The Green & Pleasant Land

Harry Leslie Smith talks about what it was like to live in Post War Britain during the construction of the Welfare State.

Chapter Two:

Repatriation

For two years, my life was good as a member of Britain's occupation forces in post-war Germany. The RAF kept me well fed, clothed and even provided me private quarters at our airbase, which was unusual considering I was not an officer or an NCO.  

I was stationed in Hamburg. It was a city that, during the war was turned into rubble by a series of air raids aptly named: "Operation Gomorrah."  

Life was hard and sorrowful for many in that bomb-ruined city. It was not a place that took kindly to the old or vulnerable. But if you were young, there was hope because knowing there was peace around the world meant you could plan for the future.

I never felt I belonged anywhere until I arrived in Hamburg. It was because I fell in love with Friede and we married in that city. Belonging to Friede made me believe I had the world on a string. String, however, can be easily cut. 

The RAF cut my string in November 1947. That was the month they exiled me from that city and my love when I was posted to Ringway an airbase north of Manchester. My return to Britain was a punishment from the RAF. I had crossed a line they didn't like when I married Friede in August 1947. Working class lads, even when a socialist Labour government led our nation, weren’t encouraged to find love, joy, and a better destiny by marrying a foreign woman, let alone a woman from a former belligerent nation. 

Instead of being allowed to fly direct to Ringway, the RAF landed me at an airfield outside London and provided me with a travel warrant to make my way to Manchester.

“Sod them,” I thought while I hitched a ride into London from a delivery van driver. 

When I arrived in London, it stood worse for wear under a discontented sky of dull clouds fat with rain. She was haggard and lacked confidence. The city looked more defeated than some of the cities; I had seen in Germany during my stint in the occupational forces. 

 The train station for my trip up north was overcrowded, with commuters who looked worn down from the daily demands of a life lived on a ration book. The air in the station was thick with the smell of tobacco and damp clothes that desperately needed laundering. Brushing past people on the way to my platform and the train taking me north, I heard whisps of articulated anger float through the concourse. Most of it dealt with the slowness of reconstruction or the scarcity of decent food.     

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught saccharine-dipped headlines from newspapers festooned on sandwich boards about the royal wedding between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, which occurred the week previous. The newspapers all concluded Britain was blessed to be ruled by a royal family possessed of so much wisdom, courage, and a sense of duty.

 I knew it was shite and whispered.

" Send ‘em all to heaven in a corn beef tin."

The Royals, the aristocrats, the Tories, and the toffs always expected the lower orders to suffer the famine. But when it was time for the feast, we were never invited except as humble spectators or servants. 

I arrived when dusk had set at RAF Ring Way because my train was delayed by problems on the track. The outpost was immense, and it bustled with the drone of aeroplanes taxing to take off or land from far away places that were perhaps less monotonous than here, where men marched without purpose on a parade ground built for square bashing boys into warriors for the RAF.

I presented my transfer papers to a warrant officer. He looked me up and down as if I were a grinding gear in a machine. At first, I thought he was going to ask a subordinate to:

“Get hammer out and bang on it till the bloody racket stops.” Instead, he deferred to his lieutenant, who seemed bored by my existence. Wearily, he informed me that everything was in order but, “We’ll have none of that slackness you lot got up to in Germany.” 

. 

I was assigned sleeping quarters in a Nissen hut that boiled over with young recruits who had spent the war close to their mother's apron strings. It didn't matter because outside, of a nod; I didn't speak to any of them. I was worn out from the travel and fell quickly into a dreamless sleep on my cot that had a mattress stuffed with straw.

When dawn arrived, an NCO came in and cried,

“Wakey, wakey.”

I dressed quickly, walked outside, lit a cigarette and looked for a wash hut. 

At the building, I joined an impatient queue. Once inside, I found an empty sink, where I wet my face and then applied some lather with a coarse soap brush. I started to shave the stubble covering my face. After I cleaned myself up, I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My face was ashen, and my eyes dull from exhaustion. 

I wiped my face dry with a towel and, then left the hut to begin the worst posting of my RAF career.  

During December and through the Christmas holidays, I was deeply depressed because I missed my wife and my old life back in Germany. Everything around me seemed dingier and backwards compared to Europe, including the food, the people, and the camaraderie. The longer I stayed at Ring Way, the sullener and more morose I became. I detested this peacetime Air Force as it had an overabundance of boot polish, boot licking, and perfectly creased trousers.

My superiors had me execute one senseless order after the next as if I were in a glasshouse and being punished, for some unknown transgression in military law. They put me in charge of a squad of blotchy-faced recruits, and each day, apart from Sunday, was filled with the same insane order. 

“Have the lads fetch sledgehammers and march them to the cinderblock building up the road from the parade square. Inside you will find a room filled with surplus transmitters, radio receivers and radar paraphernalia. Smash it all to Kingdom Come, and never you mind the whys or the wherefores; it is not your business. For as long as you are in the service, that room will have shite in it- that needs busting up.”

By January, I was desperate to leave the RAF and try my luck as a civilian in the brave new world Labour was attempting to build. I couldn't take much more, and I longed to be reunited with Friede. The RAF had assured me they would fly her to England to be with me when the time was right. But I didn't press them because what life could she have had with me on base and; her alone in a bed-sitting room with no friends or family to help her? I had to get out of the RAF but still have the air force pay for her transport because I couldn't afford the travel costs.

The problem was when I married Friede in August of that year, I'd reenlisted in the RAF for another thirty-six months. I had done it under the belief I would be able to stay on in Germany and live as a married serviceman off base as my superiors had promised me. 

But the RAF mucked me about and posted me to Ringway instead. I would have been buggered were it not for a clause in my reenlistment contract that allowed me to rescind the agreement within six months of signing if I returned the £20 bonus the RAF gave me to extend my time with them.   

After many, "Why did you go and marry a ruddy foreigner - and a bloody Jerry to boot;” my request for Friede to be reunited with me ASAP was approved. 

“Mind you, Smith, don’t get any ideas about living off base as you did in Hitler land,” said the officer who approved my request. “When your missus comes, you’ll have to find her digs for herself and drop by for tea when I say so,” he said with malice.

The problem was I didn't know what I was to do for employment or housing when I left the service. 

I wrote in despair to my sister Mary who was employed in one of Bradford’s wool mills, and I asked her advice about finding work. When I received my sister's reply, she told me: the looms never stop in the weaving mills of Yorkshire. Work was everywhere, and the pay was alright but never enough to make you feel safe and secure.

My sister also informed me that housing was scarce:   There’s nowt to let across the north and not much knew was being built except in sections of towns and cities that were bombed. 

She suggested I try our mother for a place to stay for Friede and me while I got sorted. However, Mary also cautioned me that asking our mum for help was,

"like asking the devil for a fiver because, in the end, it’s going to cost you ten." 

My sister’s letter wasn’t encouraging. I didn’t have many options. I contemplated writing Friede to say don’t come, forget me, please go and live your life as if we had never met. Instead, I choose to reconcile with my unstable mother. We had been estranged for years because of a hundred cuts each had done to the other’s heart and soul during the Great Depression. 

I humbled myself and wrote a note to my mother. I asked her to put us up until I got back on my feet and could find something more suitable. Her response was quick and guarded. I was offered the attic of her rented house located on the ugly side of Halifax. My mother wrote I would be charged fair rent, and she didn’t hold it against me that I’d married a German after all the problems “Hitler had given us.” 

I sent her a curt reply and agreed to her terms. I had no other choice because I wanted to be reunited with Friede and quit the RAF as soon as possible, and no one else had offered me a room to let.  

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.