Harry Leslie Smith's working class odyssey is a tale about the birth and death of the Welfare State.
Harry Leslie Smith died on November 28th, 2018. He was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. His life's journey was the odyssey that most of his working-class generation endured: poverty, war and then renewal with the creation of the Welfare State.
The Green and Pleasant Land was unfinished at the time of my dad’s death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards my father left behind. The fifth anniversary of Harry Leslie Smith's death is November 28th, I hope to have the first 50k words of this work ready for you to read. by then. Below are Harry's memories of arriving in Canada 70 years ago. I find it very ironic that the day, his new life began in Toronto on the 28th of November is the same day he died 65 years later.
Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me.
It was November 1953 when I departed England on the Empress of Australia for Canada with my German-born wife, Friede. Our marriage was on the rocks, and Britain had turned its back on a nation fit for the working class when it returned Winston Churchill to government in 1951. It was time for a new start and a chance for a life worth living that class-conscious Britain wouldn't offer me a thirty-year-old carpet weaver and part-time car cleaner from Halifax.
It took 24 months for my wife and I to save up for our Atlantic crossing and reserve funds needed in Canada while we looked for employment.
The night the Empress slipped her moorings from Liverpool with Friede and I standing on its third-class passenger deck, the air was brisk and ripe with the chatter of other immigrants bound for an uncertain future.
We were bundled in heavy coats damp from rain falling in a drizzle. When I began to wave farewell to the land of my birth, I wasn't sure if it was to say goodbye or good riddance.
As I stared at the disappearing shore, I thought of all those people living or dead I had brushed against during my young existence. I thought of my sister Marion dead from TB in 1926 and dumped in a pauper's pit because she was the daughter of a family of piss-poor miners. I thought of Alberta, my other sister who held my hand during the famine of the Great Depression and who now languished in an unhappy abusive relationship. I thought of my mother driven mad from the abuses she endured and delivered during the worst of the 1930s. "Don't Drown in one of the lakes in Canada," were the last words she said to me before I left for Liverpool and the world beyond.
The further we moved from land, the fainter were the echoes stirring from my past. Then I remembered my dad, dead ten years and like my sister Marion resting in a pauper's pit. In my head, I heard his voice and imagined him saying 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 ship's engines cutting through the sea towards the future.
The next four days, the seas were rough and the ship rolled violently from one wave to the next. Friede only stirred from her bunk to be sick in the communal toilet outside our berth. I was unaffected by the crash of waves against the hull. The ship pitched back and forth but in all my life I had never felt more steady on my feet.
I was alone when I first saw Canada's coastline somewhere around the 26th of November and it was love at first sight.
At first, it was unrequited love because Canada didn't know what to make of Friede and myself. Their customs agents at the Port of Montreal believed us Russian spies. They took issue that our British Passports had a visa stamp, which allowed us to travel through the Soviet zone in Germany to West Berlin. Despite it being explained to them- that the visa was issued so Friede could visit her family in Berlin, we were deemed suspicious.
Entry to Canada was grudgingly granted. We were allowed to go, on our way, to Toronto, but our steamer trunk was seized. Canada Customs was under the impression that they would find a secret compartment in the trunk which contained copies of the Communist Manifesto.
It was a long train journey to Toronto and it was after dark when we arrived in the city. Toronto was cold and empty of people because shops and restaurants were shuttered for the evening. We had no friends or contacts in Toronto where we could spend the night. We were on our own but it felt liberating. There was no past only tomorrow ahead for us. Friede and I walked from Union Station to Young Street. Once there, we followed it north for a mile or so; until we found a rooming house that was open and welcoming to weary travellers from abroad.
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