was provided with a gas mask, a tin helmet, and buckets of sand to battle against the mighty Nazi Air Force.

The war progressed through its phoney stages while I managed the store, played fireman, and wooed girls at dances on Saturday nights.

I did my air raid warden duties three evenings per week at the company’s warehouse on the moors overlooking Halifax. I scanned the skies, watching for the airborne armada that never came for Halifax. But when dawn came, I returned home for a short kip before my shift started at the Arcade.

In 1940, my sister married an infantryman who thought the war would be like a brawl outside a pub. He went off to basic training while she remained at Low Moor, working at the mill. He would go to France and find himself at Dunkirk, where he waited for rescue while being relentlessly bombed from the air. When he eventually made it back, people who knew him said Charlie was never the same after what he saw at Dunkirk. “It buggered up his head.”

I thought a lot about shell-shocked Charlie and what happened to him after Dunkirk whilst I waited for the inevitable letter from the government calling me to do battle for the King and bloody country. In some dreamy moments, I viewed the war as an escape, a diversion from the world of my parents and ancestors. However, I watched the newsreels and heard the gossip on the street; this war was a deadly business that wanted to leave millions upon millions either dead or broken up.

Did I want to fight and possibly die? Did I want to sacrifice my life for a country that had made millions destitute in the 1930s and destroyed my family?

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Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.

The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent.

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A Legacy Nearly Complete

It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.

It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.

I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.

Take care,

John

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August now feels like its last days are being played out to Peggy Lee singing, “Is That All There Is?” But this also goes for Western neoliberal society.

In the Before Times, these waning days of summer carried a weary melancholic echo of the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Now a different sadness comes on the winds that carry the cries of cicadas. It is the anguish over how much is fucked up and how little can be done to change it, short of ordinary people risking their own lives, their kin and their comrades to do so.

There is a sorrow cut with rage over knowing our governments, news media, corporate managers, and most of our intellectual class have squared the circle of mass killing to perpetuate their entitled positions in society.

They have so much contempt for ordinary human life, as demonstrated by their continuing support of a genocide against Palestinians, the siege of Cuba, a forever war in Ukraine, and the war with Iran.

It becomes a question of when, not if, our governments will put you or me in a camp, on a kill list, or just let us perish in a homeless encampment. You don’t build the infrastructure for repression without intending to use it.

There is an urge, as in the last lines of The Great Gatsby, to beat on against the current carrying us towards a future we rightly fear. But even if we could row back to a shore that felt safe to us, where would that be: 2019, 2015, 2009, 1999, or 1981?

Capitalism has fought the idea of a Welfare State since 1945, when socialists and social democrats attempted to bridle the wealth and power of society's wealthiest through taxation, state ownership of key industries, strong laws to protect workers, support for trade unionism, comprehensive assistance to the vulnerable, and universal public healthcare. This battle to civilise capitalism was lost over the past decade, and now society has few options for survival. Believing you can vote yourself out of fascism isn't one of them.

Summer 2026 is just a worsening repeat of every summer since we were coerced into neoliberalism as humanity’s credo to exist.

The heat domes, wildfires, air poisoned by the soot of forests ablaze, the floods, the droughts, and the crop failures aren’t caused by someone idling an SUV in a drive-through waiting for a Big Mac. It is because capitalism sold us the idea that endless consumption was prosperity that gave existence meaning.

We took it for something like the myth of Prometheus giving humanity fire. Instead, it has become the myth of Sisyphus: we are condemned to roll the rock up the mountainside forever, while the billionaires and their minions plunder the planet, exploit our labour, and enrich themselves to immeasurable proportions, a process that can only end with humanity’s extinction.

The West’s faith in neoliberalism has become cult-like because no major political movement is demanding the wholesale destruction of neoliberalism.

Instead, individual political parties or politicians assert, either cynically or naively, that the system can still be reformed with UBI or wealth taxes. The genocide in Gaza has already proved the system doesn’t care about individual human life unless it comes from the wealthier Western enclaves.

Trump’s domestic policy proves this every day, whether it’s his attacks on migrants and the homeless or his assault on what remains of America’s democratic institutions.

Trump is not an anomaly because it takes a village to raise a Hitler.

Trump’s racism, cruelty, stupidity, greed, and megalomania are institutional. In an empire based on oligarchies of wealth, there will always be more Trumps to replace him than FDRs.

Knowing this doesn’t make me resigned to accepting it; it only makes me more aware of what awaits us.

As I sit here writing this near the shores of Lake Ontario, my optimism that Canada will hold out or win against Trump’s brutal trade war against it isn’t strong.

This is the formal beginning of the nation’s annexation by the USA. It won’t happen overnight or in a year. It may not even be like a 51st State arrangement: something like Vichy, perhaps.

But it will occur because empires got to consume, or else they fall.

Either way, this is just an era of Is That All There Is? until people rise up.

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Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.

The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent. 5 new subscribers should cover it.

Get 40% off for 1 year

A Legacy Nearly Complete

It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.

It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.

I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.

Take care,

John

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I am running hard against a clock, ticking down to September, but I think I will complete the last touches for The Green and Pleasant Land on schedule. When Harry’s Last Stand began in March 2010, I didn’t realise it would consume the rest of my life. But 16 years later, I am not disappointed with what my father and I undertook or that it continues long after his death. The preservation of working-class history is necessary if society is ever able to fight its way back to a Welfare State where every citizen is granted a dignified and purposeful life.

Below is a chapter excerpt from Harry’s Last Stand, which was published in 2014. The chapter resonates with the melancholy and outrage of a man nearing the end of his life, lamenting neoliberalism’s destruction of the post-war social democratic world.

We are coming to the end of the month, and my situation isn’t as dire as in some other months, but it still requires your assistance to get to the finish line of paying my rent.

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VI. Cheap Talk

We live at the sharp end of history. The average person today is at serious risk of losing their livelihood and their lifestyle. No one is immune from unemployment, and too many are just one pay cheque away from insolvency.

Too many lives in Britain are ruled by financial uncertainty. Whether it is fear of eviction, economic strain caused by wage restraints, clawbacks in benefits, fuel poverty or the food poverty that has forced many families to trek from one food bank to the next like prehistoric hunter-gatherers, it has caused serious structural damage to the fabric of our society. It threatens to impede the proper emotional and educational development of our children just as the Great Depression did to my generation.

In times of doubt and crisis the tone is always similar, no matter the century. In my youth, a coalition government asked the working classes to tighten their belts to speed Britain’s economic recovery. We were asked to be patient and told that jobs and wages would return. We waited through many winters, springs, summers and autumns, but recovery never came. Jobs, stable wages and decent housing didn’t actually materialise until after the Second World War. Only then did prosperity begin to return to Britain and the modern welfare state was created.

As in my youth, today’s politicians utter like a catechism that both full employment and better wages are only a matter of letting the business cycle run its course. Their pronouncements are the same carnival barker’s cry that I heard in my boyhood: to be patient and endure economic suffering and injustice because it is the patriotic thing to do.

All our leaders read from the same hymn book and sing that the economy has recovered, but that it is as fragile as blown glass, so don’t expect much if you are working or middle class.

The question our leaders don’t want to answer is: ‘For whom has the economy recovered?’

It is certainly not for the average wage earner, the student or the pensioner. The sad truth is most workers haven’t seen substantive wage increases in 25 years. Since the 1980s, substantial wage increases have been geared towards upper middle-class occupations, leaving every other worker in the cold.

I admit that in the 1970s and early 80s I was lucky, and survived with little discomfort, but the average bloke who worked in a factory, shop or mill was hit hard in both decades. Hyperinflation and labour unrest created a financial instability that produced Thatcher’s Britain. The country wanted stability, but the price we paid was unemployment levels that skyrocketed to Depression-era levels while whole regions, communities and industries were decimated by policies of privatisation. In that era, Thatcher’s conviction that a free market unfettered by regulation would return Britain to its former mercantile glory was as near-sighted as was the left wing’s refusal to accept that capitalism does produce benefits to the individual and society at large if properly controlled and cultivated.

Many of the people I knew in my youth suffered greatly in the 70s and 80s. Their lives had remained fixed in Halifax, and they remained tied to their working-class professions. For them, both the winter of discontent and Thatcher’s political and economic revolution were seasons of bitter disappointment. It was a time of self-reflection about the value and the meaning of their sacrifices in the Great Depression and during the war.

The summer of 1977 was the last time I saw the mates of my youth all hale and hearty. After that year, one by one, my boyhood friends began to die, until the last one shuffled off this mortal coil in 1993.

But in August 1977, I was 54, and though we were no longer larking about and chasing girls around town, my mates were still in fine form. As we aged, married, moved on and had our own families, we drifted apart physically, emotionally and even politically. However, since our friendships were forged in the difficult days of the 1930s, we were united forever by our past struggles in a hard-knock world. We might never have articulated it, but we loved each other and rooted for each other’s success.

The last time we were together was to watch Halifax Town AFC play a forgettable match in the Edwardian Shea Stadium. We sat on stone seats, drank Webster’s green ale and smoked Rothmans cigarettes. In between taking the mickey out of the players on the pitch, my friend Roy, who had been in the Guards during the war and had seen combat in Italy, told me:

“I don’t know what it’s all about any more. It’s all cocked up.”

It was a tough time for Roy because he was a factory worker and although he owned a house, inflation gnawed at his wages. Crime was up all across the country, and it looked to him like civil society had had its chips. My other friend, Eric, who had been in selective service because he was a skilled tool and die maker, told him not to fret:

“The unions are just getting what’s due to their members, after years of being beat down by Tory governments.”

Doug, my other mate from that long-ago world, also worked for a union shop. But he wasn’t as convinced as Eric about the crusade of the unions during a time when the country was in debt, and bills had to be paid. He had his doubts, and moreover he was growing afraid for his future and his retirement.

“If we don’t get a handle on these strikes, ordinary folk are going to go off us because this country is a right bloody mess. I think Labour has lost its way because it is no longer about the working man; it’s about the egos of the union bosses.”

When the match was over, and we pushed our way through the same turnstiles that had been around since I was fifteen but were now rusting and dilapidated, Roy looked over at me.

“You’ve been as quiet as a mouse when we’ve been nattering on about politics. That’s not like you, Harry.”

‘Oh aye,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking that things are bad today, but they’re not like in the past. I’m worried about how everything is changing and getting mucked up. But I feel lucky. I can pay my mortgage; I can pay for our groceries. I can even take holidays with my wife. Besides, my lads are healthy, and my oldest is at uni – that’s more than we could have ever hoped for. And I know it is a bit of a worry for you, but your house is paid for, and retirement is nearby. Your daughter’s done her schooling and now has a right good job. It weren’t like before, because we have better housing, the NHS and real universities that the working class can attend and make something of themselves in.’

“Too right,” he said.

After that, we went off to the pub and forgot about politics. But for the rest of the evening, in the back of my mind, I was fearful. Why? Because despite what I’d said, I knew from history that extreme economic and political discord is bad for society. I also knew that people crave stability and they will settle for anyone, regardless of their merit or worth, who promises them calm waters, low taxation and a return to the straight and narrow. Life was all right for me at the time, so perhaps I was just letting the wider problems of the country slide by me.

Crikey, that was ages ago. How I wish my friends had survived as long as me, because I really miss their friendship and their laughter.

By the 1980s I was in my sixties, preparing to retire, and I was chuffed for myself and my family. My children were all grown. My eldest had married and was beginning a family, my youngest was finishing up at university, and my second son was working as an artist and theatre set painter, despite the difficulties of his mental illness. Personally, it looked like it had all worked out for me. I had survived the Great Depression, found love and risen to the middle class. Yet, on the horizon were all of the telltale signs that this was not to last, because Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Britain and Ronald Reagan was President of the USA. Those two conservative leaders and their cadre of neo-con supporters saw society very differently than my generation did. Reagan and Thatcher espoused an ideology of smaller government, less taxation and more input by business leaders rather than the interest groups of ordinary citizens. It was, in short, a revolution against the welfare state. Battles were fought to castrate unions in both America and Britain. In the US, the air traffic controllers were fired, and in Britain Thatcher went to war against the north, its mines and a union that had sought to protect the livelihood of a region.

We couldn’t prevent it from happening, but people still protested and made a last-ditch attempt to save society from those who wanted to make civilisation exclusive to the rich. Students and unions protested in the streets against the gradual erosion of the welfare state. However, in the end both Reagan and Thatcher won their revolutions. Today, not even mainstream left-wing politicians are mentioning the benefits of the welfare state versus our increasingly monetised public service.

Too many people in Britain are struggling with food poverty, fuel poverty, and rent poverty. It can’t be just ascribed to a ‘cost of living crisis’. It ceased to be a crisis when the recession stopped wage growth and caused cutbacks to social services. Now it is more akin to an income catastrophe, where the well-to-do seek to feather their nests on profits created by wage suppression. To talk about recovery when consumer debt is at an all-time high is misleading.

It is a question of credibility. How can legislators talk about recovery when they speak without understanding the real misery that austerity has caused to 21st-century society? How could they really know what ordinary folk feel? In this and every other developed country, a politician’s net worth always exceeds that of the average worker. They are statistically always part of the top 1 per cent of society. Besides, even if they come into government with modest means, they always leave rich.

Considering the hardships that have been endured by the poor and the sacrifices made by the middle classes since the 2008 meltdown, there has been little compassion offered by governments to their people. Instead, every Western country, its parliaments and senates, has voted for austerity over comprehensive tax reform, because the latter would affect their corporate friends’ bottom line. For any MP or newsreader to say that we are on the mend is about as reassuring as someone who is colour blind telling you the light is green.

But it is little wonder to me that Westminster is disconnected from ordinary people in Britain. All you have to do is take a look at where these people went to school. Fifty-four per cent of Conservative sitting MPs received their education at fee-based schools, like Harrow or Eton. If you factor in Liberal Democrats and Labour, the number of MPs who attended independent schools accounts for a third of the House of Commons’ membership. Outside of government, in the world of plumbers, joiners, accountants, technical workers, doctors and lawyers, only 7 per cent of the population attended fee-based schools last year. In fact, this number of public school boys guiding the ship of state hasn’t been this prevalent since the days of Empire.

My values weren’t formed on the playing fields of Eton. They were formed by experiencing the cruelty caused by the Great Depression, and forged by service to my country in the RAF during the Second World War. My values include both sacrifice and sharing. My values are framed by the idea of a welfare state that is not just compassionate but prudent. I find it ironic that many right-wing commentators and politicians find fault with certain immigrant minorities because ‘they don’t fit in’. Ostensibly, these newcomers cling to their ancient traditions and don’t assimilate into our British way of life. Perhaps they don’t immediately, but over time people always start to assume the attributes of their country.

In truth, there is only one exception to this rule, and that is the students who attended private or fee-based schools. The ones who don’t fit into our society are not the new migrants, but the old families and the nouveau riche who adamantly believe that they and their progeny should rule Britain for their sole material benefit.

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Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.

The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.

I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent.

Get 40% off for 1 year

A Legacy Nearly Complete

It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.

It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.

I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.

Take care,

John

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I fear that everything is being turned into AI slop: history, politics, even love. Once we can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy, truth and lies, society becomes collectively psychotic.

AI is changing us as human beings. The ubiquity of AI, rendering the past into a version that best suits modern authoritarians, is terrifying.

History written by its victors has always existed; imperial powers, oligarchies, and giant corporations mould “official” history, normalising their oppression of foreign nations and the poor in their own countries. However, this curation of reality became worse in the 21st century as society shifted from analogue to digital mass communication. In that new environment, neoliberalism spread across democracies like an invasive species. This dominant political/economic ideology destroyed the institutions that once preserved and promoted working-class history, socialism, and independent thinking. We are now nearly defenceless against the end of historical truths.

It’s why I believe my father’s Harry’s Last Stand project, which consisted of five books and the now-finished Green and Pleasant Land, is important today. In these books, my father used his personal odyssey across Great Depression Britain and the Second World War to explore his life and defend the necessity of the Welfare State as it protects civilisation against the few. I am sending Volume One of The Green and Pleasant Land to my father’s old publisher in the first week of September, come hell or high water. Below are two chapters from it.

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Chapter Nineteen: Blood on the Stone Floor

Most nights, following a day of slaughtering livestock, Bill drank just enough rum to make himself irritable and worrisome to those around him. He was unkind, verbally abusive and menacing but not physically violent. That was something Moxon kept in reserve, like some men save their best shirt for Saturday night.

During the week, Mum never touched alcohol, which didn’t make her any less volatile. Anxiety over money made Mum angry and panicked. Her tongue was a dagger of insults, and her threats were thrust against her children’s emotional well-being. Once, a customer tipped me for delivering their coal.

“They’ve got boys to do a man’s work. England has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

When Mum discovered I had used the money to buy sweets for Alberta and me, she hollered.

“Do you want us all dead from hunger because that money is for everyone, Greedy guts.”

Bill also became Mum’s target as she found that showering him with love wasn’t making him a better provider. Perhaps a few sharp words might focus his attention on keeping our household afloat.

“Maybe, if you bought less rum, we’d have something better to eat than fried bread.”

It didn’t. Instead, Bill took note of her scratching at his sense of self-worth and stored it away as a resentment to be paid back in full when he was properly drunk at the weekend.

I avoided them when I wasn’t at work or school because the outbuilding was already stifling without their vicious bickering. Alberta said, “They are like two alley cats circling each other, getting angrier and angrier until claws come out and fur flies.”

For Mum and Bill, that moment always began on Friday at tea time and lasted until Sunday at bedtime.

It was forty-eight hours of angry, spiteful words, curses, and invective, but it was not always limited to that. There was always the possibility it would go further because Bill treated Saturday night as he did shore leave during his stint in the Royal Marines. He drank until he passed out. As for the time in between, Bill believed that was his to do as he pleased, even if it harmed others.

Mum joined Bill on these weekend piss-ups less as a companion and more as a sentinel to stop our meal ticket from spending his entire pay packet. My mother also tagged along because she didn’t trust Bill to be faithful to her. His eyes too often lingered longingly on the pub’s barmaid, and she returned his interest.

Saturday drinking gave them no joy, but it gave them licence to unleash their rage at each other or anyone who got between them and a pint or a swig of gin. The more Bill drank, the more rankled he became about my mother and her children. The drink and his stupidity convinced Bill that he was a cuck for supporting Mum and her kids.

Moxon thought himself a fool everyone laughed at for having a soft heart.

It was a motif that reached a crescendo after the last bit of gin or beer was gone on Saturday night.

“You caught me, Lil, with lies. A mountain of lies. Nothing but rubbish from yer gob. You and your useless children are nowt but trouble for me.”

Then Bill would overturn the kitchen table, sending beer bottles, plates, and empty jam jars we used for cups crashing onto the stone floor.

Every Sunday morning, the stone kitchen floor resembled a beach strewn with the wreckage of a ship cast onto land by an ocean storm.

Alberta and I were, in turn, terrified and disgusted by the verbal and emotional violence Bill and Mum hurled at each other every weekend. We knew our lives were hostage to their regrets, drunkenness, and violence.

