When Harry met Friede
LEFT-WING POLEMICIST RECOUNTS A TALE OF LOVE AMONG THE RUINS
Harry Leslie Smith is pushing 93, and best known f or being an angry old man with almost 65,000 followers on Twitter. His repeated criticisms of British Prime Minister David Cameron in The Guardian newspaper and his book, Harry’s Last Stand, ( part memoir, part lament and part exhortation to save t he welfare state from the perceived clutches of austerity), have established him as t he nonagenarian darling of the left in British political circles.
But in Belleville, Ont., Smith is not f amous. In f act, he is a retired oriental rug salesman, who spends about half the year living in modest anonymity in an apartment a few blocks north of Lake Ontario. When we met there t his week, Smith wasn’t angry. Rather, he seemed a bit wistful and more in the mood to talk about love — a forbidden and unlikely love between a non- Germanspeaking lad from Yorkshire and a shattered- by- war, non- English- speaking German lass — than politics.
Smith’s new memoir, Love Among the Ruins, will be released in Canada in April. ( About 15,000 copies have already been sold in Britain.) The young Harry Leslie Smith was a Royal Air Force radio operator during the Second World War. His unit was stationed at an airbase in Hamburg after the fighting ended. The German port city had been pulverized by the Allied bombing raids and the chief military rule among the victors in 1945 was no fraternizing with the German people, especially German girls.
“We couldn’ t walk or talk with any German girl, or any German,” Smith says. “But I used to wander around the streets when I was off duty. That’s when I saw this girl, and my heart just stumbled.”
Friede Edelmann’s hair was dark and her eyes ha- zel. When she pulled away from the crowd of people she was with, the young English soldier sidled up, asking if he could walk her home. “Part way,” she replied. “I never would have asked if I wasn’t full of beer,” Smith admits, laughing. “But I felt like she was my destiny. It sounds nutty, I know.”
The next day she agreed to a picnic. The young couple conceived a strategy — communicated using hand signals, and with the help of the English- German dictionary Smith carried everywhere — to avoid military police. Smith would trail 20 paces behind Edelmann, trying to look inconspicuous. When they arrived at a café, a park and, later, her mother’s apartment, the pair would retreat from prying army eyes to talk. Or try to, at least.
“I can remember flipping through pages of that dictionary,” Smith says.
Edelmann was bemused by the Brit. Forbidden love wasn’ t only forbidden, it didn’t stand a chance, didn’t he understand that? So she encouraged her suitor to forget about her, go back to Britain and marry a nice English girl. But Smith wasn’t going anywhere. And, after a year or so, when the military occupation eased its restrictions on fraternization, he went to the mayor of Hamburg to plead his case. The woman at t he desk at city hall scanned her appointments book. She saw a “Smith” and ushered him in.
“I didn’t say anything,” Smith says, chuck ling. “The mayor looked at me and said, ‘ I don’t recognize you.’ I apologized profusely, but then I asked him if he could get Friede out of her job at a factory.”
The mayor told Smith that he didn’t know what he was getting into, that love between a German and a Brit couldn’t possibly work. But it did. Harry Smith and Friede Edelmann were married on Aug. 16, 1947, in a Lutheran chapel — after the German Catholic bishop of Hamburg refused to sanction the union. Photos of the reception show a twotiered wedding cake and a smiling couple preparing to cut into it.
The newlyweds moved to England, but then Friede moved home, phoning her husband to explain why.
“She said, ‘ I still love you, Harry, but I don’t want to live in England anymore,’ ” Smith says.
Friede wanted to move to Canada.
“I’ ll go to the moon with you, dear,” was her husband’s reply.
Smith still has their old passports f rom the trip. They are stamped Nov. 12, 1953, the point of entry, “Quebec.” Harry the weaver from England became Harry the high- end carpet salesman in Toronto. He and Friede had three sons. They had a life and then in 1999 she died of cancer.
The afternoon light is pouring through the windows of Smith’s apartment. He removes his glasses. He hates the “damn things” anyway.
“I miss her more than life,” he says, quietly. “She is always present. She never goes away. I buy flowers for her birthday. It took me a long time to get over her death.
“I went back to Germany and I stood outside her old apartment—it was still there — and I stood there, for ages, looking at the door, thinking, if I could just turn the clock back, then she would walk out.”