The Green & Pleasant Land

Harry Leslie Smith writes about the winter of 1948 and its energy crisis as well as disappointments people had in the Labour Govt.

Chapter Three:

It’s now only the days that separate us. February 1948

Winter in 1948 was harsh. It was a season of chilling temperatures and fierce snowstorms. In February, the thermometer refused to budge above freezing on most days. Coal was still rationed, and the skies above Manchester were streaked with emaciated plumes of sooty smoke that puffed from the chimney pots attached to the working-class row houses below. Inside to take the chill off, residents wore multiple pullovers, stamped their feet, blew on their hands, or moaned about the ferocious winds banging like a bailiff on their windowpanes outside. They drank numerous cups of tea and lamented to each other how cold their arses were after making a trip to outside bogs that, before breakfast, still glistened with a night-time frost.

That winter, there were queues for just about everything and every activity. People queued for buses, trains or for scarce food items that were rumoured to be available in their local shops. Nobody in the working class was starving, but they weren’t getting fat off the land either. There was a whinging cadence to voices on streets throughout the country that grumbled, “Is this what we fought Hitler for?” It was almost three years after Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were done and dusted, and the tolerance; of the population for grinning and bearing their lack of material gain was growing slim.

People felt they’d been denied the victor’s spoils like affordable housing, and naturally, the government was blamed. But the ongoing housing crisis was not their fault so much as it was the fault of centuries of the entitled stealing from the commoner. There was only so much time in the day to clear slums or replace housing destroyed in the war to meet the needs of demob soldiers and their new families.

My mood was no different than everyone else in 1948 Britain. I was pissed off and concerned for not only my present situation but my prospects for the future. I might have been even more keenly grim than others because Friede was soon to arrive from Germany. I felt ill-prepared for her arrival whilst still under the yoke of the RAF. Being in the service gave me little time to find lodgings for Friede or prepare for my civilian life once I was demobbed. I only felt free of my responsibilities when I was asleep at night and my dreams roamed far from my military confines.

But my liberty ended each time I awoke in the morning to a warrant officer barking, “You bunch of useless bastards, get a move on or else you’ll feel my boot on your arse.”

I turned twenty-five on the twenty-fifth of that month. It could have been my fiftieth birthday, considering how despondent I felt. I had nothing to show for living a quarter of a century. I didn’t come from a family with connections to either wealth or trade unionism. I was an outsider to both the world of capitalism and socialism. All I had to show for my time on earth were the scars of surviving extreme poverty during the Great Depression and- managing to stumble through the second world war without getting killed. At the time, it didn’t seem to add up to much. Especially, when I considered I was married to a foreign bride awaiting to be reunited with her in a post-war Britain overabundant with poor blokes like myself.

I wasn’t even cheered by the birthday letter Friede sent me, which ended optimistically on, “It is now no longer months, but days that separate us..”

When I read that letter, I knew the die was cast. Whether our marriage could last or be happy was dependent on finding my place in the world and the Labour government making a Britain fit for the likes of us. I was terrified of what lay ahead; despite being young, street smart and industrious- my success in this new world being constructed for the common man was still a gamble. For generations beyond memory, my family had toiled for the coal barons and received for it; shortened lives, indentured poverty and lungs stolen of breath from coal dust. I had been trained for nothing else but servitude and hunger. Now a government I helped elect told me my labour would be paid fairly, but their treatment of me in the peacetime RAF argued differently. It was terra incognito that awaited me, and Friede after my tenure in the RAF was done. I knew it; despite Labour’s assurances that it would be right as rain for workers, that power makes us forget our roots.

What I didn’t know at the time was how difficult life was for Friede in Germany while I attempted to prepare for her arrival in England.

Since my departure from Hamburg in November 1947, I used much of my pay to obtain rationed cigarettes, chocolate, and coffee from nefarious sources on my airbase to be sent to Friede in Hamburg. I had these parcels smuggled onto RAF transports by servicemen either friendly to me or that were bribed to do the favour. When the packages arrived in Hamburg, Friede took those goods to the underworld black markets to trade for the essentials she needed to survive in a city that struggled to rebuild itself from the rubble of its wartime destruction. In those days if you were working class, you needed to be on the fiddle or else face being drowned by an economy that had not yet swung in our favour.

That winter might have been harsh in England, but it was lethal in Germany. We had austerity, but Germany had starvation because snowstorms in January and February halted the transport of food relief across their country. Residents in cities like Hamburg were reduced to subsisting on famine diets like they did right after the war ended.

Friede's mother, Maria Edelmann, was happy her daughter was leaving Hamburg for England because it was low on food, and morale and experienced daily blackouts from a power grid not restored to pre-war efficiency. Anywhere was better than Germany. So she diligently prepared for her daughter’s departure to a new life abroad and bartered with friends or on the black market for warm clothing for Friede’s new life in Yorkshire.

During Friede’s last days in Germany, she was filled with moments of breathless excitement over the prospects of a new beginning. But her happiness was tempered by darker emotions like melancholy and fear competing for her attention. She was bidding farewell to her childhood and youth. Saying goodbye to the familiar and normal hurt with the same intensity as a love affair gone sour. Friede burst into uncontrollable tears during her farewell gathering with her closest friends Gerda and Ursula because they were the ones who knew her better than her mother or the foster family she'd been foisted on by her mum's Nazi lover Henry.

The friendship between the three women had outlasted Germany's economic collapse, the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the war and the pain of the reconstruction. Their loyalty to each other in an era of betrayal and falsehood was a testament to their characters.

Friede spent her last night in Germany with her mother in their sparsely furnished apartment. Most items of value had been pawned off to feed themselves during the last months of the war and during the first year of peace. The two women sat close to each other on a chez lounge in the living room and drank schnapps to keep warm because it was hard to find even scrap wood to heat their stove in a city where coal was in such short supply it was designated for industrial use only.

Mother and daughter talked nostalgically about old times until it became too sad to remember all those who didn’t survive the war as they had done.

Years later, Friede confessed that the night before her departure for England, she got cold feet. Friede realised she was embarking on the greatest gamble of her life with a man she really didn’t know. Friede was in her twentieth year and had chosen a path which was about to separate her from all those she loved and places where she felt the most comfortable. Buyer's remorse crept over her, and Friede worried she had made the wrong bet by renouncing her old life for the sake of one man. It frightened her to come to England because her family, her friends, her city, her culture, and her language had to be abandoned for me.

The following morning, at Fuhlsbüttle airport, Friede boarded an RAF Dakota. From a nearby road, Maria Edelmann watched the plane, which carried her daughter to a different life taxi out onto the runway and take off.

Marie Edelmann then got on with her day because, in 1948 Hamburg, your quality of life was measured in what you could trade on the black market, and prolonged sentimentality was a pursuit for the extraordinarily rich or the deranged.

Up until my dad Harry Leslie Smith's death in November 2018, he was revising two of the books he wrote at the beginning of his Harry's Last Stand mission. The chapter you have just read is from his book about post-war life in Britain under Attlee and then Churchill. I hope to get a new edition of his book, The Green and Pleasant Land printed for 2023 as it is the centenary of his birth. Your subscriptions to my substack are always appreciated because what I am attempting to do is keep my dad's legacy alive and also the legacy of the working class struggle to achieve dignity, good health, love and purpose in societies that value the entitled too much for their own good.