It was like being forever in a trench, suffering heavy bombardment from enemy guns. Silence turned to shrill voices, tears to accusations, love to vitriol and contempt.

From weekend to weekend, while Bill and Mum stormed at each other, my sister and I tended to Matt, whose early years were nurtured by siblings who were still just children themselves.

Bill didn’t beat Mum every weekend, but on enough of them, their yelling crossed an unmarked border between verbal abuse and physical assault.

Each weekend, my sister and I slept uneasily, bracing for Mum’s cries of pain and fear because Bill believed he had the right to strike a woman if she irritated him.

In the early hours of many Saturdays, Alberta and I were jarred awake by the sound of Bill’s open hand or fist hitting Mum.

We scrambled downstairs to protect her.

We’d find Mum on the ground, being kicked by Bill. Together, Alberta and I would leap on his back and hit him with our fists.

“Get off me,” Bill yelled. “Or I’ll clobber you!”

We didn’t stop, even when he began hitting us.

We held onto his back until Mum escaped him.

Moments later, she stood, blood dripping from her lips, with eyes black and swollen.

“That’s enough, Bill. Alberta, Harry, get off him. Stop this now.”

Chapter Twenty: Capitalism Left a Bitter Taste in My Mouth

Bill Moxon never met a job he couldn’t lose thanks to his short fuse.

One day, Bill was too hungover, and his temper got the better of him. A foreman said something harmless, and Bill went off like a bull at a red flag. Bill punched his boss and was sacked on the spot.

Naturally, he took his anger out on my mother and broke his rule of only hitting her on weekends.

After Bill became unemployed, nothing kept us in Sowerby Bridge.

So my mother’s boyfriend decided that because he always got into rows with his bosses, he should become one himself. Bill convinced a landlord in King Cross on the outskirts of Halifax to let him use a hole-in-the-wall building to open a butcher shop.

It was a shop for those too skint to afford anything better than meat not fit for dogs.

We packed up what little we had, left the bleak, dishevelled stone outbuilding that stood on top of the moor above the village, and never looked back.

At King Cross, Mum believed things were looking up.

“The jobs are coming back. I can feel it. Look all around here. The skies are thick with coal smoke.”

She needed to believe we had moved on to somewhere better, and that Bill’s new business might finally lift us up.

But it wasn’t true.

In 1934, 2.5 million men were out of work, or around 17% of the workforce.

In Yorkshire, it was worse. In mining and manufacturing, almost half of the workforce wasn’t employed.

We left Sowerby Bridge as light as we came. Memories from the past, especially what we had done to my father, were the heaviest baggage we brought to King Cross.

I hadn’t seen my father in three years and struggled to remember the soft cadence of his Yorkshire accent.

Still, I avoided talking about him, even to Alberta.

Even before our first night in King Cross, Bill said to me:

“Lad, when I was in the navy, lazy sods were tossed overboard.”

He didn’t need to say it twice.

I began looking for work the next day.

A few miles from our new lodgings, a Jubb’s outlet had a Delivery Boy Wanted sign in its front window.

Inside, the manager asked if I could ride a bike and handle heavy lifting.

When I said yes, he hired me immediately.

It was arduous work. At the beginning of my shift, I loaded 40 pounds of groceries into a woven basket mounted atop the bike’s front tyre. Most days, I pedalled a 20-mile route across Halifax and the rural areas surrounding King Cross.

I did my duties energetically and without complaint because I wanted to be known as a “good worker.”

Emotionally, I understood my servitude was unjust, and I resented how I was meant to live.

Yet, I concealed my true feelings from those above my economic station.

They wouldn’t have listened anyway. I knew that from how middle-class kids saw me, as if I were beneath them and not wholly human.

I was someone not equal to them, but there to make their lives less burdensome.

To them, I existed to be their workhorse.

Their fathers’ wages, grammar school upbringing and class snobbery made them believe they were naturally superior to the working class.

I despised them and envied them.

As I huffed and puffed, sweated and groaned while transporting my cargo, I caught glimpses of middle-class kids on their way to birthday parties, music lessons, or the matinee.

Sometimes, a middle-class kid did react to my presence. It was an awkward and uncomfortable glance one might give an animal burdened with cargo.

After a few months at Jubb’s, the manager expanded my duties to include working behind the counter.

He liked keeping me at the front of the store because he was having an affair with one of the married female clerks and spent much time with her in the back storeroom.

I caught them having sex on the sugar sacks once too often.

But instead of firing me, the manager gave me the task of designing the store’s window display.

I became so adept that one of my displays took second place in a community-wide competition.

I began smoking at the age of eleven because my manager said it would give me more energy and stop me from feeling hungry.

Every week, I bought Woodbine cigarettes for two pennies a packet of five fags.

At break time, I stood outside, placed a fag on my lips, and struck a match.

The coarse tobacco soaked into my callow lungs, made my head dizzy, but quieted my hunger pangs.

Next door to Jubb’s was a high-end chocolate confectioner.

Locally, the shop was renowned for its hand-crafted chocolates whose price made them far out of reach of an ordinary worker.

When cleaning the stoop at Jubb’s, I’d glance at the shop’s clientele and feel both envy and hatred at their affluence. The chocolate confectioner’s customers didn’t even bother to notice me.

With a reputation for excellence, the shop routinely discarded entire boxes of chocolates deemed unsatisfactory.

They were dumped in a bin behind the store that they shared with Jubb’s.

Out back, in the rubbish bin, were exquisite boxes of chocolates wrapped with bows and ribbons, buried treasure amidst rotting produce.

It seemed too good to waste.

And many times, at the end of my shift, I dove into the rubbish bin to fish out a box.

The top layers were usually mouldy, but the chocolates beneath were perfectly edible.

So I brought them home to share with the rest of my family.

Eating them gave me a taste of how the better half of Yorkshire lived and left a sour feeling in my stomach. They had so much, and the rest of us so little.

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Thanks for reading and supporting this Substack. Without your loyalty, I honestly don’t know where I’d be. You’ve helped keep both my father’s legacy alive and the wolf from my door.

The last few months have been difficult. New subscriptions have slowed, and some long-time readers have had to step away because of the cost-of-living crisis. August is naturally slow because it marks the end of summer and people are on vacation and wanting to escape the politics of today.

The first week of September, The Green and Pleasant Land will be sent to my father’s old publisher for consideration. A small independent publisher has already expressed interest in bringing it into print, which is heartening. But for my father’s legacy, and for the book itself, it makes sense to try first for the widest possible readership.

I’m starting my rent appeal earlier than usual, so I’m offering annual subscriptions at 20% off. Seven new subscribers should put me over the top for September. My subscription rates haven’t changed since 2021: $3.50 a month or $30 a year.

Take care,

John

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I haven’t been watching or reading much of the news this past month. And yet I am up to date on how shitty things have become, or how much worse they are likely to get.

I’ve also been mildly under the weather for weeks, which, as it turns out, is down to a B12 deficiency that is now being sorted with high-dose supplements. It’s the result of malabsorption caused by my cancer radiation treatments. I feel that I am also suffering from corporate news media malabsorption because their propaganda has become harder to digest, hence my avoidance of it.

It made for slower final edits of The Green & Pleasant Land. But it will go off to publishers in the first week of September.

Below is a chapter from its second volume, Love Among the Ruins, which deals with the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany, and the consequences for working-class people like my mother’s family.

It is also a chapter about survival, and about how women often had to be stronger and more resourceful than the men around them simply to keep their families alive.

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Chapter 7

The bargain between a mother and an uncle

During the last months of 1945, civilian mortality dramatically increased throughout occupied Germany. By October 1945, Hamburg was as desolate as Carthage after Rome laid it to waste. Incessant food shortages, poor sanitation and disease were now as deadly as aerial bombardment to the inhabitants of Hamburg. As if life couldn’t get any more miserable for the metropolis, it also suffered from electrical blackouts, water shortages and a decreasing amount of food rations for its inhabitants.

German society disintegrated into pre-industrial communities ruled by the victorious armies of the West and the East. The occupiers appeared ill-equipped to manage the responsibilities of peace. During the first year of occupation, Germany plunged to the bottom as an elevator with its cables cut. Hamburg existed in the sub-basement of civilisation. Many of its residents lived in hovels dug from the ruins of bombed buildings. It was a miserable time, with starvation and hopelessness driving multitudes of women onto the streets to barter their bodies for cigarettes to battle-numb soldiers.

Hamburg was a city where sexual commerce transpired on every boulevard and beneath every burnt-out street light. When it came to distinguishing between a girl on the game and a girl down on her luck, soldiers were myopic.

The week before her birthday, Friede wanted to introduce me to her foster parents, who lived in the Altona district. We agreed to meet each other in the afternoon at Dammtor station. Unfortunately, I was late for my train, and when I arrived, I had forgotten where we were supposed to meet. I walked outside, where the glare from the sun temporarily blinded me and left me disoriented in a crowd of strangers. It took me several minutes to adjust to the afternoon brightness, but I finally recognised Friede standing at the entrance to the Victory dance club on the opposite side of the road.

Friede was beside an airman in Canadian uniform. It appeared as if he was arguing with her because several times he threw his hands up, frustrated.

I crossed the street and yelled out, ‘Is everything all right?’

Friede looked relieved by my arrival, but the Canadian appeared less so and inquired, ‘Who the hell are you? Can’t you see I’m talking to this Fräulein? I want to ask her out on a date.’

Friede spoke hastily to me in German: ‘This very rude man cornered me and won’t let me walk away. He is drunk and stinks of beer.’

I said to the Canadian: ‘I think you are a little confused, mate, she’s with me.’

‘With you?’ he asked suspiciously.

I explained to him that we were on our way to meet friends.

‘Fuck off,’ was his response. ‘Give ’em a bit of chocolate or some cigarettes, and these Germans will go with you like a stray dog in Cabbage Town. They’re all fucking tarts.’

‘Mind your manners,’ I told him. ‘If I were you, I’d get on your bike and move on.’

‘What ya going to do about it?’ he demanded threateningly.

The Canadian swayed drunkenly from one foot to the next and gave me a stare filled with violence and hatred.

I said to him: ‘You’d better hop it or I’m going to bust your head open like a tin of kippers.’

The Canadian was about to take a swing at me, but in the distance I saw a military policeman. I told the drunken airman that the MP was my mate. ‘He’ll throw you into the glasshouse for disorderly conduct, without looking sideways at you. So best be off home.’

I called out to the MP: ‘Oi, George, over here for a second.’

Scared by my bluff, the Canadian tried to run off, but I grabbed his shirt cuff and said, ‘Before you go, apologise to the lady.’

‘Sorry, miss,’ he said in a shallow voice and disappeared into the crowd.

When the MP arrived, he asked what all the commotion was about.

‘Nothing, I thought you were my mate’s brother. Sorry for the trouble.’

‘No bother,’ he said. ‘This is no place to loiter.’ He looked suspiciously over at Friede.

‘Is this woman with you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Well then, I suggest you both get a move on.’

We walked on, and Friede laughed at my deviousness. She gently grabbed hold of my arm and asked, ‘When are you going to take me dancing in that club?’

‘I’ll take you there in a week, when you turn eighteen,’ I told her with forced enthusiasm. ‘How do we get to your foster parents’ apartment from here?’

‘Today, we will go through Planten un Blomen. We can take the U-Bahn from there. It is no more than ten minutes,’ she said definitively.

Hand in hand, we strolled across the city’s botanical park, Planten un Blomen. Even in the autumn, it was a beautiful green space that included an artificial lake populated by graceful swans. Some of the flowerbeds had been turned into potato and cabbage patches, but it was still more picturesque than London’s Hyde Park.

It was a quick walk to the U-Bahn station. When we were inside the tube train, Friede gossiped about her girlfriends and how much everyone’s lives had changed since the German surrender.

‘Gerda, for instance, is all for having foreign boyfriends. But Ursula wouldn’t be caught dead with a Tommy.’

‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ I said.

‘You probably won’t. I love her to bits, but she believes shaking hands with a Tommy is something close to treason.’

‘What do you think?’ I asked jokingly.

Friede paused to collect her thoughts. ‘My world has changed forever. Nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow or five years from now. Both the war and now this peace have taught me that I am going to experience my adventures today, because nobody can be sure what tomorrow is going to be like.’

When our train passed the Reeperbahn station, Friede spoke in a serious tone of voice. ‘I’ve heard rumours that the British are going to cut our food and wood rations by a third. Do you think that will happen, because I don’t know how Mama and Papa are going to be able to survive if their food allotment is reduced? Papa hasn’t been able to work since the end of the war.’

I replied, ‘Don’t worry. I will find a way to take care of them through the winter.’

‘That would be fantastic,’ she answered in a happy voice.

It would be incredible, I thought, if all my brazen promises to Friede were kept. I calculated that if half of my pledges materialised, everyone would have enough food and fuel to live until the spring thaw. I was terrified that I’d fail and her family’s desperate bid to survive was going to end in tragedy. There was only so much I could barter from the mess sergeant or steal from the cookhouse before someone noticed. If I was discovered, my borrowed philanthropy would end with me on charges and Friede out in the cold.

After emerging from the Altona U-Bahn terminal, we went south along the Allee, which had received a lot of bomb damage. The buildings on the street were in a bad state; most were burnt fragments where hungry feral cats and dogs now took shelter. Remarkably, along the way, there were also some apartments and shops that had remained unmolested by the bombing.

‘It looks like a lot of people were bombed out here,’ I remarked.

‘Thousands,’ Friede commented in a faraway voice. ‘Mama and Papa were lucky. Our building never suffered a direct hit. But I spent a lot of nights in the bomb shelter because we are so close to the harbour. The RAF never seemed to tire of dropping bombs on us.’

Friede asked me if I had ever been in an air raid. When I told her no, she sarcastically responded, ‘Of course not, you are in the RAF. Your job was to drop the bombs.’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘You know I was on the ground in the mobile communications unit.’

‘I do,’ she responded in a softer tone of voice. ‘That is why you are my boyfriend. I would never have a lover who dropped bombs on Germany.’

Ambivalently, I nodded, but I wasn’t about to condemn my RAF for the brutality of the air war. I knew there were two sides to this conflict and the skippers and crew of Bomber Command suffered appalling casualties. Those men waged a war they didn’t create but were compelled to win for civilisation’s sake.

I also understood it was just too difficult for Friede or anyone else who had endured the firebombing to be reminded of General Sherman’s aphorism that war is hell.

When we approached her foster parents’ apartment on Klausstrasse, Friede pointed towards a five-storey apartment building on the corner. For a working-class apartment block, it seemed stunning and elegant to me. The windows facing down onto the street were immense, and although the paint was faded and chipped in places from the masonry, it was an impressive building for the common man.

‘This was my home when I was a little girl,’ she noted with some ambivalence.

‘What about your mother’s apartment?’

‘That was my weekend home, but only if Uncle Henry said it was OK to go and visit. That is why I always feel like I am just a temporary lodger at Mutti’s. At Mama and Papa’s, I was happy.’ She paused and qualified her statement. ‘Well, I felt happiest here when Mama was nice to Papa and didn’t call him all manner of names. Do you see the window beside the balcony on the fourth floor?’

I looked up at the apartment window where Friede had been sent to live in the summer of 1932. The day Friede went to live with the Bornholts, her mother had treated it as a normal outing. ‘Mutti packed my suitcase and said, “Hold onto your doll, kid, hold onto your doll.”’

Friede wasn’t aware that when she left her mother’s apartment on Weidenallee, it was for the last time. On the way to her new home in the taxi, Maria Edelmann prepared her daughter for their separation. Maria told her that she would be in the care of the Bornholts for only a short while. It was to let her mother get back on her feet financially. She said there was nothing to worry about because the Bornholts were the kindest of folk and everything was going to work out just fine.

When mother and daughter arrived at the Bornholts’ apartment, Maria Edelmann rang the doorbell and kissed Friede on the forehead. Maria said to her daughter: ‘Remember to be a good girl for your Mutti and always obey the Bornholts.’

The door opened, and Max Bornholt and his wife walked out to greet Friede. Maria Edelmann refused to display any sorrow or any guilt she carried for relinquishing her daughter, and turned emotionally to ice. She let go of Friede’s hand and bid her a perfunctory adieu. Maria didn’t look back, and she didn’t cry out her daughter’s name when she rushed downstairs to her taxi, which was waiting to take her to her lover’s home in the suburbs.

Friede said: ‘After Mutti left, Frau Bornholt grabbed me and scooped me inside the apartment. I cried for a week and thought I must have done something very bad to Mutti to be left with the Bornholts.’

‘That sounds horrible,’ I said.

‘That was life in Germany during the Depression. What can you do but survive?’ Friede said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Friede explained that the trauma of being separated from her mother quickly passed. ‘Soon after Mutti left me with the Bornholts, the whole neighbourhood was turned into a battleground between Hitler’s Brownshirts and the communists.’

It was called the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1932. In that year, the Nazis were a strong political force, but not a supreme power in German politics. The Communist Party was one of their major rivals, and it had a strong following in working-class districts of Hamburg. The radical SA, or Brownshirt wing of the Nazis, was entrusted with eradicating their Red rivals once and for all, in the Altona district where Friede’s foster parents lived.

So on a seemingly quiet and normal Sunday in July, a street war erupted between well-armed SA stormtroopers and the out-gunned but enthusiastic adherents to socialism and communism. The SA hunted down their Red enemies from apartment block to apartment block and rooftop to rooftop. From her bedroom window, Friede witnessed Brownshirts battle Red-shirts with pistols and machine guns.

‘So after all that bloodshed,’ Friede said, ‘I adapted to living with the Bornholts, and Mutti visited me on most weekends.’

I was still confused and asked why the Bornholts were chosen to take care of her.

Friede explained to me that there was no other possible solution for her mother but to have Friede live with the Bornholts because her father Fritz was out of work and out of luck. ‘He didn’t even live with us,’ she said. ‘He was like a sailor that rolled in and out of our lives to escape a storm.’

Friede’s mother loved Fritz, but she knew their affair was doomed. Ever since he was traumatised by his experiences in the German army in the First World War, Fritz had problems keeping a job. After Germany plunged further into economic and political chaos after the Wall Street Crash, life only became more difficult for Fritz. He wasn’t any help to himself, and he was certainly no real help to Maria Edelmann. So Fritz moved on and out of Hamburg with a promise to make things right for his daughter and Maria.

Maria Edelmann didn’t put much stock in the words of men, especially sentimental ones damaged in the war. She knew Fritz wasn’t going to save anyone. The only thing that was going to keep Maria Edelmann above water was her sex appeal to certain men of influence and wealth.

‘My mother wasn’t going to let me starve. In those days, she was very beautiful and was a gifted singer and dancer. She did what was necessary; Mutti took a rich, fat old man as her lover. His name was Hinrich Karp, or as he used to say: “Friede, think of me as Uncle Henry.” Uncle Henry liked me, but he liked me best from a distance. He didn’t want me in their Fuhlsbüttel love nest because he was a businessman and some big shot in business and politics. So I was sent to live here with the Bornholts.’

