He also did a wonderful job of bringing the difficulties of the lower classes in England to light, and bringing us into the mindset of these people and to really understand their struggles and challenges.
It was fascinating to see how people lived in Germany after the war-this was something I had absolutely never thought of. He joined the Royal Air Force during World War II and was stationed in Hamburg, Germany after the war. His family situation was incredibly difficult his whole childhood. He was born in 1923 in England and lived in complete poverty growing up. The books weave together Harry's personal experience with history as we know it today.
This is the third in a series of memoirs.
Sometimes, after the war, peace is the hardest battle to survive. The Empress of Australia is a personal history of one man’s journey towards self discovery and freedom from row house Britain. In his book, Smith speaks for all generations who have faced untold hardships in their quest for dignity and purpose during times of financial, political and familial upheaval. Harry Leslie Smith sketches a real, sometimes amusing and sometimes melancholic portrait of Britain in the late 1940s. Yet, like so many other returning veterans from the Second World War, Smith stumbled onwards through the era known as the “Age of Austerity” to confront the horrors of his childhood and the innate injustice of a society divided by class. At first, Harry Leslie Smith finds himself ill equipped for this brave new world where Britain has lost its empire and is bankrupt. Recently demobbed from the RAF, Smith and his German war bride must try to adjust to a civilian society that is scarred from not only the war but the harsh reality of living in peacetime Britain. So begins Harry Leslie Smith’s bitter-sweet memoir: The Empress of Australia which depicts life in post-war Yorkshire. In the winter of 1948, a post-war darkness felled Britain and happiness, like sweets, was tightly rationed.
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