"I am history"… review of Harry's Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith, pub. Icon Books

[sheenaghpugh]

"I am not an historian, but at 91 I am history and I fear its repetition"

Harry Leslie Smith's father was a miner in the early years of the last century, like my own grandfather, and the only difference between them was that, as Smith observes, a miner in those days was only ever one accident away from destitution. My grandfather was relatively lucky, surviving to his sixties with an impressive collection of lung diseases: Smith's father had the accident that plunged the family into real poverty.

It isn't often I go in for saying "if you liked this, you'll like that", but in this case it is a fair guide: if you found Ken Loach's film "Spirit of 45" both moving and alarming, you will want to read this book. Harry Leslie Smith is another from the same stable as Sam Watts and Ray Davies, interviewed in that film. Born in 1923, he grew up in the Depression years in such poverty that joining the army to fight in World War 2 felt more like an escape than anything else. He then emerged, with so many other young working-class people, into the sunlit uplands of a country that for the first time in its history was actually trying to bring about decent housing, education and a health service for people like him. And naturally he thought it was going to last, so that his own children and grandchildren would never be in danger of repeating the life of his mother, worn down by poverty and so suspicious of authority that she saved as much as she could of her pension in case the government might suddenly change its mind and want it back. Or of his father, whose marriage broke up when he became unable to support his family, or his sister Marion, who died of TB in childhood.

Now in his nineties, seeing the wreck of all he once saw built up, he is naturally puzzled and annoyed: "Sometimes I try and think how I might explain to Marion how we built these beautiful structures in our society – which protected the poor, which kept them safe at work, healthy in their lives, supported them when they were down on their luck - only to watch them be destroyed within a few short generations. But I cannot find the words".

That, though, is just what he did do, by setting down the story he sees the world in danger of forgetting: the narrative of the slum housing in which he grew up, where no amount of cleaning could eradicate damp and vermin, of disease which could not be cured because doctor's fees could not be afforded, of education unavailable to children whose families could not spare the wages they might bring in. (Harry's own education, like so much else, really began in 1945 when he went to adult education classes.) As one of his chapter headings says, "everything old is new again" and he is concerned in this book to warn "we have to take back control, or soon we won't have a social welfare system, we won't have free or affordable health care, we won't have safe neighbourhoods and we won't have decent school. We will have the world of my youth, where people died from poverty and preventable illnesses and lived short, unfulfilled lives".

How this control might be returned is a tricky question, because one thing that has changed about the world is the amount of power in the hands of multinational corporations with no aims or obligations outside the making of money. Harry Leslie Smith is an unusual man, who sees beyond boundaries that restrict the vision of others, as he showed when, in post-war Germany, he overcame his hostility to his former enemies to the extent of marrying a German woman. He has no time for the demonisation of minorities, the fragmenting of those who have a common cause if they could only see it, nor for the fashionable apathy that says "what's the point of voting?". He does have some practical suggestions for making our world better, like going after corporate tax evaders and amending the voting system. But mostly, as I think he himself suspects, it is a matter of spirit, the spirit in which he and his generation not only "voted for the future" in 1945 but were prepared also to work and pay tax for it. It's a question of whether that spirit still exists: when he says "I am history", we must hope this is only true in the sense that he and his kind lived through it, and not in the modern slang sense of the phrase.