‘So your mother chose Hinrich over you?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that at all,’ she said, irritated. ‘Back then, Germany was economically destroyed, just like it is today. How could we have survived if Mutti had not become Henry’s lover? Do you know?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

‘It would have been the orphanage for me and the street for Mutti.’

‘But why were you sent to live with these people rather than another family?’ I asked. ‘Surely, if your mother couldn’t provide for you, the government would have sent you to a foster home?’

Friede laughed and explained to me that Hinrich Karp was a man of some influence and authority. Karp also knew that Maria Edelmann wasn’t prepared to forsake her daughter for him and the safety he provided. It was imperative that Friede be given a good upbringing and that she was never allowed to forget her real mother or the sacrifices she made for her daughter.

Placing Friede in the care of Max Bornholt and his wife was the best solution for Henry because he knew Bornholt through his import and export business. Bornholt worked for the state railway company in the customs department. He always ensured that Henry got his goods on time with little trouble or government interference. Naturally, for his ability to make Karp’s customs problems disappear, Max was rewarded with gifts of cash.

‘What did Henry import?’ I asked.

‘Tobacco, cigars, smoking accessories from lighters to hookahs; he manufactured them or imported them with his partner, Jons Rodmann. Their company, Rodmann und Karp, were known all across northern Germany for good cigars, excellent carved pipes and elegant silver lighters. How Henry got his goods I was never told, but I am sure there was some dirty business in it. Anyway, you are letting me get away from how I ended up as the Bornholts’ foster child.’

Friede told me that Max and his wife Anna weren’t happily married. They already had two children, Alvin and Herma, but they were pretty well grown. After their daughter Herma was born, Anna couldn’t have any more children. She developed an early menopause, which she blamed on Max’s wandering eye for the ladies. Both she and Max thought they might be able to find peace with each other if they could have another child.

So, fortune in the guise of corpulent Hinrich Karp walked into their lives and left Max with an exciting proposal. One typical business day, Karp showed up at Max’s office at the railway company to enquire about some tobacco orders held in customs. However, Karp wasn’t his usual jovial self and was in a sour mood. So out of sorts was Karp that he began to complain to Max about his mistress’s kid, Elfriede.

Henry said: ‘The little so-and-so is getting in the way and being a real chatterbox.’

Max, half-serious, said that he would love to make this problem go away for Henry. He even offered to raise the girl like she was his own. Naturally, whether it was his own or someone else’s, there were costs involved with raising a little girl.

‘Naturally,’ said Henry, ‘and how many Reichsmarks will this cost me?’

‘That many Reichsmarks,’ Max suggested, and both men agreed upon a sum to ensure the health and well-being of Elfriede.

The crisis of where to put Friede was solved like it was a problem about what to do with a pet dog that was too noisy. After Friede had related to me how she ended up in the care of the Bornholts, she added with no apparent bitterness: ‘Somehow it is funny to me to think how I was traded from one household to the next and everyone said they loved me the more for it.’

‘How is that funny?’ I asked.

‘Well, everyone ended up happy, just like a fairytale. Mama and Papa got a little child to love and some extra money, while Henry got my mother all to himself.’

‘And what did you get from it?’ I asked.

She smiled enigmatically. ‘I got to survive and was loved. That is more than most people ended up with in this war.’

A Legacy Nearly Complete

The manuscript for The Green and Pleasant Land Volume One is now done, save for a few edits which I will complete by the end of August. It traces Harry Leslie Smith’s life from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory. But it is more than a personal story. It is a testament to a generation of ordinary working people who endured poverty, war, and hardship, yet refused to accept a society where only the wealthy thrived.

Through struggle and resilience, they helped build a welfare state where everyone mattered, not just a privileged few.

These achievements were hard-won, forged in opposition to both rampant, unfettered capitalism and the dark allure of fascism.

We forgot the lessons of that generation, and because of it, 2026 is under threat from authoritarianism, fascism, and a new Gilded Age.

The Green and Pleasant Land is a story of survival, hope, and the enduring power of ordinary people to shape history.

Your support keeps these stories alive. Paid subscriptions and contributions to the tip jar allow me to preserve my father’s legacy and continue sharing these pieces. Every subscription, tip, or share helps keep my dad’s history and legacy alive. It also helps keep me housed.

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Harry’s

Today would have been my parents’ 79th wedding anniversary. They lived together as man and wife for 51 years, and considering the generation they came from, it was a good stretch. Mum died from cancer when she was seventy-one, in 1999.

Her last living act was to kiss my Dad before dying. Their marriage wasn’t a fairy-tale romance, and in many ways they were ill-suited for each other but still carved out a measure of happiness.

As marriages go, it was loving, meaningful, and respectful. Each was loyal to maintaining the other’s dignity.

When my parents married in Hamburg on 16 August 1947, Europe was in a heatwave. The war against fascism only ended two years previous and it was a fresh and hurtful memory. Europe was still licking its wounds from that brutal conflict.

My mum was an 18-year-old German woman, and my dad was a 23-year-old lad from Yorkshire stationed in the city as part of Britain’s occupation force following the war. They both suffered from traumas caused by the war, but also from what they had experienced growing up as children.

My parents, like most young people, stumbled into their love affair by chance. My dad noticed my mother bartering away prized family possessions at a black market. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he lusted after her.

So, he pursued her, and eventually, they became lovers. My mum did not have as strong a feeling for my dad as he had for her when they were first lovers. Life was short, and she was young and wanted to taste as many pleasures as possible because she had seen so much death and come close to it herself.

Over time, because of his devotion and my father’s endless ability to help her family survive an unforgiving post-war world, my mother agreed to his marriage proposal. It took a year for my father and mother to receive the necessary military and civil permissions to wed.

After my mother’s death, my father wrote about their wedding day but also how their relationship waxed and waned over the years.

August 16, 1947

On my wedding day, it felt like I had finally arrived at a life worth living.

‘Don’t bugger it up,’ I said while brushing my hair tightly back.

When Stan and I rode up to the church in a jeep, a growing crowd of onlookers was loitering around the entrance. Stan and I quickly rushed through the church doors and passed the assembled guests as we moved towards the altar. While I waited for Friede, Stan cracked jokes with the vicar and me.

It was hot inside the church, and the air was stagnant. The padre was sweating, and the organist looked uncomfortable on his stool. I mopped my brow with a handkerchief; Stan said, ‘Hope none of the neighbours nicks the beer while we’re at church.’

After several more perspiring moments, I heard the doors open at the back of St Luke’s. The guests shuffled in their seats and then made an appreciative collective sigh.

The music was struck, and Friede slowly walked towards me with Max, her foster father. Walking up that aisle, she wasn’t just coming towards me; she was walking away from her childhood sorrows, pains, and humiliations. I wanted to turn around but dared not. Stan glanced backwards and whispered to me, ‘Blimey, she’s beautiful.’

Finally, Friede and Max were beside us. The organ notes faded away like a feather caught in a breeze. Max ceremoniously relinquished Friede to my care. He whispered in my ear, ‘Remember to be tender to my Friedl.’

Friede and I sheepishly smiled at each other. She whispered the words, ‘Ich liebe dich.’

Friede held a bouquet of wildflowers, whose scent perfumed the air around us. It was a wonderful, fresh aroma that made me think of our time walking in the botanical gardens.

The feast following the wedding ceremony could not have been better. Everyone was content; no one brought any disgruntled or disjointed emotions to the party. Congratulatory telegrams arrived from my mother and sister. Friede translated them into German and read them to the guests, who applauded my English family for their warm-hearted support.

We drank wine and beer and ate cakes and delicate sandwiches. Cigarettes were shared and hands held. They talked in low voices and then hugged each other warmly. Friede walked over to a painting hanging on the wall and placed a small wallet-sized photo of her father, Fritz, along the edges of the frame. She raised her glass and announced:

“To my mother who loved me in dangerous times; to my foster mother for caring for me; to my foster father who loved me as his own.”

The wedding table broke into applause at the dedications. When the clapping stopped, Friede continued:

“I raise my glass to Harry, who will love me until the end of days, and I shall love him whether the sea is in a storm or the waters calm.”

But it didn’t last.

Halifax 1948 — Marriage Decline

During the dying days of 1948, my relationship with Friede started to unravel. Our love was forged in the cauldron of Germany’s terrible winter of hunger. But Britain’s season of discontent tore apart the delicate bonds that held our marriage together.

“After living too long in the bleak and hopeless world of England’s working class, our affections began to cool.”

By Christmas Day, our marriage began to founder.

The culture shock of working-class Britain during an age of austerity was too much for Friede, whose command of English wasn’t strong. Yorkshire was all sharp edges and damp draughts for Friede.

With Dorothy gone, we had free licence to argue from sunup to sundown with only the hiss from the gas lights to distract our thoughts from our disintegrating union.

By Boxing Day, Friede and I were worn down from quarrelling. We argued over trifles, from whether the room was too cold or hot to why the tea always tasted like tepid water with a hint of rust. We no longer spoke to each other in civilised tones — but instead were surly and sarcastic.

By the end of January, Friede said she was leaving for Germany: “I don’t think I will be coming back.”

Emigration to Canada — 1953

If it were today, my parents’ marriage would probably have ended when Mum left my father and returned to Germany. It’s not because my parents and that generation were more serious about their relationships. It’s because they had fewer options due to societal pressures and prejudices. I think it took a great deal of courage on my mother’s part to leave my father and much less to return. I am glad she did because without it, I wouldn’t exist.

I am not entirely sure what convinced Mum to return to Yorkshire.

I suspect my Dad begged because he admitted at the end of his life the separation made him emotionally unstable. It was a trigger that tore open scar tissue from his horrendous childhood. However, my Dad’s despair over the end of his marriage was not my Mum’s fault. I don’t know what ultimately convinced her to return, but it probably saved my father from a short and angry life.

Below are my father’s recollections about Friede’s return and how they began a new life far from Yorkshire.

When I saw Friede disembark from the ship that had returned her to me from Hamburg, I felt that I had been given a second chance for a happy life. We had decided that there was no future for us in Britain and so made plans to emigrate to Canada. The next few months I was occupied with selling the few possessions we owned and book passaging for our new life in Toronto. Most of my friends thought I was daft but I didn’t care.

A month before we were scheduled to sail from Liverpool to Montreal, I ran into my mother on the street.

‘A little bird told me that you are leaving Halifax.’

‘It is true, mum; Friede and I are going to Canada.’

‘Make sure you don’t drown in one of them lakes. I hear that in Canada, they be deep and cold. It’s best you be gone, Harry, ‘cause this country — like your old mum — is ready for the knackers.’

It was a November night when our ship slipped her moorings in Liverpool and began its voyage to Canada.

As the ship began to glide away from the empty pier, Friede and I stood on the third-class passengers’ deck.

“In my imagination, I saw all the people who — whether living or dead — had influenced the course of my first thirty years bid me farewell.”

The further we moved from land, the fainter were the echoes stirring from my past. The last one to leave me was comprised of words I thought my father might say to me:

‘It’s time to make your mark, lad. Have a bloody good life for those of us who didn’t.’

Soon, there was only silence from the shore, and the sound of the steamship cutting through the sea towards the future.

In the forty-fourth year of my parents’ Canadian residency, they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a small party at their house. Mum, two months prior, had undergone emergency quintuple bypass heart surgery. She was exhausted but joyous at being alive and having friends and family around for the celebration. Their marriage hadn’t been an easy ride, but it had been their ride, and they rode it until death intervened.

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A Legacy Nearly Complete

The manuscript for The Green and Pleasant Land Volume One is now done, save for a few edits which I will complete by the end of August. It traces Harry Leslie Smith’s life from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory. But it is more than a personal story. It is a testament to a generation of ordinary working people who endured poverty, war, and hardship, yet refused to accept a society where only the wealthy thrived.

Through struggle and resilience, they helped build a welfare state where everyone mattered, not just a privileged few.

These achievements were hard-won, forged in opposition to both rampant, unfettered capitalism and the dark allure of fascism.

We forgot the lessons of that generation, and because of it, 2026 is under threat from authoritarianism, fascism, and a new Gilded Age.

The Green and Pleasant Land is a story of survival, hope, and the enduring power of ordinary people to shape history.

Your support keeps these stories alive. Paid subscriptions and contributions to the tip jar allow me to preserve my father’s legacy and continue sharing these pieces. Every subscription, tip, or share helps keep my dad’s history and legacy alive. It also helps keep me housed.

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We are now at Chapter 6 of Love Among the Ruins, the second volume of Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy.

Recently, I inscribed these words in a copy of the book for a supporter. As I wrote them, I realised they perfectly capture how my father would have felt about each and every one of you who has chosen to read this chapter, and his books.

My father wrote his books to bear witness to history and to remind people never to make his past our future. Yet in Love Among the Ruins, he also wanted readers to remember the joy and hope that accompanied peace, and the building of the Welfare State.

I know he would have been delighted to welcome a new reader into the world he left behind.

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Chapter 6

Behind the screen door

Occupied Germany was much like a boarding house in the seaside town of Bridlington. Every farce or tragedy was hidden behind closed doors. In Fuhlsbüttel, the people kept schtum and thought it good table manners. Their ability to conceal unpleasant truths was so sophisticated, a statue of the three wise monkeys wouldn’t have been out of place on the main square. The town was adept at ignoring evil, but their true talents lay in doing evil with suburban routine at the local gaol.

Known by locals and inmates as KolaFu (a contraction of Konzentrationslager Fuhlsbüttel), it was constructed in 1911 to house drunks, wife-beaters and swindlers. By the time British forces liberated it on 3 May 1945, it had become a way station for Nazi Germany’s undesirables. Many of the region’s Jews, gypsies, communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with Russian slave labourers, marked time at KolaFu before being dispatched to their deaths at Buchenwald and Ravensbrück.

In the last month of the war, Himmler ordered that the memory of the camp and its prisoners were to be erased from Fuhlsbüttel. On 12 April, the remaining prisoners were marched out of Fuhlsbüttel and north to the port at Kiel. The SS hoped the prisoners of KolaFu might disappear into the Baltic Sea fog.

It was difficult to comprehend that this quiet, bucolic retreat from Hamburg was a willing accomplice to the Holocaust. Barbarity seemed as out of place in Fuhlsbüttel as litter on the streets or untended gardens. Like people who can’t remember where they put their keys, Fuhlsbüttel collectively forgot about KolaFu or the prisoners’ death march along Langenhorner Chaussee. I did wonder if, on their way to extermination, the prisoners passed Friede’s apartment. But much like the first wise monkey, I thought it prudent to hear no evil.

I was now in Friede’s company as often as my duties at the airport allowed. We found it difficult to find any privacy for love-making, except on weekday afternoons at her mother’s apartment. Intimacy became more complicated for us after the Gellersons, a homeless couple, were allocated a portion of the apartment by the occupying authorities. When Friede’s widowed grandfather showed up at their door, the apartment truly became claustrophobic.

‘He isn’t even my real Opa [grandpa],’ Friede said with disdain, ‘because my mother is also a bastard.’

‘Then who is he?’ I asked.

‘A miserable old man who says spiteful things about Mutti and me any chance he gets.’

Before one of our afternoon trysts, Friede greeted me on the street with a kiss and said, ‘I was getting worried that you wouldn’t show. Opa and I have had a terrible row.’

‘Nothing could stop me from seeing you,’ I told her. ‘Look, I brought you some fresh supplies. There is enough meat, veg and wine to last everyone a week.’

‘Wonderful, but remember I have to make sure my foster parents get some of the provisions because they can’t survive on their rations.’

‘I’ve only got two hands,’ I retorted, overwhelmed by her entire family’s need for extra food.

‘I know it is hard for you to keep pinching stuff from the base, but it is keeping us from becoming beggars on the street. Look, you can see for yourself what good you have done me. The sores on my legs are healing because of the vitamins you got for me.’

When we entered the apartment, a sullen old man greeted me. It was the cuckolded grandfather. He snarled at me in unintelligible German. ‘What’s up with him?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he is in one of his moods today. Isn’t that right, Opa?’ she asked sarcastically.

Friede turned to me and explained: ‘He has been on his hobby horse all day. About how everyone is stealing from him. How he never gets enough to eat. Stealing what, I ask? He hasn’t had a pfennig to his name since 1913. Before you arrived, he screamed that Mutti and I showed him no respect. We were just illegitimate guttersnipes. I gave the ingrate an earful. I told him he was lucky Mutti let him stay, considering he chucked her out when she was twelve years old.

‘That is when he got nasty. Isn’t that right, Opa? You went on about how the Nazis knew how to do things and wouldn’t allow an old man to be treated like rubbish by the daughter of a whore.’

The unshaven old man sat on a wooden stool. He wore thick, uncomfortable woollen trousers held up by bulky braces. He looked as thin and fragile as a tall blade of grass in the dry season. The old man muttered, ‘Thunder and lightning.’

‘Harry, please give him a cigarette or else we will get no peace.’

I pulled out my cigarette case and offered him a Player’s. With shaking hands, he pulled one to his mouth. For a moment, our eyes met; his were filled with watery hatred for everything around him.

‘Come,’ Friede said. ‘Let’s get out of the kitchen. I don’t know how long we’ve got until the Gellersons come back. Bring a bottle of wine with you. We’ll take it to my room,’ she said playfully.

It really wasn’t a room, but an alcove that housed a wood-stove and a chaise longue. The walls were thin and covered with heavy floral wallpaper. Along the wall, Friede had pinned up small photos of her girlfriends and glamour shots of German movie stars cut from defunct magazines published during the war.

We put some pillows behind our backs and propped ourselves up on the day bed. We drank warm Rhine wine out of a shared coffee cup and ate slices of bread slathered thick with butter. ‘Did you hear,’ Friede said excitedly, ‘the British have started up Radio Hamburg again. So we can finally listen to jazz and dance music banned by the Nazis.’

I laughed and sipped back my wine. I thought these moments with her were the closest to paradise I had ever got in my short and squalid life. Lying beside Friede was like a wish come true from Aladdin’s lamp. To me, she was as mysterious as the sphinx and as sensual as nightfall in an exotic garden. I clung tightly to the hope that my desire for her was more than physical want, and that her interest in me went beyond food parcels. Perhaps that was all we could demand from each other after a long war.

We finished half a bottle of wine, and I sang silly songs. I made extravagant compliments to her eyes, her hair, her body, and her soul. After a while, we undressed each other. We made love on the chaise longue, which was just large enough for us to hold each other tightly, in a selfish and generous longing. For a long time, we remained in Friede’s small lair, while outside the thin shuttered door the old man raged against the occupation, his life, and his new lodgings. The din slowly dissipated and faded into the background like a smudge on the wallpaper.

I must have dosed off because I woke to the nakedness of her back and the curve of her spine. I traced my fingers against her skin and noticed that just below Friede’s left shoulder she carried a horrible discoloured scar. ‘What are you doing back there?’ she asked in a sleepy voice.

‘Nothing,’ I replied nervously as if I had been caught eavesdropping.

‘You are staring at my war wound, aren’t you?’ she asked, turning over to kiss me on my forehead.

