This "Is what it is world," doesn't have to be our reality if we only own our socialist history.

This summer has been brutal for so many of us. War is all around devouring the young in its meat grinder and diverting our attention from building better societies. The climate has turned wrathful from us poisoning it. Refugees drown in unspeakable numbers on the seas or if they survive their flight to sanctuary sleep on the streets of the West’s wealthiest cities. While the cost of living crisis emaciates our optimism for all the tomorrow’s hereafter. It didn’t have to be this way. 76 years ago Harry Leslie Smith wed on August 16th in the melancholic shadow cast by the Second World War. But as you will see in his essay about a moment that changed him; there was time in 1945 between burying the dead of that conflict to build not only a new civilisation but a happy life under socialism.

I have lived almost 100 years and I am approaching the long night of nonexistence, but I am not afraid because I have survived much turmoil: the Great Depression, World War Two, The Cold War, the deaths of friends and also the hardest blows to my spirit, the passing of my beloved wife and my middle son, Peter. But now, as time dwindles down like a clock with an ageing battery, my heart still beats strong, content and free of rancour because of one single event that changed my life and forged a thousand moments of joy for me.

It happened a long time ago, in the summer of 1945 when I was stationed in the city of Hamburg as part of the allied occupation force charged with enforcing the peace on a defeated German people.

Because of allied air raids against it during the war, the city was like Gomorrah the day after God’s wrath. It was an alien landscape, where city streets were dotted with scorched building facades cut up unevenly by the bombs and firestorms that had rained down upon its inhabitants for five long years. Even though it was now peace time, the city was feral with the dispossessed, the hungry, and the children orphaned by war and cruel circumstances.

The totality of Hamburg’s destruction was something I had never experienced in my 22 years of life, despite the misery I had endured in the slums of Barnsley and Bradford during my childhood. Only the brutality meted out to the innocent people of Belgium and Holland by the retreating Wehrmacht and SS divisions at the tail end of the war seemed comparable to what I saw in the first year of peace in Hamburg.

To survive emotionally during those nascent months of peace, I retreated into myself and hid in the words of poets and the sound of jazz music that I listened to on a radio. When off duty, I stumbled through the ruins, as lonely as Wordsworth’s Cloud, overwhelmed by the hunger, the dirt, and the simple despair of ordinary folk that had lost everything in a war that was not of their making.

One day in August, I came upon a makeshift black market where German civilians who subsisted on a 1000 calories a day in rations bartered heirlooms for extra bread or tinned meat and the chance to survive another day. In the throng, I noticed a woman who made my heart and head stumble in aroused confusion. Her stance, her look of defiance and grace made her appear to me like she was in Technicolor while everyone else around her was in sepia tone.

Rashly, I barged into that young woman’s life, and used what little German I knew to introduce myself to her. On a girlish whim because I seemed harmless, she graciously let me know her name. She was called Friede, and she allowed me to walk her to the apartment where she lived with her mother and an elderly couple who had been left homeless because of the war.

In any other time or circumstance we would not have been suited to each other or destined to become lovers. Friede was cosmopolitan and bohemian, whereas I was a young man who came from the wrong side of town lacking either education or a trade to earn my keep. But Friede had suffered during the war like I had suffered during the Great Depression, so we recognised in each other a fragility that needed both tenderness and protection from a harsh and unforgiving world.

In many ways we were old souls but we were also young, so Friede and I spent our free time together in reckless abandon exploring both the pleasures of the flesh and the wonders of the heart. It was remarkable to me that after months of courtship, Friede agreed to marry me and spend her life with me as a friend, lover and partner.

Fortunately, I knew even then that nothing in this life comes easy. The RAF, the British government and society were dead set against our nuptials. It took us two years to receive the necessary permission required to marry because Friede was considered a foreign national from a former enemy nation. However, both Friede and I persevered, and on 16 August 1948 we were wed by an RAF padre in Hamburg. That day we toasted our good fortune with champagne liberated from the officers’ mess.

Our love affair continued for more than 50 years and then on 2 July 1999 Friede kissed me one last time and then died from cancer. Not a minute goes by when I don’t feel blessed that I seized the day long ago in a Hamburg black market and turned one moment into a life time of discovery, love, friendship and kindness.

I will publish on here, the two chapters from Harry Leslie Smith’s Love Among the Ruins, about his marriage ceremony in occupied German on August 16th which would have been his 76th wedding anniversary.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help this month. August is a bad month with prescriptions that need to be filled and treatments and tests that occur in cities that I must commute to. . Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Even sharing my posts helps the cause. Take Care, John