‘Come on then, give us a cigarette,’ Friede demanded, hungry for nicotine. She drew her knees up underneath the blanket and blew a smoke ring from her lit cigarette. ‘If you are wondering about the mark on my back, I was in a fire.’

‘Did it happen in an air raid?’ I asked.

‘Nothing so dramatic,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. Friede explained that the Nazis were very big on women being perfect cake- and baby-makers for the Fatherland. At fourteen, Friede was sent by the Hitler Youth organisation to live as a domestic servant with a rich family in Coburg. She was to be taught to be a proper wife, for a proper National Socialist, in a new world where Germany controlled the globe.

Friede giggled as she explained. ‘It was a crazy fantasy world created by Himmler and Goebbels. Every girl in Germany was supposed to be like a Rhineland maiden who cooked and cleaned and fucked like a rabbit to make blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan babies for the Reich.’

Friede laughed and continued her story. She was sent to live with a horrible family who were fanatically pro-Hitler. ‘If I didn’t clean the silver correctly, the mother scolded me with: “If the Führer was watching you now, he would be very disappointed in you, Friede.” I think they treated their dog better than me.’

One morning while Friede was making breakfast for the family’s youngest son, her back was to the gas stove. She stood too close to the flame, and her thick woollen house coat caught fire. The little boy waiting for his meal noticed the smoke rising from Friede’s back and screamed, ‘Friedl, you are on fire.’

‘I was so stupid,’ Friede said. ‘I panicked and fled, running down the hallway.’

The last thing Friede remembered before blacking out was running down the hall towards a giant mirror. There, she stopped and watched, horrified, as her burning body reflected back into her eyes.

Friede awoke in the hospital with third-degree burns on her back. It was difficult for her to endure the pain because there was no morphine to ease her suffering. The hospital was overwhelmed with victims from a bombing raid that had caused many casualties in Coburg.

Friede said what was worse than the pain were the cries from the near-dead and dying all around her.

‘It was horrible. People were crying out, “Jesus, save me. God help me, someone please help me.” I was so afraid I was going to die in that hospital, and the authorities in Hamburg wouldn’t give permission for my family to visit me.’

‘What about the family you lived with as a domestic?’ I asked attentively.

‘That stupid family, they came once, maybe twice,’ she said harshly. ‘The mother wanted to make sure the doctors understood that my injuries were from my own foolishness. You see, they were a good National Socialist family who always took the correct safety precautions. They didn’t want any problems from the police because of my accident.’

‘It must have been very lonely.’

‘It was,’ she said with her eyes closed and her back resting on a pillow. ‘But there was a nice little boy in the bed beside mine. He called me Edelweiss. His legs were crushed after a building collapsed on him in the bombing. He was very sick, but he was always optimistic and happy, and then one day he said, “Edelweiss, I can’t feel my legs.” It was gangrene, and he was dead the next day,’ she finished sadly. ‘I don’t think he was more than eight.’

‘Well, now you know how I got my mark. Later, I will tell you about the time I was evacuated to a farm near Coburg. I really enjoyed living with that family, but it had its negative side. Their grandfather was a deviant and tried to molest the girl evacuees when they used the outdoor privy.’

Friede crushed her cigarette into a saucer and hastily jumped out of bed. I watched her quickly throw on some clothes.

‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘Mutti will be back soon. I don’t want her to meet you like this, stark naked with a glass of wine in your hands.’

‘When will I get to meet your mother?’ I asked.

Friede was frantically brushing her shiny hair in front of a tiny mirror hanging from the wall. ‘You will meet Mutti on my birthday, which is less than a month away. I can guarantee you on October 20th we will be on our best behaviour and not at each other’s throats, like we will be today. Especially if she sees you now, looking like some afternoon Casanova. Come on then, I can hear the Gellersons coming through the door, get up.’

I stood up from the makeshift bed. I picked my uniform off the floor while Friede straightened up her room.

Just before she opened the door and breached the safety of her bedroom, Friede said: ‘Before you go, give Opa a few cigarettes; he will be less mean to me when you are gone.’

I followed her out and noticed that the old man had not stirred from the kitchen. Suddenly, the front door opened, and the Gellersons entered.

It looked like they had been foraging for supplies because they were carrying potatoes and firewood for the oven. They greeted Friede warmly and ignored both the old man and me.

Before I left, I handed the old man a half packet of cigarettes. He grumbled, ‘Danke schön.’ It could have been fuck you, judging by the tone of his voice. I gave Friede a perfunctory peck on the cheek and departed for the base.

It was dusk, but there was still a steady stream of refugees making their way through town. On the way back to camp, I whistled the tune from ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and ignored the dispossessed and homeless spawning down the road.

Not far from our camp gates, I stumbled onto a family stalled on the road. Their cadaverous horse refused to drag the family’s rickety cart an inch further. It looked like the beast had probably hauled this family and their weighty, useless possessions along the eastern corridor only paces ahead of the Russian army for the past three months. The children on the wagon looked anaemic, stricken by both terror and extreme hunger. In contrast, at the front of the trap, the parents looked equally desolate.

The father cursed the horse as it stood stooped in the middle of a crossroads. He jumped off his wagon and lashed the animal with threats of God’s damnation. Froth dripped from the horse’s mouth and puddles of foam formed on the cobblestone street below. The man drew a flashing leather whip from his wagon and began to beat the animal. The horse’s thin hide was pierced by each lash, while its eyes bulged out of their sockets from pain and hunger.

The blows quickly became too much for the horse; a groan erupted from its mouth. It sounded sad and resigned, and it said no more. The horse’s bulging eyes turned upwards, and watery turds fell exhausted from its backside. Its head twisted up and towards me like a ship before its stern dragged the bow to the ocean’s depths. The horse’s agony was over in seconds. It dropped dead to the ground, still shackled to its shuck. Even though the horse weighed nothing, it still brought the cart down on its side. The mother in the front of the wagon and the children at the rear crashed down onto the pavement. The contents of their lives aimlessly spilt from the broken wagon and onto the road.

Crumpled on the side of the road, the mother wailed in indecipherable German. The peasant woman made the sign of the cross. But I thought God had left some time ago and no one had taken over his shift.

The father stood over the animal. He looked as perplexed as a motorist peering under a car bonnet billowing with steam. It was the expression of, ‘How could this have happened? I had this car serviced only a month ago.’ He dropped the whip and unshackled the horse to right the cart. Then he reloaded the cargo that had fallen across the road. The children climbed onto the back of the cart, the mother sat in the front and continued to gesticulate to Jesus, while the father took the dead horse’s place. The man slowly pulled the cart, with his family and the jetsam of their life, away from the crossroads.

The dead horse looked like a pile of old clothes dropped on the cobbled streets. Its lifeless eye stared up into the setting sun. Before flies had time to settle on the dead beast, an old woman came out of her house. She began cutting into the horse’s belly and yanked out chunks of flesh and threw them into a leather bag.

Others gathered around the old crone and followed her example. They hovered over the horse’s corpse with pocket knives or hatchets. They roughly butchered the warm body of the dead animal.

I walked around the famished mob hacking and sawing away and jogged back to camp. The guard on duty at the gate recognised me and said, ‘You always come back to camp looking a stone lighter than when you left.’

‘One of the many benefits of walking,’ I replied.

‘As long as you stick to walking and no monkey business, you be all right, Harry.’

‘Too right,’ I agreed and passed through the gates. Inside, my mind was calculating how to keep Friede and her family alive through the autumn, let alone the winter, on stolen rations.

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Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State.

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Love Among the Ruins was Harry Leslie Smith’s second volume in his The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy. It is a portrayal of his life as an ordinary occupation soldier in Hamburg following the Second World War.

Before entering Hamburg on 4 May 1945, my father had a profound hatred of Germany and its people. In Holland and Belgium, he had seen what the Nazis had done to civilian populations and slave labourers, and the genocide they had committed against Europe’s Jewish population. Time in Hamburg, where he observed many civilians suffering extreme privations, softened my father’s hatred towards ordinary Germans who bore no responsibility for the crimes of their leaders.

Below is a short selection in which Friede, his German lover, takes him on a tour of war-ravaged Hamburg. What is striking about this chapter is that Harry and Friede walk through the physical wreckage of the city, yet everything they discuss points towards rebuilding: not just buildings, but belief, companionship, and the possibility of a humane future.

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Chapter Five: The city in the shadow of the Michel

Friede and I walked back towards the river below the city centre. A wind had picked up, and the air smelled of burning rubbish, while soot and ash rained down onto the pavement. This eruption originated from a truck, puffing along and slowing up the thoroughfare in front of us. Its roof was fitted with a boiler and a steam pipe. The vehicle dragged three carriages behind it like a primitive train.

It moved like a rheumatic centipede. A young boy raced across the top of the truck, feeding the boiler with an odd assortment of fuel ranging from chair legs to telegraph poles sawn down to size. The boy, like Vulcan’s apprentice, fed the boiler and shifted the burning timber with iron tongs to increase the inferno. The contraption wheezed ahead of us like a castrated dragon let loose on a desolate industrial wasteland, belching smoke, ash and cinder.

‘What is the matter?’ Friede asked. ‘Have you never seen German ingenuity before?’

‘It’s the strangest thing I have ever encountered.’

Friede explained that when the Nazis began to run out of petrol, cars and lorries were converted to run off coal and scrap wood. Mechanics attached primitive steam engines to Volkswagen motors. They were slow, smelled horrible, and were as dirty as mud. Friede laughed at the truck painfully meandering up the road and said, ‘Look, there goes Germany’s secret weapon to win the war.’

Suddenly we were near the harbour. Apart from the homeless, few people ventured onto this roadway. Ahead of us was a scattering of refugees who carried the weight of their lives on their backs, or pushed it on baby prams with warped, squeaking wheels. I saw a family dragging an enormous clock in their cart, its weights and pulleys clanking and screeching over the bumpy road.

Friede looked at the slim traffic of people and explained: ‘The DPs [displaced persons] always seem to take the most ridiculous objects with them on their journey. I don’t understand it. Why would you haul around a timepiece? It can only remind you that your day is done.’

‘What would you take into exile?’ I asked.

Friede thought for a moment and replied: ‘My friends, my family, books, a phonograph, and if you are good to me, maybe even you, liebchen. What about you, Tommy, what would you take?’

I smiled and quoted Omar Khayyam: ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou, beside me. I’d also bundle onto my wagon as much luck as it could hold.’

‘You are a brave soul if that is all you need to make you happy in banishment.’

I didn’t know where Friede was taking me, but I grew concerned by our rapid plunge into the dead flesh of Hamburg. We were approaching the epicentre of the catastrophic 1943 Allied bombing mission, codenamed Operation Gomorrah.

‘Are you sure it’s safe to be here?’ I asked.

‘Yes, come on; let’s get through this street quickly. Besides, you have a gun in case we get into trouble.’

I had almost forgotten about my weapon; it was a required accoutrement while outside of camp. It was a Sten gun, which I believed put me in more danger from involuntary discharge than any threat from disgruntled former Nazis.

On either side of the road, windowless, lifeless, disintegrating buildings stood ready to crumble into unrecognisable cement. It was like walking through an excavated Pompeii long after Vesuvius had destroyed its citizens. The neighbourhood was bombed into non-existence because of its proximity to the harbour. Only a handful of people survived the firebombing; most were condemned to death by flames, suffocation, or drowning. A conflagration was created by the incendiary bombs. It produced hurricane-strength fire winds that melted people, animals, and inanimate objects as it bellowed across the city, consuming anything and everything combustible.

The road abruptly opened up onto a boulevard. Against the destroyed cityscape, a resolute statue of Charlemagne stood. The effigy looked bemused. Its sculpted arm pointed rigidly towards the destruction. Behind him, something else had survived more or less unharmed through those nights of relentless bombing. It had dodged the uncountable bomb tonnage dumped onto this city from Flying Fortresses during the day and Lancasters bombing at night. It alone remained and looked even nonchalant over its survival. On closer inspection, I could see that parts of the edifice had suffered some bomb damage. However, in comparison to the surrounding wasteland, it appeared unmolested.

Friede pointed and said: ‘That is Saint Michael’s Kirche. The “Michel” is Hamburg’s most famous church. The cathedral is over 400 years old and a testament to Hamburg’s greatness as a maritime city. It witnessed our downfall under the Nazis. But we believe that as long as the Michel remains, Hamburg will survive and prosper and its people will rebuild their lives. It is beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed reluctantly, ‘it is very beautiful.’

I had a strained relationship with churches and those in charge of delivering God’s word to the ignorant. Belief had long ago been beaten out of me by sexless nuns and alcoholic priests. I suspected that the church survived because it was a reliable geographic beacon for the RAF. It helped guide the waves of bombers onwards to their targets. The cathedral was like a trumpet to the walls of Jericho.

‘Every Christmas Eve,’ Friede continued, ‘the Michel’s bells rang at midnight. You could hear their chimes from my mother’s home in Fuhlsbüttel, ten kilometres away.’

Friede picked up some bomb debris from the ground. Perhaps it was part of a roof or the side of a building; now it was just a shred of mortar. She played with it in her hand as if weighing the consequence of war and wickedness. After some thought, she dropped the small souvenir of wreckage and said, ‘I just can’t believe in God, at least not God from the Bible.’

‘How could he exist? What creator allows all this cruelty to inhabit the Earth? What type of God allows Germany to go mad and kill the Jews? What God lets Spain and Russia slaughter their innocents in civil and class warfare? Who would make a world and walk away from it as if it were a sandcastle on a beach at high tide?’

Friede wiped dirt from her hand and brushed away some hair that had fallen onto her face.

‘After all of this waste and destruction, what can you believe in, Friede? What can anyone believe in?’ I asked.

She looked at me for a moment, and after a brief second of reflection, she said: ‘I think there is something greater than man. It is not human or divine. It is energy. It came when the universe formed from the void. It was like the first spark from a flint. The ember gave humanity conscious life. Our awareness is a gift, but it comes with a price. You only get one turn, one spin at the wheel, and then you are thrown back into the cosmic vapours. There are no second chances. As for eternity, it is unconscious without dreams; the dead are like amoebas floating on the ocean’s waves.’

‘So there is no heaven?’ I asked.

‘No, you just walk to the end of your road.’

‘What happens then?’

‘Nothing is waiting for you at the finish. We return to particles, lost memories, lost hopes.’

Friede’s arms were at her sides, and the hem of her skirt rustled in a wind coming off the river.

‘Harry, now you look at me like I am crazy,’ she said quietly.

She stopped and moved away from me, then threw her head back and stared up at the church tower 130 metres above us. She was caught in the rapture of that afternoon.

‘If some beauty still exists, life cannot be that bleak. Come on; let’s go, before we are late for the train home.’ Friede dashed off ahead and left me frozen in my thoughts.

I cried out, ‘Wait for me!’ I jogged to catch up with Friede while the Sten gun bounced against my arm. I was out of breath when I finally reached her on Marseiller Strasse, near the Dammtor train station.

‘Tommy, if you want to keep up with me, you should take better care of yourself. At school, I always won the hundred-meter dash because I liked the freedom of being alone, rather than being in a pack of schoolgirls.’

We now walked together towards the Dammtor train station, located across the street from a rollicking armed forces’ nightclub called The Victory. The train station was the size of London’s St Pancras, but lacked its architectural beauty. The Dammtor was equipped for both inner-city and regional travel. In the early days after the war, its primary importance was as a terminal for inner-city travel, as petrol was available only for British military vehicles.

We pushed our way through a crowd congregating at the front entrance. Inside, Friede hung on to me as we slid past the queue of people resigned to the new order of things in Germany. The platforms teemed with desperate-looking characters, while overhead pigeons and sparrows swooped and darted through the exposed skylight. Below, civilians were divided into groups of two or three people. Their eyes darted to the ground when they got sight of a British uniform.

Across the platform, the U-Bahn riders scurried to their trains. They dragged unwieldy luggage stuffed with what remained of their pre-war lives. It was now to be traded for food or medicine. On the inner walls of the train station, message boards had been hastily erected. They were crammed with pictures of lost relatives, lovers or friends. Sad notes were tacked up: ‘Hans Schumann, I am now at Opa’s, your loving Inga.’ Miserable pictures were jammed against a dozen other photos. Each snapshot asked to be recognised, remembered, and loved. However, the hot August sun leaked through the station’s rafters, blistering the edges of the photos as if to say, ‘Don’t waste your breath looking for me: I am already dead, my body lies with the nameless that died at the side of the Autobahn.’

Railway employees patrolled the station in worn uniforms that looked ready to disintegrate no matter how cleaned or starched they were. Whistles rested threateningly on their lips while passengers diligently looked to follow their orders. Even in defeat, Germans still craved a well-executed command, even if it was only to stand ready for an approaching train.

An electrified train entered the station and edged past us. Passengers were pressed up against the windows like guppies in a fishbowl with too little water. When the train screeched to a halt, middle-aged men wearing old homburg hats and soiled overcoats spilt out of the doors. They shuffled out towards the street with their heads bowed as if frightened to look at the ruins around them and the sunlight above them. Behind them, women followed, clutching cloth bags ripe with silverware and wrapped china to be bartered for food.

Small orphaned children darted around the platform searching for discarded cigarette ends. They were bottom-feeders who wore rancid trousers and coal-smeared pullovers as if they were waifs from Victorian London. If they were lucky, they found a handful of partially smoked Capstans or Player’s on the dirty platform floor, which were sold for a few pfennigs to teenage gangsters employed by the German mafia. The mob recycled the cigarette stubs with the labour of homeless children and destitute women into new cigarettes of questionable quality, taste, and hygiene. Eventually, the newly fashioned cigarettes ended up in the mouths of indigent Germans who tried to quell the hunger pangs created by the starvation rations thrown to them by the occupation forces.

The rail police blasted their whistles with menace. The order was barked to board the U-Bahn train. Friede and I were herded towards the railway cars. The embarkation resembled a scramble by passengers on a fast-sinking ship with too few lifeboats. We were jostled into the first car by the momentum of the people behind us.

Outside, the police held back disappointed passengers who were too late to board. Inside, I was hit by an overwhelming stench of cabbage and body odour. There was an exhausted gloom painted on the occupants’ faces. I had seen the same defeated look on unemployed miners in West Yorkshire during the Great Depression. It was an expression of pain and surprise from a person who couldn’t quite work out how they had lost everything at life’s roulette table.

It was claustrophobic in the train, but the Germans were either unaware of the lack of oxygen or had grown stoical to the means by which they had to travel around town. Friede said, ‘There is more air at the rear of the train.’

We jostled through the crowd of exhausted travellers. A teenage boy, dusty from a day foraging through the wreckage, saluted me. This caused a woman in her 70s sitting beside him to hiss.

‘Danke,’ I said, but offered the wooden seat to Friede, who declined and gave it to a pregnant woman standing nearby instead.

The train entered a tunnel, and our car was plunged into darkness while we sped underground below the wrecked city. In lightless obscurity, people coughed nervously, some joked, and others whispered as if they were still in a police state. I felt as if I was choking. It was like being trained for chemical attacks by being locked in a cinder-block shed filled with tear gas.

Friede said to me, ‘Let’s play a game. Come with me.’ She grabbed my hand tightly and led me through the throng of people.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see. Don’t ask too many questions. It spoils the surprise.’

Friede forced us to the compartment door by the front of the train and said, ‘The rules to this game are simple, but you will have to learn them while we play.’

‘All right,’ I agreed with some hesitation.

The U-Bahn squealed into Hallerstrasse station. On a poorly lit subterranean platform, weary passengers waited to board. The door flew open and warm oxygen raced in to fill my lungs. Friede dropped her hand from mine and disappeared out into the station. I froze for a moment. It was difficult to calibrate what had happened. Instinct took over, and I jumped out of the carriage. I saw from the corner of my eye that she had run into the next compartment. I took off towards Friede and manoeuvred around passengers and objects. I heard train guards screaming halt, which I ignored. I thrust myself into the next compartment and found her grinning at the front of the carriage.

‘Next time,’ she called out, ‘the game gets more difficult. Keep up with me, Tommy, or you are going to lose me.’

‘Never,’ I said.

With a surge, the train took off, clanking against railway ties. A woman beside us held onto the overhead railing while beads of perspiration trickled down her squat neck. The woman cursed the humidity, and someone slid a window open, making the compartment as sultry as a rainforest.

While we pulled into the next station, Klosterstern, Friede prepared herself like a runner on a chalk. ‘Better keep up this time, Tommy.’

As soon as the door was ajar, Friede darted out and onto the crowded platform. Energetically, I followed and barged my way through the travellers, who stepped aside as if I was pursuing a criminal rather than playing a schoolyard game. I heard the signalman blow his whistle, which meant the train doors were seconds away from closing. I got nervous; I couldn’t find her. I looked in all directions, but couldn’t see her through the shuffling phalanx of Germans.

Then, as if the smoke had cleared, I heard Friede call out to me in her soft accent, making my name sound Arabic. ‘Hari,’ she cried. There she was frantically waving and jumping, three cars from me.

I cut through the crowd, shouting, ‘Schnell, schnell, out of the way.’ My Sten gun wrapped around my shoulder jerked and bounced while I sprinted to reach her. The railway guards blew their whistles, and the train doors began to close. Just ahead of me, I saw Friede slide into the last compartment. In front of me, an elderly guard blasted the all-clear to the engineer. The doors were now closed to new passengers. I raced up to him and demanded to be let inside the train. The guard tapped his wristwatch to indicate I was too late and out of luck. I screamed so loud the whistle fell from his lips.

‘Look, mate, Hitler’s kaput. We are in charge now, so open up this bleeding door.’

I saw Friede’s head peek up from inside the train and she smiled at my discomfort. Another conductor strode up to the elderly guard and me. He wondered why the all-clear had not been sounded, making the train seconds late for its next stop. The two guards argued for several minutes. Finally, the older one relented and allowed me onto the train. I noticed the rest of the occupants eyed me with suspicion and contempt, except for Friede. She rushed up to me and grabbed my hand.

‘If you want me, Harry, you have to hold on to me tight or else I will slip away from you, and neither of us wants that, do we?’

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Thank you for reading and supporting my Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State.

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There are no working-class memoirs from Britain’s occupation force in Germany’s second-largest city, Hamburg, apart from my dad’s Love Among the Ruins. It’s a brilliant read about life observed from the lower ranks when hope was reborn from the ashes of war.

The creators of much of our popular literary, journalistic and cinematic culture are from the upper middle class or society’s entitled set. They have moulded a myth about Britain during the Second World War, cast from their privileged position in society. The working class are archetypal, a backdrop used for comedy, whinging, dead bodies, or examples of a Tommy who learns through battle that democracy is worth fighting for.

My dad, who was from the lower rungs of the working class, didn’t experience war like someone from the middle class. He didn’t hate Britain. But he did detest the people who owned it and those who managed it for them.

My father’s experiences in the Second World War were not about patriotism or duty. They were about surviving it and returning to a peacetime that included the construction of a modern Welfare State. The reason our working-class history during the Second World War was rewritten by popular culture is to keep us obedient in an increasingly unequal and authoritarian society governed for the benefit of its highest income earners.

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Chapter 4

A coffee house on the banks of ruin

When August came, the residents of Hamburg sweltered within the skeleton of their defeated city. Record temperatures scorched the northern hemisphere, and the city’s ruins were bleached grey by the sun. At night, in the sultry dark, the sound of wild dogs barking rode through shattered windows on humid breezes that floated in from the Baltic.

In the dwindling days of summer, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated by atomic explosions that ended the Second World War in the Pacific. All nations were now at peace with their fellow man. In Germany, it certainly didn’t feel like civilisation was in harmony with itself. Europe was divided between the Soviet army and the Allied forces in an uneasy détente. Anarchy and hunger threatened Western Europe. Political grievances, black-market turf wars, and old scores against collaborators were settled at midnight with a loaded revolver. Peace in Europe was as uncomfortable as a suit too small in the shoulders.

While the puppet-masters – the banks, the politicians and the generals – pulled strings behind the scenes and shifted the continent politically and financially, I was being tugged deeper into Friede’s world. I orbited her like a faithful satellite, while she tentatively introduced my good character and name to her closer girlfriends. She smuggled me into their conversations and inflated my generosity and kind nature.

‘Look what he brought my family: a whole kilo of cheese. He even found me tooth powder to clean my teeth. This Tommy always tries to converse in German, even when he mixes up the words.’

Among her friends, I was becoming known as the Brit who wasn’t looking for a quick shag underneath the linden trees. At the beginning of our courtship, I was left to linger in the background. Friede kept me ignorant and oblivious to most of her everyday world. She was still uncertain about the depth or distance our friendship would travel. Friede purposely kept me apart from her friends. She was afraid they might reveal confidences to me about her life or disapprove of her dating a foreign occupier.

In late August, I was introduced to her friend Gerda. The two had been friends since early childhood. Gerda was the first friend Friede made when she was sent to live with her foster parents in Hamburg’s working-class Altona district. Both girls lived in the same apartment block, and from the day they met, Gerda acted as her bodyguard against gossipers and bullies. Friede’s friend was a peroxide blonde who was physically pretty and emotionally and intellectually uncomplicated. Past or future tense meant little to Gerda because she lived without introspection. To her, one day you were born, and many years later you died. It was the in-between living that mattered to her.

I took them both out for coffee to a riverbank café in the Blankenese district. It was an area popular with occupying forces because its restaurants still functioned with pre-war efficiency. An old and shuffling maître d’ brought us to our table. Friede remarked that the café had been in business since the days of the Kaiser.

‘When I was about ten, my mother and her boyfriend Henry brought me here. It was filled with stuffy Nazis. I see the uniforms are different, but the cakes remain the same.’

‘Hush, Friede,’ said Gerda. ‘I have never been here, so it is all new for me.’

It was a beautiful outdoor restaurant for a well-to-do crowd. Money, not ideology, was its political stripe. That was why it survived the Kaiser’s abdication, the assassination of democracy, and Hitler’s bloody end. Regardless of who was in power, the menu at the café remained the same: Vienna coffee, Sachertorte, and VSOP brandy. The café welcomed occupation as it did every historical event: with a cash-only policy.

It was a warm, cloudless day and the restaurant tables were crowded with loud British troops and their female companions. It looked like there was an equal portion of officers and enlisted men chatting and flirting with young German women. Although the occupation command frowned upon fraternisation, it was almost impossible to enforce. The occupiers were young men who had endured five years of war, privation, and the threat of obliteration. So, irrespective of HQ’s fear that contact with the civilian population would lead to an outbreak of venereal disease, corruption in the ranks, and a diminished capacity to keep order in Germany, nothing was ever really done to enforce the regulation.

The atmosphere at the café was as carefree as a summer’s day before the war. But that was because everyone was facing the river. No one dared turn towards Hamburg’s skyline, where it was Gomorrah, the day after Lot had packed up and left. Hamburg was no more than a putrefying animal body. Underneath the city’s mountains of ash, cement, bricks, and burned beams were the mummified corpses of some 30,000 bombing victims. They had perished during the RAF firebombing raids in July 1943.

‘Last year, you could still smell it,’ Friede noted as she put on fashionable sunglasses.

‘Smell what?’ I asked, while her friend Gerda looked out towards the river, uninterested.

‘The stench from decaying bodies trapped underneath the city’s wreckage,’ she replied. ‘Last summer, you needed to place a handkerchief sprinkled with eau de cologne against your face to stop the odour of rotting flesh from getting into your nostrils. It was overpowering. Even in the winter of 1944, how do you say, the taste, is that the right word? The taste of death overpowered winter’s frigidness. Hamburg is a tomb,’ she concluded morbidly.

The waiter arrived and set down our order at the table. He was dressed in an immaculate white coat, black tie, and dark trousers. He bowed and scraped before me and fawned over the two women. Contemptuously, I imagined he had displayed the same amount of servility when his customers had been Gestapo officers with their dates.

I offered the ladies a cigarette from my Player’s pack, which they both hungrily accepted. I placed my cigarettes on the table. With Hollywood gallantry, I lit our cigarettes. I was about to bring the match to my smoke when Friede suddenly blew it out.

‘Don’t forget, it is bad luck being the third one to be lit.’

‘I don’t think we have to worry about snipers any more. Do we?’

Gerda laughed: ‘Both of you should be careful of Cupid; he is the only one who will get you two into trouble.’

Gerda slurped her coffee piled high with fresh cream, while Friede used a spoon to savour each mouthful of rich butter fat. Her friend smiled and laughed at my jokes, even if she couldn’t fully understand them. Friede intently observed how I treated Gerda and was obviously making mental notes of whether I was being kind or cruel. For some time, we talked about music. The two women were famished to know about American singers, swing bands, and whether I had any of their phonographs.

‘Do you have Benny Goodman?’

‘I adore Tommy Dorsey.’

‘What about “Pennsylvania 6-5000”?’

‘Glenn Miller,’ I told them, ‘is very popular.’

I suggested we should all go to a dance held at one of the Air Force clubs in the near future: ‘We can hear swing music played by some great bands?’

Considering I didn’t know how to dance, it was a bold offer, so I quickly changed the subject. I suggested as an alternative that I bring some phonographs over to Friede’s mother’s apartment. ‘We can listen to some good music and make it our own private party.’

‘I would still rather go out dancing,’ Friede said, disappointed.

The afternoon passed quickly and pleasantly as everyone skirted unsettling incidents from the past or our precarious present. Only once did I let the conversation drift into uncharted waters, when I foolishly asked Gerda if she had any brothers or sisters. Gerda’s eyes grew dark. ‘Two,’ she answered dejectedly. ‘I have not seen my brother Erwin since 1942. He was in the Africa campaign. He was taken prisoner by the British. At least he is safe because he is a POW in Britain.’ Gerda stopped her narrative and asked, ‘Could I have another cigarette? Bitte.’

Her younger brother, Hans, hadn’t been as lucky because he had fought on the Eastern front. When I closed the lid of my lighter, she resumed the story. He was at Stalingrad and couldn’t endure the brutality. He tried to desert to the Russians. Unfortunately, Hans failed in his attempt to surrender to the Reds. He was caught by his own side, who subjected him to a front-line court-martial. Found guilty of cowardice and desertion, Hans was sentenced to death. The verdict was carried out within minutes of the judgement. He was strung up on a telegraph pole - a sign hung around his neck which read: Coward.

The waiter arrived with our bill. He presented it on a silver tray placed obsequiously before me. He officiously swept crumbs from the table with a shiny brass-handled brush. There was a hasty servility to his movements. Other soldiers with their German girls were eager to pay for coffee by the river. I stubbed my cigarette into the ashtray and tried to leave a fat tip on the table, but Friede commented out loud: ‘That is just foolish, Harry. That stupid waiter is already rich on Tommy’s money; better to give him half and we can enjoy the rest somewhere else.’

I picked up part of the gratuity and sheepishly thrust it back into my trouser pocket. When I stood up, I noticed Gerda had hastily gathered up spare sugar cubes from the coffee saucers and put them into her pocket.

The three of us walked along the riverbank. The water was sluggish and covered with a sheen of petrol. The sterns of scuttled naval ships perched themselves above the waterline like markers leading towards the dockyards. Off in the distance, the harbour was still. It was a testament to the air war against the city. The port was now only broken awnings and collapsed steel cranes resting derelict across docking slips. We strolled on a path along the Alster. It was an exquisite walkway decorated with ancient trees and ornate benches. The sky was clear, the sun warm, but there was a dusky smell in the air coming from the ravaged city beyond.

We walked with Gerda to a black market where she could barter cigarettes for sausage. The market was in the ruins of the working-class district, near the docklands. As we walked, dust blew up from the bomb craters where buildings had once stood. All around me were gaping holes in the cityscape, as if a giant animal had bitten a chunk of flesh from a carcass. In other places, ziggurats of debris formed, where buildings had caved in onto the street. In some spots, a giant bulldozer had brushed ruined neighbourhoods into heaps as one would rake leaves for burning.

Everywhere, there was a loud, monotonous clicking and scraping sound coming from old women pecking through the rubble. They were known as the ‘brick Omas’ (‘Oma’ being German for grandma). They scavenged around the wrecked streetscapes looking for salvageable masonry to rebuild the sacrificed city. The old women wore rags and torn aprons over their clothing. Brick dust coated their hair and faces, while their hands were blistered and cut from handling bomb debris that they gathered in neat piles and placed along the roadway. They worked without complaint, reminding me of the Israelites building Pharaoh’s necropolis. Sometimes, scores of old women were killed when they tripped an unexploded bomb trapped in the wreckage.

In the background, amid the industrious Omas, lurked a pack of men in various stages of deformity. A man missing a leg hobbled around on a dubious crutch that barely kept him upright. Beside him stood an armless man whose shirtsleeves looked like sails empty of wind. There were several other men whose heads were wrapped in dirty bandages. These war victims huddled around broken concrete as if waiting for the old women to reclaim them as the other refuse in the street. The uncontaminated scent from my crisp RAF uniform stirred them from their crippled indolence.

‘Tommy, cigarette für einen Kameraden.’

‘Tommy, chocolate bitte, für meine Kinder.’

‘Tommy, Tommy,’ went the chorus of maimed men living in the shadows of burnt-out buildings.

We quickened our pace and rushed away from these men. We soon approached the black market where Gerda wished to trade. All around the haphazard, open-air market, thuggish-looking men guarded the perimeter from thieves and the occupying authorities. Generally, the British turned a blind eye to this commerce of survival. However, on occasion, especially if the market was dealing in liquor or medicine, a less-than-honest bureaucrat, officer or NCO demanded a kick-back to keep the business permit ‘official’, so to speak.

I bade goodbye to Gerda and uncoordinatedly kissed her cheek. Friede spoke rapidly and lovingly in German. When they finished talking, Gerda called out: ‘Tschüss, Puppe.’

‘I imagine she’ll do all right in there,’ I said. ‘She’s quick-witted and no fool. I like her.’

‘If anyone wants to live in Germany, they cannot be a fool. As for Gerda, I trust her with my life and would a hundred times over. She would never betray me, or stab me in the back for money, man, or country. Gerda is not complicated, but she is beautiful in her simplicity. I have other friends, who you shall meet, who are different, but I need them just the same to make me complete.’

‘What did she just say to you?’

‘Oh, that,’ Friede said, laughing. ‘Gerda said, “See ya, doll.” We must really begin to work on your German,’ she added.

'Doll?' I asked, puzzled. Friede replied in a tone that was impatient and peeved that some of her private life was being opened up to an outsider.

She explained that it was a pet name. Friede’s mother, out of guilt for making her live with foster parents, bought her daughter expensive clothes. It made the other children who lived in the working-class district think Friede resembled a princess or a doll, fallen on hard times.

Tip Jar

Thank you for reading and supporting my Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State.

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Love Among the Ruins was Harry Leslie Smith’s portrayal of his life as an ordinary occupying soldier in Hamburg following the Second World War. It is the second volume of his The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy.

In the first volume of the trilogy, my father writes about his early memories from the slums of Yorkshire. It’s an exploration of a working-class Yorkshire man shaped by poverty. In it he is deeply conscious of class, suspicious of authority, emotionally marked by childhood deprivation. It is a search that most from his generation made for belonging and dignity in a society ravaged by capitalism.

Love Among the Ruins is a crucible where all that Harry experienced in The Green and Pleasant Land is tested by a harsh peace in which he is seen as a victor.

Harry repeatedly measures Hamburg against his memories of Halifax, Bradford, Barnsley, the Depression, and his family history. The earlier life isn’t left behind. It remains the explanatory framework for everything he encounters: post-war Germany, love, adulthood, moral responsibility, identity, rebuilding after catastrophe.

Each volume of this memoir trilogy has unique ambitions, and all of them read like novels. Harry’s favourite was Love Among the Ruins because it brought Friede back to life for him. Together they form a panorama of a working-class man’s passage through the maelstrom of twentieth-century history. It’s a story about living through the worst and coming out of it intact, empathetic and a socialist.

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Chapter 3

A summer in the ruins of Troy

During that spring and summer of 1945, history’s forge was busy. Russia and America were intent on beating out a new and different Europe from the dead Nazi era. The Potsdam Conference formally divided Germany into four unequal parts. Naturally, Russia and America, as the strongest and wealthiest partners in the war against Germany, occupied most of the country’s territory. The smaller contributors to the war effort were offered a reduced share of the fatherland. Britain was given a small but meaty portion of northern Germany. France was tossed some offal to assuage their Gallic pride. In this divided Germany, peace was strained between the Western powers and Russia, except over reparations. On that subject, each occupying nation acted like an appellant at an insolvency court hearing.

Russia was by far the most brutal and vengeful occupier, having suffered greatly at the hands of Hitler’s armies. So, without regret, the Soviets gnawed and chewed into their share of the German carcass that stretched from Berlin on a north–south axis and eastwards to the rich farmlands of Pomerania. Trains left on the hour destined for Moscow, filled with dismantled factories, laboratories, and heavy machinery. Along with the spoils of war, these trains also carried former Wehrmacht soldiers and the SS, condemned to Siberian hard labour.

The situation didn’t look much better for Germans residing in the Western-occupied zone of their country. The Allies implemented the Morgenthau plan, which was created to neuter Germany’s warlike tendencies and transform it into a pastoral society. The country’s industrial base, its steel works, automobile plants and consumer manufacturing centres were dismantled. The contents of Germany’s economic greatness were shipped to the Allied victors in giant rail cars and ocean freighters. Like the communists, Britain, America and France called the looting of Germany ‘reparations for the just’.

As acetylene torches dismembered factories, steel mills and shipyards across Germany, so the friendships I had built in the RAF were dismantled too. One by one, my mates departed, and their names were replaced on the sergeant’s morning roll call roster with new and unfamiliar draftees. My friends went home to their old and familiar civilian lives, while I remained in Germany, beguiled by a fresh world emerging from the wreckage.

It wasn’t meant to happen, but I fell in love with the German girl. Considering that our two nations had waged a brutal war for five years, it was astonishing that Friede and I even liked each other, let alone grew into lovers.

Before I met Friede, my knowledge of Germany was based upon propaganda posters and newsreels displaying an endless sea of jackboots flooding across Europe. I was convinced that Germans were evil and sinister after I witnessed the results of the Nazis’ scorched-earth policy in Holland.

My black-and-white opinions about Germany changed when I crossed through their borders and encountered a civilisation turned into a wasteland by aerial bombardment. On the ground, I witnessed emaciated German children living in appalling conditions in the ruins of their city. It was at that moment I accepted that both the damned and the innocent suffered in this war. The longer I stayed in Germany, the more I understood that Friede was both my Beatrice and my Virgil. She was the one who was to lead me through Germany’s post-war inferno and perhaps towards our own paradise.

Friede was an excellent guide through both present-day Germany and her country’s recent past, but sometimes the maps were filled with errors created by the imperfections and the prejudice of the cartographers. There were moments when Friede expressed an overwhelming shame and guilt for the crimes of her elders. At other times she couldn’t fully digest the totality of Germany’s barbarity under Hitler.

Friede said it was impossible to fully comprehend the ever-expanding list of heinous acts her country had committed. She compared it to a child having a father who is wonderful to his own family, but is found guilty of murdering many people in the neighbourhood.

‘You think to yourself: was this the same man that loved me and fed me and cared for me; yet did all of these wicked things to our neighbours?’

In many ways, Friede was just an ordinary teenager savouring the liberties of youth, discovering the pleasures of sex and the exhilaration of being adored and wanted by men.

‘I love the way you look at me when I wear that summer dress with my new white shoes.’

Friede was nonchalant about male and female relationships and casually warned me that she saw other men.

‘There are other boys, you know,’ she said in a carefree whisper one day.

‘Oh?’ I responded, acting as if I were cosmopolitan and blasé.

‘Like you, they take me on walks or to a café,’ she added.

‘Who are they? Anyone I know?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘Of course you don’t know them. One is a German boy who I have known since I was four. And the other one is a Tommy who likes to talk to me.’

I bet he does, I thought cynically.

Friede absorbed my silence and tried to explain her feelings about the other young men in her life. She said that her whole world had changed the day the war ended. Peace was difficult, hungry, and complicated, but it was also exhilarating. She wanted to enjoy the simple pleasure of being alive and young with few restrictions.

‘Harry, you must take things slowly with me. Let our hearts grow for each other as we explore this new world,’ she told me, skipping slightly ahead of me.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘you’re right.’ And then I lied. ‘You know I’m seeing other German girls, so don’t get too comfortable with me, if you know what I mean.’

I was no actor. My shoulders stooped, and my face displayed a painful heartache. Friede noticed and became more serious.

‘Those other boys are nothing to me. I am very fond of you. You are so … what is the word … gallant? I am very grateful to you. I just don’t know yet what we will become, friends or lovers. So don’t be cross, please understand.’ Friede added: ‘I shall always be your comrade. My heart will tell me when it is time to give it to you or another. Now stop pouting,’ she admonished me. ‘Buy me some flowers before you walk me home.’

Friede introduced me to her past like I was the Sultan in Scheherazade; there was a story every night that never finished and led further into her soul. She revealed her illegitimacy to me, her experience as a foster child and evacuee. She was adamant that if we were to continue seeing each other, she wanted ‘No dark places in your heart, no jealousy, and no anger in your soul. Between us, Harry, things have to be light as a Strauss operetta or as fun as the jitterbug.’

Tentatively, we began to learn about each other’s likes and dislikes to see if we shared anything in common, except surviving a war from opposite sides.

‘I love to read poetry,’ I told her.

‘Wordsworth, he is a good poet, but Goethe is more universal,’ she responded.

‘I’ve never heard of Schiller, but everyone in the world knows Shakespeare.’

‘Shirley Temple, I loved the way she could dance.’

‘What about Harold Lloyd?’

‘I don’t know him, but you must know Dick und Doof?’

‘Who are they?’

‘You know, the fat and the thin man, who wear the bowler hats.’

‘You mean Laurel and Hardy.’

‘That’s right, Dick und Doof.’

During our first few weeks together, Friede and I didn’t have much physical contact, except that we held hands on occasion. Sometimes she even let me kiss her lightly on the lips or play with her hair. I would sometimes catch her staring deep into my eyes, trying to decipher what was greater, my lust or my affection for her.

Friede wasn’t a patriot, but she was proud to be German. She knew her country’s history and achievements in music, philosophy, art, and the sciences. Friede also admitted that Germany’s character, its national greatness, was also the ember that sparked its evil. On one of our many walks, we strolled down an avenue showered in dust and demolition. Friede pointed to a group of women working outside their apartment block.

‘Look at them, they have nothing, and yet they will still sweep their stoop. They will always make sure the inside of their homes is clean. Even if they have no food to eat, Germans will always make sure they are dignified and clean. It is what we learn from birth. It doesn’t matter if you are poor or rich, you must have discipline and pride in yourself.’ Sadly, she added: ‘This is what led us to this Gomorrah. Our discipline transformed us into criminals.’

On another day, we were drinking wine at an outdoor river café, when she told me: ‘I think my emotions were created in the social clubs of Weimar Germany because they are so democratic, so contradictory. I am up and down and all over the map.’

‘You seem all right to me,’ I replied.

Friede shook her head. ‘No, I have so many anxieties. I am afraid a lot of times, for no real reason. It is a gift from the Nazis.’

Friede explained that she was nervous and self-conscious because of her illegitimacy. She was confused by where and to whom she belonged. Was it with her mother or her foster parents? Did any of them really want her or even love her? She was afraid that people judged her because her mother took a rich lover and her biological father was a socialist.

‘That is why I read so many books,’ she explained. ‘I am looking for another character that might resemble me or my life, even if they are just fiction.’

I confessed to Friede that I had the same fantasy as a boy and would hunt through novels looking for my identity or the cause of my family’s misfortunes.

‘Did you find anyone who was like you?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m afraid I have only found escape from the people around me. What are your favourite books?’ I asked.

‘Too numerous to count,’ she replied. ‘Many of them were forbidden under Hitler because they were considered anti-German. They even called Thomas Mann ‘an enemy of the people’. But Mutti still had a copy of Buddenbrooks, which she let me read. There were no books at my foster parents’ house. They were simple people and didn’t read much, except my foster father liked Karl May to drown out my foster mother’s complaints.’

‘So you and your mother were anti-Nazi then?’ I asked.

She looked at me with dark, impenetrable eyes and said: ‘Before the war, everyone was pro-Nazi, even if they had doubts about Hitler. Now everyone is anti-Nazi, even if they have doubts about the British and Americans. My family survived as everyone else did in Germany. We had two faces: one for the world in black uniforms and another for life behind closed doors. You know,’ she added conspiratorially, ‘my mother even joined the Nazi party.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, it’s true. Her lover Henry said it was good for his business; it probably was, considering he imported and sold tobacco products. Henry joined the party in 1939 because it was easier to sell lighters and humidors to officers’ clubs if you could say you were a member of the Party. My mother became a member of the Nazi Party in 1942. It was a simple decision for her. Too many people were asking questions about me because I lived with a foster family and she lived with a much older businessman. There was always someone sticking their nose into our business and asking about my real father, Fritz. Funny how people stopped gossiping once she got her party badge.’

Friede’s illegitimacy tortured her. Being a bastard dug a deep furrow inside of her personality. It made Friede believe she wasn’t complete, that her existence was evidence for a crime of passion. She believed she was just the product of a love affair that ended in shame.

‘It is a stain on the child more than on the parents,’ she said bitterly. ‘Children made fun of me because I didn’t have a father. I didn’t fit in because of my mother’s avant-garde lifestyle and my polar-opposite life with my foster parents. Mutti’s way of life made it hard for me to make friends. But even the lone wolf sometimes wants to be liked. So at school, I was a good National Socialist and said “Sieg heil” with the rest of my classmates.’ She paused and then continued. ‘Why do you look at me like I just said I followed the devil?’

‘Did you believe in Hitler?’ I asked.

‘What a silly question. When Hitler came to power in 1933, I was five. I was too young for politics. I only knew what adults told me, or what I heard on the wireless and saw at the movies or at school. We were taught: “The Nazi party saved us from anarchy.” So yes, I believed in Hitler because I believed in my mother and my foster parents and my teachers. Once, I even told my class that I met Hitler in Berchtesgaden on summer holiday.’

‘Did you?’

Friede looked at me as if I was a simpleton and said, ‘Sure, and he shook my hand! Hardly, I was just trying to impress the class with a fib no one could contradict. If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you I hated the Hitler Youth. But that is because the girls were all bullies in my squad, so I tried to avoid them as much as possible. So,’ she added, while looking at her face in a compact mirror, ‘is the interrogation over? Am I now de-Nazified enough for you?’

‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘You didn’t,’ she replied, snapping the compact shut. ‘I just believe you can’t possibly know what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. No matter what I tell you, you will never understand what it was like, and you will always say underneath your breath, “Us Brits would never act like that.” Maybe not, but ask the Irish what they think of jolly old England. I am sure they have a different story to tell. Germany did horrible, unspeakable things to millions of people and we are rightly guilty, but I don’t want to talk about it any more because all of it just makes me sick inside.’

In the time it took to change a phonograph, Friede could veer from extreme emotional brooding to playfulness. One evening, we sat on a park bench and argued whether occupying soldiers behaved no better than the Wehrmacht in France. Fed up with the conversation, she grabbed a box of matches that was resting on my cigarette pack. She struck a handful of matches and tossed them at me to see how I would react. Of course, I returned fire. Neither of us blinked in this game of combustible chicken. The competition ended only when the box was empty of flaming projectiles.

At other moments, Friede was guilt-ridden by the wretched circumstances faced by refugees. When we encountered a group of them slumped on the street, Friede took a fruit basket I had purloined from RAF stores and handed it out to them.

‘They need it more than my family or me. Look at them; they must have travelled all the way from Lithuania. What is going to become of them? Who will help them?’ she pleaded.

She began to hand out apples and pears to the displaced family. It looked to me like all the kindness in the world wasn’t going to save them from annihilation. Caustically, she said, ‘You take everything from us, you English, and you think we should be grateful like a dog because you are a better master than Hitler.’

I watched her feed the refugee family until there was nothing left to give. With the basket empty, she dropped it to the ground and swept their youngest child into her arms. ‘If only there were more people like us, there would be no war, no Hitler, no Stalin, and no hunger.’

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Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State.

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If you haven’t got the memo yet, this is dystopia, and it’s worsening by the day. Neoliberalism requires us to believe there is a rational off-ramp from all of this — genocide in Gaza, war with Iran, the starvation blockade of Cuba, a perpetual cost-of-living crisis, the environment dying, the monetisation of every human interaction, and the gulagification of peaceful protest.

We want to believe that somewhere ahead there is a deus ex machina of good sense that will transform Trump’s stream-of-consciousness funeral oration for society into a wedding march. That somehow we can vote our way out of this.

That’s not happening.

The people who insist the system can still be reformed — politicians, corporate news journalists, and the comfortably off income earners — all have a great deal of skin in the neoliberal game. They want us to believe that a system so metastasised with corruption and nihilism can be reformed through incremental adjustments — a tweak here, a regulation there, a slightly kinder rhetoric from the same political class that engineered the crisis in the first place.

But neoliberalism was designed precisely to eliminate the margins where people once survived.

Older social systems, for all their injustices, still contained spaces where people could subsist — extended families, strong unions, affordable housing, public institutions that functioned as buffers against catastrophe.

Neoliberalism engineered society to remove those margins. What remains are sharp edges where people perish.

The digital economy mirrors this brutal logic because the billionaires who own it didn’t want a thousand renaissances to bloom from it; instead, they made content creators like nineteenth-century factory workers, chained to a 24/7 production cycle.

Substack is a good example. For the profit of its major shareholders, it has transformed content creators into participants in something akin to a dance marathon during the Great Depression.

Any time I publish on Substack, the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, based on a 1935 novel, flashes before me. It tells the story of people trying to survive and find hope in dance marathons during a time of economic collapse. These marathons enriched the organisers far more than the participants.

I saw the movie once at the cinema with my parents when I was very young. What stayed with me was how strongly they identified with the financial desperation portrayed by the characters. They had lived it, so it was cut into them like tree rings marking drought in a forest. They also thought that because it was the 1970s, the Welfare State was forever.

The rule for a 1930s dance marathon — like being a content creator for Substack or any other platform — is simple: keep producing or collapse from exhaustion. As the old saying in academia goes, “publish or perish.”

The result is a tidal wave of content. Most of it, mine included, is produced when it is too fresh off the vine. It doesn’t have the time or the leisure to mature in thought or style. Now I compensate for that by recycling and improving essays that were first filed under the deadline of economic necessity.

Posts by Substack creators increasingly resemble white noise in people’s inboxes. So much content is pushed out every day that it produces vast digital slush piles — newsletters that sit unopened, buried beneath newer ones, or quietly filtered into spam and junk folders.

A recent Pew Research study found that 62% of subscribers don’t read the newsletters they sign up for.

And who can blame them?

Content, content, content. It’s hard enough trying to keep up with your own thoughts, let alone the interior monologues of Substack creators.

Social media platforms now resemble the crowded cobbled streets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — packed with the discordant cries of street hawkers selling wares that most people cannot afford or do not need.

Somehow we all became barrow boys, and I don’t think any of us intended that. But the system and its algorithms are controlled by billionaires. They control everyone’s ability to live well or not live well in a way that primitive people thought their gods controlled the wind, the sun, the weather, the tides, and a good harvest. Except in this case, unlike gods of ancient myths, the billionaires really do control everything, except their own mortality.

Yet even though I know the game is rigged, like in those dance marathons of the Great Depression, I keep producing, you keep producing, and everyone else keeps producing — performing, hawking bits of ourselves. We hope we are the ones who survive until the last dance so we can earn enough to enter another marathon.

However, all of us will eventually collapse under the strain of endless, breathless production. Someone else will step forward onto the digital dance floor.

After all, they shoot horses, don’t they?

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Thank you for reading and supporting my Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State. It will be going to publishers in the first week of September.

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My grandmother’s stepfather was a hard-working paper hanger who liked to drink and be vicious to the vulnerable under his roof.

My grandmother endured her stepfather’s abuse until, at the age of 12, she fled to Hamburg. There, Maria Theresa Edelmann found work as a kitchen maid at a hotel located in a rough section of Hamburg, whose clientele were sailors, pimps and prostitutes.

In time, she fell in love with a waiter. They planned to marry, but in 1914 her fiancé went to war for the Kaiser and fought on the Western Front. Not long after the Great War began in August 1914, Maria Edelmann’s fiancé died in some forgotten sideshow of the Great War, shot by a sniper’s bullet for lighting a cigarette at the wrong moment.

When the First World War ended, Maria Theresa was only 23 but already carried the burdens of someone who had lived into old age.

Hardship didn’t sour her, perhaps because the new German republic brought her love again, this time with a soldier who had survived the catastrophe of Passchendaele. It too didn’t last long because her lover, who dodged bombs and bullets in trenches from English and French troops, succumbed to the Spanish Flu, which proved more lethal than the war.

In 1920, my grandmother became a hotel manager in the Reeperbahn district of Hamburg during the Weimar Republic.

In 1928, she had a love affair with a socialist trade union organiser from Berlin named Fritz.

Their relationship left my grandmother pregnant with the child who, years later, became my mother.

The socialist trade union organiser, Fritz, was a gadfly who believed more in revolution than in personal responsibility.

He abandoned my grandmother and Mum, just as she and her own mother had once been abandoned.

1928 wasn’t a good year to be born working class in Germany, as ordinary citizens were still paying heavily in reparations to the Allies for losing the First World War a decade earlier. It also wasn’t a good year to be an unmarried mother.

Yet it would prove to be the best year that mother and daughter would know until after the Second World War. Each year that followed 1928 was more unsettling than the last. In 1929, Wall Street crashed. In 1930, millions of Germans were unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. In 1931, the banking crisis and recession plunged Germany, like an elevator shorn of its cables, into the Great Depression. In 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in Germany’s Reichstag. In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Germany’s economic collapse destroyed the security my grandmother had built for herself managing a dodgy hotel frequented by sailors and shady businessmen. Wages were cut, and inflation was crippling even the middle class.

It was a needs-must epoch. So my grandmother became the mistress of a man who could provide both physical and monetary safety during an era of extremism. As my mother said in later life about my grandmother’s lover and provider, “He wasn’t the best sort, but there were worse out there.”

Uncle Henry, as he was known to my mother, was an overweight opportunistic importer of tobacco products. On weekdays, Henry deserted his wife and lived with my grandmother in an apartment he rented for her, located in a leafy suburb of Hamburg near its airport. On weekends, he returned to his wife and five children, who lived in a small town north of the city.

To Henry, this division of affection and time was a perfect arrangement except for one inconvenience: my mother. It’s not that he disliked my mum, just her presence in his life. “I was a talkative, inquisitive child, always clinging to my mother’s apron strings. I disturbed his lovemaking and business scheming alike.”

Henry was good at schemes because he had convinced an importer of games, who also happened to be a communist, to sell a controlling interest in his company to him as protection against the Nazis. That same cunning had Henry arrange for my mother to become a foster child to a working-class family in the Altona district who were short of cash. My mother was parcelled off to her new family and returned on weekends to visit her mother.

In 1944, Henry died of a heart attack after consuming a rich meal cooked for him by my grandmother.

After the Second World War, my grandmother’s stepfather showed up at her doorstep because he was homeless and widowed. My grandmother took him in.

It was an act of charity he did not reciprocate, as he was often belligerent and ungrateful under her roof.

In 1946, on my mum’s birthday, he went to the basement of my grandmother’s apartment and hanged himself from a rope lashed to a beam. My grandmother said it was the kindest act he had ever done for others in his life.

In 1948, my mother left Germany to begin a new life with my father. At first, my mother’s marriage and life in England were not very happy. Mum wrote to her mother about her loneliness and despair over a marriage foundering fast.

My grandmother replied.

My dear Elfriede, I received your lovely letter and was so happy to hear from you. You write to me so often, and that brings me great joy. I always carry you in my thoughts. Don’t lose heart, my dear — that wouldn’t be like you at all. Your strength and determination are a comfort to me. I know I can always rely on you, so please, never give up hope.

Dearest Elfriede, remember what we talked about. I hold on to those memories. I hope, dear Elfriede, that you’re keeping strong. I still think about that last day in March, when we had to say goodbye near the train station, when the trains to Altona were departing. With all my love, Mum.

During the 1950s, my grandmother continued to work in hotel kitchens until a motorcycle accident in the 1960s made her unable to stand for long periods.

After the death of her half-sister, who had taken care of her, my grandmother moved into a spartan long-term care facility with hallways that reeked of stale urine. My grandmother’s room consisted of a sturdy bed, a bedside table with a fresh newspaper on it and a vase of flowers.

In 1973, Mum flew to Germany because she feared it would be the last time she saw her mother. When they said goodbye before Mum flew back to Canada, she wept.

“Why are you crying? You are going home to your family who loves you, and you love them. I have had my time, child.”

My grandmother died in 1975 without any family in attendance in the long-term care infirmary. The director of her care home stated in her letter to my mother that my grandmother raged against the dying of the light until a photo of my mother was put into her hand. Maria Theresa Edelmann, brilliant, beautiful, angry, sarcastic, difficult and misunderstood by most, including me, remained unfailingly loyal to her daughter until her last breath.

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Thank you for reading and supporting my Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State.

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It was a few days ago, in an afternoon’s summer heat, that I walked across a grocery store parking lot. I have done it hundreds of times before, incident-free. This time, there was commotion: a middle-aged grocery store manager was shooing away a homeless man at the curbside. I immediately thought of shop owners, from long ago, in aprons using brooms to brush cats away from their front entrances. I was far enough away that I couldn’t hear the words, but the manager, by his body language, looked embarrassed, maybe even ashamed.

But like T.S. Eliot in his poems, it was the human voices that woke us to our drowning.

Emerging from the air-conditioned store were three female customers who swaggered with a belligerent confidence that I once believed was reserved for the schoolyard or the pub at closing time.

“He’s a junkie; kick him out.” Sneering, they said the homeless man was a bum who wasted other people’s money on crack or booze. Whatever they said after that, I couldn’t hear because the shriek of wheels from a buggy boy’s train of shopping carts muted their strident sanctimony.

My eyes glanced towards the homeless man as he struggled to his feet, and I turned into the store. I didn’t give it another moment’s notice until I was at the self-serve checkout. Beside me was the homeless man purchasing two cans of beer. A female store attendant was speaking to him kindly, the way a sister would speak to a wayward brother.

The homeless man didn’t say anything while she talked and looked at the checkout machine. After he paid, he said, “See you later.”

When he had gone, I turned to the attendant.

“You’re alright.”

“I try. When I was a girl, he lived across the street from my parents’ house. People don’t know what he has lived through, but I do.”

The memory seemed to upset her because her eyes looked the way the sky does before a soft spring rain falls.

So I left with a “Take care” and let her get back to earning her living. Outside, the homeless man was ahead of me on my walk home. Near the top of the hill, he turned around and saw me, then disappeared into a treed section near the railway tracks. I hoped he did it to drink his beer, not because he thought I was going to give him trouble or judge him.

I can’t mark the day when society crossed over into this brutish cruelty. But I know how it metastasised.

Society fell into a social media rabbit hole, where people were radicalised into intolerance towards the vulnerable by the oligarchs of Meta and X. Flash mobs erupt now not to sing songs from Mamma Mia! but to incite hatred against outsiders, whether they are homeless, refugees, or Muslims. People proudly display their animosity towards anyone or anything unlike themselves because social media made it acceptable by presenting falsehoods as home truths.

I cross paths with these soldiers of stupidity and cruelty every day. Just last week, an old woman outside my building watched a young Nigerian man pushing an e-bike with his daughter beside him.

"I wonder if we paid for that too," the old woman said, as if she were exhaling cigarette smoke rather than racism.

As I walked past her and into the building, I asked where she had learned that shit.

“Facebook.”

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As always, thank you for reading my Substack posts. Rent for August is due tomorrow. I am fighting to make sure I can pay it. There is still a shortfall of C$125.

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We don’t get the dog days of summer anymore, which could be cooled with a garden hose outside and a box fan circulating air inside a suburban house. Now, the season, like all the seasons of the year, is as unpredictable as an alcoholic parent. They are the end days of what we have always known and thought would remain constant.

In a few hours, below my living room window, the asphalt parking lot will shimmer in the scorching heat. It’s not even a heat dome day, just a prelude to the ones predicted to arrive soon.

“Stay hydrated” is the most common response from journalists on cable news networks to the pernicious health symptoms created by the climate emergency. Predictably, they use B-roll of people in public pools and splash pads as if the heatwaves of 2026 are the same as those of the 1970s, rather than the catastrophic weather events brought about by unregulated industrialisation driven by the greed of the 1%. Too many boomers, despite all the facts to the contrary, still say, “It was ever thus, hot summers and cold winters.”

My life straddles two centuries: one that was analogue and this digital one. I know today’s climate is not the climate of my youth. Like Dorothy says to Toto in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” We must stop pretending we are if we ever want to find normal again.

The 1% and their corporate news media manipulate us through bought politicians and pundits into complacency over this existential threat. Today, The Telegraph told Britain to enjoy its new Mediterranean climate, which is as ludicrous as telling someone thrown into the sea to grow gills and fins if they want to live.

After 200 years of industrial abuse accelerated by capitalism, our planet’s Goldilocks climate is over. What has happened is not change or evolution but wholesale exploitation. The 1% poisoned our world in pursuit of greater wealth.

In 1975, my parents took my brother Peter and me on holiday to Alberta. That was the year Pierre Trudeau created Petro-Canada as a Crown corporation. It was done with the support of the New Democratic Party, whose backing kept his Liberal minority government in office. It was a forward-thinking strategy. But the rich didn’t like it very much because state-owned industries don’t bring wealth to the 1%. Instead, they offer prosperity to the whole nation. The rich of the 1970s made the working and middle classes hate it too because they told them it was “socialism gone amok”.

My dad drove us to Alberta in a Rideau 500 that pulled a Coleman camper trailer. It was a car of its time, an enormous dinosaur of an automobile with a V8 engine. Apart from excessive horsepower, it didn’t come with much else except an AM radio and ashtrays located in the front and back of the vehicle for the convenience of smokers.

There was no air conditioning because that was considered a superfluous luxury in the 1970s. Our holiday in Canada’s western provinces took place in July. There was a Lawrence of Arabia opening-scene cinematic quality to our drive across the Prairies. The Trans-Canada Highway undulated in the summer heat.

My brother and I cooled ourselves by pressing ice-chilled seven-ounce glass bottles of Coke against our faces before gulping them down until we burped loudly, much to the consternation of our mother, who sat in the front seat fanning herself with a road map.

After a week-long trek from Toronto, we arrived at Banff National Park and set up our trailer. We spent five days nestled between forests and the Rocky Mountains, hiking, joking, arguing and loving our time alone as much as our time together as a family.

Far from our camper trailer, the oil sands were beginning their rapid expansion as capitalism’s response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

My dad, who was a curious man, asked a camper on the neighbouring pitch, an Albertan who sat with us around our campfire one evening, what he thought of these new oil sands.

“It’s going to kill this land,” he said, “and the only ones who will get rich from it are the already rich.”

After more than fifty years, that Albertan was not wrong. It changed Canada for the worse. It turned Canada into a petrostate and one of the world’s largest carbon polluters and contributors to climate change. Canada is among the world’s largest oil and gas producers. We are an energy superpower that pretends to be on the right side of environmental fair play. It isn’t, though, and the longer Mark Carney remains Prime Minister, the more apparent that becomes.

The oil sands produce substantially higher greenhouse gas emissions during extraction than conventional crude oil. The filthy little secret that most Canadians don’t know, or don’t want to know, is that they ceded their economy to oligarchs, corporations and the entitled, who will see millions of us dead before they do anything to stop climate change. Putting your plastics in the recycling every week won’t amount to a hill of beans for the planet’s survival until you make the behemoth polluters of our economy pay for their crimes against humanity.

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As always, thank you for reading my Substack posts. Rent for August is coming up in 48 hours. I am fighting to make sure I can pay it. There is still a shortfall of C$270.

Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and keep me housed. So, if you can, please join with a paid subscription for just £3.50 a month, or take out a yearly or gift subscription. There is also an option to tip, and yearly subscriptions are 40% off. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful.

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Late last week, I became aware of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic in the United States over its harvesting of millions of books, more than a decade ago, without the permission of their authors or publishers.

Curious, I searched the database of works listed in the lawsuit. To my astonishment, I found my dad’s first book, 1923, among the titles that had allegedly been scraped.

I contacted the law firm handling the case to ask whether, as Harry Leslie Smith’s literary executor, I could file a claim for compensation. They told me that the deadline had already passed. However, they also explained that I could submit a late claim, although there was no guarantee that the adjudicator would accept it.

With that small glimmer of hope, I spent the last four days assembling the evidence and preparing the claim. I’ll be sending it later tonight.

Fingers crossed, as they say.

Another thing I need crossed fingers for is finding a publisher for The Green and Pleasant Land.

This final clean-up of the manuscript has had its swings and roundabouts. It has certainly been worth the effort, but it has also been emotionally exhausting. More than anything, I believe Harry Leslie Smith deserves one final opportunity to speak from beyond the grave, preserving not simply his own legacy but the memories of the generations who lived before, during and after the creation of the Welfare State.

The excerpt below comes from the second volume of The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy. It finds Harry serving with the British occupation forces in Hamburg in 1945, where he begins to confront the moral ambiguities of victory.

Finally, it’s the end of the month and 1 August is fast approaching. Things are, as always, a little tight, so if you enjoy these posts and are able to support my work with a subscription or by sharing this newsletter, it really does help me make the rent. Thank you.

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Chapter Two: Staying On

In 1945, I had no attachments to Britain except for one person who still tugged at my shirt-sleeves: my sister Alberta. She was my true friend and companion through our family’s bleakest and saddest moments. But my affection for her wasn’t strong enough for me to flee back into the oppressive and stifling arms of Britain’s West Riding.

Besides, Alberta didn’t have the means to put me up, even if I did want to return home. She lived on the steep hills of Low Moor, in a tiny terraced house with a young son and a troublesome husband. Nor did Alberta have any influence with the local powers to find me employment; without a friendly word in a manager’s ear, there was no possibility of a job. The mills around Bradford and Halifax were brimming with unemployed servicemen, all looking to return to their old positions. If I went home, I would be just another redundant cog in the broken wheel of British industry.

Just to make sure I wasn’t under any delusion about life back in Yorkshire, Alberta wrote to me: ‘Luv, there’s nothing here for ya. There’s nothing at all, no housing and certainly no brass. If you need it, I can always lend you a spare shilling. But I suspect you’ve got more than me being in the RAF. But I won’t deny you anything I’ve got, which is love and a shoulder to cry on. Stay put, stay safe and stay out of our Mam’s way or she’ll be asking for something from you. Enjoy your time abroad because you’ve got nowt to come home to.’

No, I wasn’t going anywhere dangerous. I would remain in Germany because they were defeated, broken and submissive. It was the safest place in the world for me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wasn’t cut out to live as my parents did on bread, drippings and bitter. Besides, staying on allowed me the time to pursue Friede. I wanted the opportunity to win Friede to my heart, and I believed it was going to be like most of the crooners’ love songs that played on Armed Forces Radio at the time: one that ended happily ever after.

Now that hostilities were over, the RAF had minimal expectations for the lower ranks. Their one simple rule was this: keep your head down and your nose out of other people’s business. I had no problem with this unwritten regulation as I had followed this practice since boyhood. As long as it didn’t affect my immediate well-being, the petty affairs of others didn’t rouse any interest in me. It was safer to close my eyes to everyone’s evil or saintly exploits.

After all, if I wished to remain in Germany, there was wisdom in silence. I wanted to be known and relied upon for my indifference to the comings and goings of the world around me. Keeping out of trouble was one thing; witnessing was unavoidable. Two weeks into our stay in Fuhlsbüttel, the profiteers were salivating at the opportunity to plunder an occupied country with no inventory list. Supplies, from food to fuel, were always going missing. One morning, a sergeant put a friendly arm around my shoulder after I noticed a group of airmen suspiciously hanging around a storehouse. The NCO said: ‘Lad, keep your eyes shut and whistle a friendly tune because there’s nowt to see here.’

The men I encountered were shifting boxes of tinned meats, preserves and beer into an Air Force van, which, when loaded, took off for an unknown destination. Later on, I mentioned the truck with its cargo of RAF stores to my mate Sid.

‘Oh that,’ he said. ‘It’s a sergeant’s fiddle. He’s got some deal with a bloody Nazi who owns a restaurant. The sergeant provides him booze and meat. In return, good old Fritz pays him in gold coins and jewellery.’

‘What happens to the baubles?’ I asked foolishly.

‘The missus flogs it back in Leeds.’

My mouth opened to respond, when Sid said to me: ‘Don’t even think of joining that party, mate. We should stick to what we know: getting pissed and getting laid. Everything else is a big boy’s game.’

‘Too right,’ I agreed.

So in the interest of self-preservation, I did what I was told. I turned a blind eye to my equals and my betters. I turned my back on anything that appeared out of sorts. I even closed my ears to the sound of coins being counted in the darkness by those who were plundering the German nation or the British armed forces. However, as the weeks progressed, it became more difficult to ignore the racket caused by the pilfering. It seemed anything of value, if it wasn’t guarded or nailed down, was nicked. Some members of my squad acted as if they had found bits of a Spanish galleon washed up on shore when they returned from a trip into Hamburg.

‘Jesus wept, would you get a look at that watch. It only cost me a carton of bloody Lucky Strikes.’

‘Jim, if you’d spent forty years in the pit as a ripper, you’d still not get a watch as fine as you traded today, for a bunch of bloody fags.’

With a nation being hawked away for cigarettes, I wasn’t going to be left out of this burglary. I took what wasn’t mine, but I reasoned it was an altogether different type of crime. My larceny was innocent of profit or malice. I pinched food for the German girl and her family. My misdemeanour was insignificant except to those who received my food parcels. I thought my actions were more akin to extending the hand of British philanthropy towards the less fortunate.

On base, there were a few others like me, unwilling to profit on the misery of others. We were incapable of seeing a reason to garner personal gain from the sunken and ashen faces of bomb-battered ordinary Germans. As for the rest, the temptation for theft and for sex without responsibility was overwhelming. It was too easy for them to suspend their morality while abroad. They believed that their ethics could resume upon their return to Britain. They thought their moral code was like a light switch; it could be turned on or off without ever marking their soul.

Within my barracks, a great many used food and cigarettes as a bartering device for nameless sex with near-starved German teenagers. Others traded food for gold, jewellery and other valuable commodities, which they saved for their return home to Brighton or Birmingham as chocolate soldiers on parade. Their dubious earnings from fraternising with the desperate provided a valuable addition to a down payment on a house or a new car. Others just frittered their money and morality away as if they were down at their local pub with their pay packet.

‘For a bit of coffee or nylons, you can get those Fräuleins to do anything you want.’

‘Smith, why don’t you try it, if only for a laugh? You’ll never get a chance like this again, ever in your sorry life.’

But I shook my head. I had already experienced life at the hands of ghetto kings back in Bradford and had no wish to become a proper bastard in Germany.

‘Sorry, lads, I don’t want anything from the bloody Germans because they’re nothing but trouble,’ I remarked.

Someone at the far end of our hut shouted out: ‘We got Jesus of the Nazarenes sleeping beside us. Let’s hope he doesn’t go to turning tables at the temple on Sunday.’

I laughed. ‘Bugger you, mate. There will be no water into wine for you ungrateful lot.’ I went back to reading my book.

A few days later, I spoke with my friend Taffy.

‘I wonder if things had worked out differently in the war and Jerry was on our High Street buying us out for a thruppenny, how we’d take it?’

Taffy was Welsh and as sentimental as me. I liked him for his love of poetry and whisky, and his soft touch for hard-luck stories.

‘Pack it in, Harry,’ Taffy said. ‘Most of those lads are like us; since the day they were born they’ve been beaten down by the squire, by the church, and by the foreman. All they want is to taste a bit of the good life after being cheated out of it for centuries by those Tory bastards back home. Sure, they shouldn’t be filching, whoring, and acting like clowns on parade just because no one gives a toss. But I’ll keep schtum to their misdemeanours and leave it up to God to decide who’s guilty and who’s innocent.

‘As for Ali Baba over there and his forty thick thieves, leave ’em be. Germany is a land of louts, and I’ll be glad when I am rid of it and back home in Wales. You should go home too. Forget this place; it’s filled with bloody foreigners.’

Even though it disgusted me, Taffy was right about the pilfering. So I kept quiet. I didn’t want my larceny to be revealed or curtailed, or for me to be punished for helping the German girl.

It was both terrifying and exciting keeping Friede’s family afloat while the former German nation collapsed around us like a block of condemned buildings. It was also a giant fraud because my gallantry was circumstantial. I only appeared successful and confident to Friede because her country was decimated. Every day, I was frightened that Friede would discover my counterfeit, that my ability to save her was limited to my present circumstances. Anywhere else, I would have been just one of a hundred men searching for work and shelter.

It terrified me to think that Friede or anyone else might discover that my outward confidence was a swindle, a deception as devious as a cheque written on a bank account with a nil balance. So there was no turmoil in my soul when I made an appointment with my superiors to extend my days in Germany. I had only one anxiety: that perhaps the RAF didn’t want me and were prepared to chuck me over the side once my terms of service were complete.

Before my scheduled appointment, I made sure that I was properly groomed. A German barber cut my hair and shaved me with a straight-edge razor. My uniform was pressed by a woman who worked at the base laundry. I was determined that my outward appearance would convince any officer that I was born for the military life. After a quick cigarette behind a Nissen hut, I marched over to the wing commander’s office where I was to meet with his adjutant. When I arrived, the foyer was littered with other men in similarly pressed uniforms. We looked like lackeys begging for favours in the Sun King’s antechamber. The adjutant had a wiry LAC (leading aircraftman) for a secretary, who acted more like a guard dog on an estate than an administrative clerk.

I announced myself to the secretary, who scanned a large appointment book. Out loud, he called out a roll of names pencilled in for meetings with the adjutant.

‘Benson, Hearn, Simpson... ah yes, and here we are, Smith. Your appointment is at 1:45. Bit eager, aren’t we?’ he said.

‘Pardon?’

‘You’re early for your appointment.’

‘It’s only five minutes away,’ I pointed out.

The clerk looked up at the wall clock, back to his wristwatch, and then smiled at me.

‘You’re still early. Please take a seat.’

The secretary returned to his duties, and I was left to watch the minute hand on the clock make five slow revolutions. At 1:45, the clerk stood from his desk and knocked on the officer’s door. He entered and returned to the foyer.

‘The adjutant is ready to see you.’

I stood up, and the secretary admonished me.

‘Come on now, let’s get a move on, chop, chop. We don’t have all day; the adjutant is a busy man. It’s not like going to see the parson, you know.’

The secretary announced me to Flight Lieutenant Locke, the adjutant.

‘Wireless Operator Smith to see you, sir.’

The officer was at his desk signing papers; behind him was a wall map of northern Germany. He looked up from his work and said, ‘At ease, Smith.’

He had a waxed moustache and was at least ten years older than me. It was a kind but weary face. I noticed he was wearing a wedding band. On his desk were framed photographs of a blonde-haired woman and a little girl.

He pulled open my file, read it quickly and said, ‘So you want to stay on in Germany. Any reason for this? I hope this isn’t about a girl.’

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I like the Air Force, and I enjoy the life. I think I can contribute to my country better in uniform than out.’

He looked back at my service record.

‘You’ve never been up on charges, and you’ve always passed your courses in the top percentiles. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about you. So you must be the decent sort. Well, I’m not going to deny this request. We are demobbing so many men these days, there is hardly anyone left trained to boil a kettle for tea. I’ll have your request approved.’

I saluted the officer. He returned it with a sloppy hand-to-head motion. I left the office, relieved; I had bought myself six more months with Friede.

When Taffy saw me, he asked, ‘So are you in or are you out?’

‘Back in,’ I responded.

‘Bloody fool,’ he said. ‘Everyone is begging to get out of this nut house, and you are climbing to get back in. Well, Smith, since you know you’ve got a pay packet for the next six months, let’s go out on the town and get pissed.’

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I am always very appreciative of my Substack subscribers. People only have so much spare time, and the fact that you spend some of your leisure moments reading excerpts from my father’s writing and life, or my own, is deeply humbling.

This platform has been a good place to store and share these writings, especially because my health is problematic. I don’t expect to die for at least a few more years. However, if I pass away sooner than medical science predicts, this Substack preserves a personal, working-class history of things past that may be useful for others when I’m gone.

I’m proud and thankful that you’ve come this far with me on the journey across the shadowlands of the Great Depression and how it shaped the lives and politics of people like my dad. My Substack now has almost 3,400 subscribers, of whom 212 are paid. Your support keeps a roof over my head. Others are also generous enough to tip when a story resonates, and that is greatly appreciated.

When my dad died, The Green & Pleasant Land was unfinished. I’ve been piecing it together from the notes and index cards he left behind. It ends on a very optimistic note: Hitler’s defeat and Labour’s election victory, which created a socialist state that was for and by the people.

It’s vital now that people reclaim their working-class history. Democracy in the twenty-first century increasingly serves the interests of top income earners at the expense of everyone else.

Beta copies are available to any subscriber interested in reading the manuscript. DM me if you’d like one. It is being sent to publishers in the next few weeks, come hell or high water. The Green & Pleasant Land offers a unique perspective on the Great Depression and the Second World War, much like Love Among the Ruins, which remains one of the only working-class memoirs about life and love in post-war, Allied-occupied Germany. During the last weeks of summer and into the autumn, I will provide excerpts from that book, so you can see the scope of this series.

Below is its opening chapter. It’s long but so are summer days.

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To the reader

It is autumn, and it is wet and damp outside. I can already feel the approaching cold and heavy breath of the frozen months upon the nape of my neck. If I survive, this will be my 92nd winter on this Earth. Some say age brings wisdom, reason, serenity. I say bollocks; great age brings rheumatism, deafness, vascular degeneration and organ failure. So far, I have been lucky, and my body has endured my storm-tossed life healthy and intact. It is a blessing I appreciate and honour every morning by performing the graceful movements of tai chi, which provides me the balance to combat the punishment that great age bestows on those who dare to live so long. We suffer the irretrievable loss of love through death. We abide the profound loneliness of age as friends and lovers disappear from our grasp and are replaced with static photographs mounted high up on our fireplace mantel. I don’t ask for condolences or your pity because I have felt an elemental chart of wondrous emotions during my life. I have experienced the very best, and the very worst that mankind has to offer. I have loved and been loved, and that is a great matter. It is all that should matter. It is all that must matter, even to you, dear reader. So as I walk into the fourth season of life, I say accept love as it comes and as it goes because it is the only currency that never devalues us.

I leave you now with a small piece of my life; my time in Germany following the last Great War. It is a simple story about people searching to belong and survive in a world that was almost destroyed.

Cheers,

Harry Leslie Smith

Chapter 1

1945: The conditions of surrender

I don’t know why, but the winter rains stopped, and spring came early in 1945. When Hitler committed suicide at the end of April, the flowers and trees were in full bloom and the summer birds returned to their nesting grounds. Not long after the great dictator’s corpse was incinerated in a bomb crater by his few remaining acolytes, the war in Europe ended. After so much death, ruin and misery, it was remarkable to me how nature resiliently budded back to life in barns and fields and across battlegrounds, now calm and silent. The Earth said to her children: it is time to abandon your swords and harness your ploughs; the ground is ripe, and this is the season to tend to the living.

I was 22 and ready for peace. I had spent four years in the RAF as a wireless operator. I was lucky during the war; I never came close to death. While the world bled from London to Leningrad, I walked away without a scratch. Make no mistake, I did my part in this war; I played my role and I never shirked the paymaster’s orders. For four years, I trained, I marched, and I saluted across the British Isles. During the final months of the conflict, I ended up in Belgium and Holland with a unit that was responsible for maintaining abandoned Nazi airfields for Allied aircraft.

When Germany surrendered to the Allies in gutted Berlin, I was in Fuhlsbüttel, a northern suburb of Hamburg. At the time, I didn’t think much about Fuhlsbüttel, I felt it was between nothing and nowhere. It was much like every other town our unit drove through during the dying days of the war. Nothing was out of place and it was quiet, clean, and as silent as a Sunday afternoon. Our squadron took up a comfortable residence in its undamaged aerodrome.

While I slept in my new bed in this drowsy neighbourhood, the twentieth century’s greatest and bloodiest conflict came to an end at midnight on 7th May. On the morning of the 8th, our RAF commander hastily arranged a victory party for that afternoon. The festivities were held in a school gymnasium close to the airport.

The get-together might have been haphazard and the arrangements made on short notice, but there were no complaints because death was now a postponed appointment. Our individual ends, from road accidents, cancer, or old age, were to be pencilled in for a date in the far distant future. There was a lot of excitement, optimism and simple joy generated during the party because we were young and pissed on free beer. RAF officers, NCOs and enlisted men marked the passage from war to peace, dancing the bunny hop in the overheated school gymnasium.

No one considered or asked on that day of victory, ‘What happens next?’ That was tomorrow’s problem. I certainly didn’t question my destiny on that spring afternoon. Instead, like the Romans, I followed the edict: carpe diem. I ate too much, I smoked too much, and I drank too much. And why not?, I reasoned. The war was over and I had survived, whereas a great many had been extinguished as quickly as blowing out a flame on a candle.

I still didn’t want to think about tomorrow, even when our victory party was no more than a hungover echo of patriotic songs and dirty limericks playing inside my head; I was content to wait and watch. I was perfectly happy to observe my mates plod onwards like dray horses back to their old lives. I was satisfied to enjoy a moment that wouldn’t last, peace without obligation. I relished the mundane luxury of sitting on a bench with a cigarette between my fingers. I indulged in the sensual pleasure of feeling the warm spring sun hover over my face. I was liberated from home and the dismal dull world of a mill town, where one’s life was charted to end as it began: in a tenement house, under grey, dense skies. I wanted to simply enjoy and savour my release from the threat of death.

During those first few days of peace, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of good fortune. It was really blind luck that I had endured. My survival was the mythical lucky dip at a fairground raffle. I was alive while millions of combatants and civilians simply perished in this long and brutal conflict.

It wasn’t long after road workers had swept the streets clean from our victory parade that I began to realise my four years of service to the state hadn’t altered me greatly. Perhaps I was a bit more educated and less naive about the world. I had certainly acquired some now-redundant skills in marching and Morse code. I was also more aware that suffering and hurt was not a commodity in short supply. Possibly an outsider might have even considered me more cynical and crass after my years with the RAF. Yet underneath my cocksure attitude I was still the same self-conscious, lonely, awkward teenager who had volunteered to join the RAF in December 1940.

No matter how relieved I felt with Hitler dead and peace at hand, it reminded me that my personal destiny was now my own responsibility. Considering that the war had rescued me from the nightmare of my past life, I was a bit frightened by peace. I was comfortable in my RAF blue uniform, which made me look the same as Bill Jones, Will Sanders, or a multitude of other boys from counties all across Britain. I didn’t want to be Harry Smith from Halifax, former manager at Grosvenor’s Grocers, son of a cuckold, from the backside of town.

So for as many moments as I could grasp, I took smug comfort in the anonymity of military life. I relished the new laid-back approach both officers and NCOs took to commanding our group. It was a simple decree to live and let live. As long as there was no scandal, we were allowed to pursue our own pastimes for amusement or profit.

As the spring dissolved into summer, I began to appreciate that the war had been relatively harmless and uneventful for me. My life must change, I ventured, because I was one of the fortunate few; I was healthy and alive. The question was how to modify my existence that had been laid out since my parents’ rapid and one-way journey into poverty and rough living.

While shaving one morning in the wash hut, I said to my mate Dave: ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to be working at a mill back in Halifax or be a grocer.’

Dave took a while to reply because he was absorbed in taking careful strokes around his chin with a razor. ‘It’s all in the cards you are dealt before you are born. Some get a lucky hand while others get shite. If all you get dealt is deuces, there’s nothing you can do about it, except learn how to fucking bluff.’ Dave paused, looked at his clean face, and added as an afterthought to the rules for a successful life: ‘You also need a good fry up in the morning.’

Was he right? Was it just down to luck? He might have been on to something. So far, every direction my life had taken was a simple act of chance or whimsy. After all, flat feet and a flaccid patriotic sentiment led me to the doors of the RAF. Most likely, had I picked another branch of the armed forces, I would have ended up as a name stencilled on a cenotaph to be washed in the indifferent rain falling on Halifax. So, for the present, I left my life in the hands of fortune reinforced by bullshit.

On the days I was permitted to leave our base, I strolled until my legs ached, exploring my surroundings as if they were the ruins of Troy. To remain alive in 1945, the Germans were reduced to the most primitive form of commerce: they bartered and begged, and they did it in every imaginable location. I encountered Germans in back alleys, on street corners, or by the entrance to the train station, huddled in small groups trading their heirlooms for food.

In the beginning, I was emotionally detached from Germans and the destruction around me. Their suffering played as blandly as a sepia-toned newsreel at the Odeon cinema. The immensity of the pain endured by both the innocent and the damned was too much for me to absorb. What lay outside of my privileged life in camp was a festering sore that fouled the air. I tried to keep my distance from the Germans and their troubles.

Keeping my heart cold and lofty didn’t last long because I was a young man looking for a bit of emotional adventure. Within two weeks, I was trying to start conversations with young German women. When I called out, ‘Excuse me, Fräulein,’ most walked by me or jumped over to the other side of the street. Some women smiled politely or giggled to their girlfriends at my bad accent and limited vocabulary.

This game ended for me on the day I travelled up Langenhorner Chaussee, in Fuhlsbüttel. It was a road populated with attractive two- and three-storey apartments, which were shaded by linden and cherry trees. It was a middle-class neighbourhood that stretched towards the horizon in relaxed prosperity. The street was a quiet and pleasant quarter that seemed immune from the tragedies unfolding all around it. It wasn’t until I walked further up the road that I discovered no district in Germany was inoculated against hunger.

On the other side of the street, a commotion was brewing between an elderly man and a young woman. They were haggling over the value of a silver fork for a packet of cigarettes. I loitered and observed them struggling to barter their way out of starvation and ruin. Suddenly, I noticed a woman who made my heart and head stumble in aroused confusion. It appeared she was also bartering for food, but there was something different in her body language. It suggested to me a dignity and a pride that wouldn’t yield to her circumstances.

Extraordinary, I thought; and I said aloud, ‘You are beautiful.’ Afterwards, I did something rash: I displayed a confidence I generally lacked, unless full of beer. I barged into the young woman’s life. It was reckless, it was foolish, and perhaps it was even desperate. It also proved the extent of my loneliness and my habitual foolishness to fall in love with foreign things. During our first encounter, she was moderately indifferent to my entreaties. Perhaps she was even amused by my stilted German and my pushy courteousness. On instinct, or possibly it was a girlish whim because I seemed harmless, she graciously allowed me to walk her part-way home.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Elfriede Gisela Edelmann,’ she quickly responded.

I tried to repeat the name, but it jumbled out horribly wrong.

She laughed and said, even though we weren’t yet friends, ‘Call me Friede, it is easier.’

I must have left a favourable impression because Friede agreed to meet me for a picnic the following week. So began my slow and irresolute courtship with this extraordinary German woman.

Perhaps the term ‘woman’ was too advanced because she was only a teenager. However, at seventeen, Friede had more style, sophistication and charm than anyone I’d ever met, dated, or simply lusted after. She possessed a sense of mystery because there was something unknowable and impenetrable about her personality. It was as if there was a sunspot against her soul. Perhaps Friede created this emotional no-man’s-land around herself because she had encountered evil in Hitler’s Germany, or perhaps because she harboured some unhappy family secret. Whatever the reason, she was an enigma who was hard to fathom, but easy to love.

It was primal, it was emotional, and it was natural, but I wanted to get to know her better. I also wanted to sleep with her and I would do anything to get to that end. At first I took her on innocent picnics. I snatched food and wine from the RAF mess hut for our meals. I believed I was being cavalier. I thought Friede might even consider me cosmopolitan when I lit our cigarettes like Paul Henreid for Bette Davis, in the movie Now, Voyager. She only smiled or laughed lightheartedly at my decorum. Initially, I didn’t understand that she lived in a completely different world than mine. Her universe had more immediate problems and concerns than if the wine was chilled. After a while, I began to understand that her community was in serious trouble and was suffering from a severe lack of food and medicine.

It was during an afternoon lunch on the banks of the Alster River that some of her real misfortunes and sorrow crept up on me. While she sunned her bare legs, I noticed they were covered in tiny blisters and ulcers. Friede registered my awkward stare and smiled.

‘We have no vitamins, liebchen. There’s nothing left to eat: all of Germany will die from scurvy like we are on a polar expedition.’

‘Why don’t you have any vitamins?’ I innocently asked.

Friede explained that for most Germans, the last year of the war had been very difficult. Their cities suffered round-the-clock bombardment, while the Allied armies began a massive land offensive against their nation. In the final months of the war, food supplies for ordinary citizens ran out. Friede and her family lived off a soup that tasted like rainwater and ate bread made from animal feed.

‘After the Russians crossed the Oder River in January 1945,’ Friede explained, ‘everyone knew the war was lost. It was only a matter of time before we got a taste of our own medicine. I was terrified because I didn’t know who our new masters would be: Russia or America?’

‘It was a good thing we Brits got here first before the Russians could get their hands on Hamburg,’ I replied.

Friede laughed at my simplistic response and retorted, ‘It is sometimes hard to tell if Britain is the best jailer. You British treat everyone as if they are Nazis and deserve to be punished.’

‘How do we do this?’ I asked.

Friede looked at me and smirked. ‘Our rations are table scraps for a dog. People are expected to remove rubble from the cities, but are allotted just 1,200 calories of nutrition per day. Britain keeps my people on the edge of starvation. Have you seen the bread they give us?’ she demanded angrily.

I had seen Germans queue impatiently for this almost-inedible food. At one time, I had even witnessed soldiers toss dense bricks of blackened dough to hungry crowds. It was a miserable ration to feed anyone. The ingredients were a dubious mixture of sawdust and salt, with a trace amount of flour that bonded the indigestible product together. The bread was baked in the morning and if you didn’t consume it by late afternoon, a thick green mould would burrow its way to the crust. Sometimes, I caught sight of vagrants in the shadow of bomb-damaged buildings who had somehow got their hands on the thick, rotten bread. Famished, they would stuff it into their mouths and wash it back with water scooped from the street gutters.

Friede said that many believed the victors treated Germany like they did in 1918. ‘The Allies will let the German people starve to death.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked defensively.

‘Unless you are wealthy, you can’t buy food anywhere in the city. Mutti must travel north up into the countryside,’ Friede told me in a halting voice. ‘She sells our belongings to the farmers who give her a few eggs and a rotting turnip in exchange. How will we live once all of her jewels and silver are gone? Mutti says the farmers act like pirates. They have no pity on the city folk and will rob you of everything you own for a morsel of food. People say the farmers are rich from the city’s misery and have Persian carpets in their pigsties.’

Afterwards, I thought my invitation to a lunch by the river seemed nothing more than a cynical gesture. I blamed myself for not understanding her difficulties sooner because I had endured a similar hunger in my childhood.

My growing affection for Friede drove me to become a conspirator in her survival. I obtained food for Friede and her family by the old and reliable methods my mother had taught me: if you can’t buy it, beg for it, and if you can’t beg for it, nick it while God and the holy ghosts are down at the pub. So, from storage units on our base, I snatched anything I thought useful to them, from food rations to soap and medicine. I wrapped up the contraband in a blanket and smuggled it out of camp in a haversack.

Perhaps I was correcting the wrong done to me as a starving boy? Perhaps I was buying love and loyalty with a loaf of bread? I didn’t know or care. I knew winter was coming and without someone like me, her family would starve to death like thousands of other Germans, hobbled by this devastating war.

Looking back, I think the start of our romance – the picnics by the river, the afternoons spent loitering in riverfront cafés – were just a pleasant diversion for Friede and her friends. They were an excuse to eat delicacies and savour flavours long absent from an ordinary German’s diet. In the beginning, Friede didn’t appreciate the ardour of my passion, but enjoyed my diligence and loyalty in trying to please her ordinary desires and satisfy her most basic needs. I was able to provide Friede with food and protection in a nation that had been cast out of civilisation. It was my sheer persistence to keep her sated and healthy with purloined wine, preserves and medicine that allowed me to ingratiate myself to her. I was able to transform our relationship from the formal Sie to the more hopeful and friendly du.

It was easy for me to fall in love with Friede because she was as glamorous as a movie star. She had deep, expressive hazel eyes, and raven hair that hung voluptuously to her shoulders. Her face was sensuous and, at times, mysterious as it expressed deep emotions and indefinable longing.

With my background of poverty, infidelity and family betrayal, Friede was everything I couldn’t aspire to in England. Her education, her taste, her style were vastly more sophisticated than my Woolworth’s tuppence upbringing. Being arm-in-arm with her, I felt like I was a lead character in a Saturday morning movie serial. I fell hard for Friede and plunged into the deep end of German life under occupation. Yet the bottomless, almost un-navigable water of love in a ruined nation was my best option for a better future. It was certainly better than returning to a wet and dreary existence in Britain.

Unfortunately, Friede wasn’t as easily convinced of my long-term suitability as either suitor or provider. In the beginning, my loyalty and my love were chided as unproven and a childish fancy. Besides, she said, ‘Tommies come and go; you too will leave for England and go back to your English girlfriend.’

I protested, but she was right – my time in the RAF was nigh. Demobilisation of soldiers and airmen was moving at a steady pace. If I didn’t act quickly, I was going to find myself demobbed and marching in a victory parade leading me right to the dole queue. If I truly loved Friede, as I so often claimed after a half-bottle of Riesling, I would have to find a means to remain in Germany. My only option was to extend my services with the RAF.

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For me, rent day approaches like the headlights of a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way.

The last few months have been difficult. New subscriptions have slowed, and some long-time readers have had to step away because of the cost-of-living crisis. This month alone, I lost one annual subscribers for that reason. But we plod on.

The Green and Pleasant Land is ready to be sent to my father’s old publisher for consideration. But I am stuck on the pitch, proposal and hook needed to get it from the slush pile to an editor’s eye. So, I hesitate. Moreover, I still go through and edit the book because it is so important to get this right for my Dad and his legacy.

A small independent publisher has already expressed interest in bringing it into print, which is heartening. But for my father’s legacy, and for the book itself, it makes sense to try first for the widest possible readership.

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