In 1949 I was 26, and struggling to make my way in postwar Britain, where happiness was rationed as tightly as sweets. Austerity blanketed the country as the Attlee Labour government struggled to pay our country’s enormous war debt, deal with the end of empire and build the foundations for a welfare state. Four years previously, we had won the war against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan but the fizz of victory had grown flat, as many of us lived in cities that still carried the scars of the Blitz. Sheffield, Plymouth, Hull, Cardiff and even London looked as worn as an unemployed miner’s Sunday best, because many working-class districts had yet to be fully cleared of the bomb debris from long ago air raids.

Back then I lived in Halifax with my new bride, a young German woman named Friede. Except for one errant bomb, the city had been spared the ravages of the second world war. It could not escape the devastation caused by the depression, however, which had left an even deeper mark because poverty was ever present and good housing scarce. But I consider myself lucky because I worked as a labourer at Macintosh’s and lived with my wife in a comfortable bedsit only a short walk away from my job.



Clydebank Blitz damage in 1941. ‘Many of us lived in cities that still carried the scars of the Blitz . Sheffield, Plymouth, Hull Cardiff and even London looked as worn as an unemployed miner’s Sunday best.’

It wasn’t paradise but it was a damned sight better than the slums I kipped in as a boy. So despite the fact that money was short, and many of our meals were just beans on toast, I was grateful. I had survived a bleak childhood and walked away from the war without a scratch. Moreover I was in love, and in good health, and a Labour government had begun work on redressing the great inequalities of the early 20th century, want, ignorance and poor health.

I was a child of the slums whose sister died of TB in a workhouse infirmary, so I knew what poverty meant for those too ill to afford a doctor – death by a preventable disease, or death from hunger because one was too ill to work. It’s why I knew when the NHS was created in 1948 that its inception was as revolutionary to our society as the steam engine was to the industrial revolution. I knew its importance immediately, when I was treated for free within months of its creation for bronchitis by a doctor who prescribed me antibiotics that were paid for by the state. It left me gobsmacked, but it wasn’t until almost a year after my treatment that I became forever in the debt of the NHS because it saved my marriage and my wife’s sanity.

Frankfurt, Germany, in 1945. Photograph: Alamy

Growing up in Nazi Germany, my wife’s war hadn’t been as kind as mine. As a child, she had been stigmatised by authorities because she was the illegitimate daughter of a trade unionist who never saw eye to eye with Hitler. So Friede was harassed by the authorities, which affected her emotions and made her suffer from anxiety sometimes. But she had also been affected by the war and its brutality, and by what she saw in her native city of Hamburg when it was firebombed and tens of thousands of its inhabitants were killed in 1943. By the war’s end, she was 17 and had seen more suffering than most people see in a lifetime. Like most people who lived through the war, she carried on and tried to forget the horrors she had endured. It wasn’t until she married me and came to England as an immigrant that her past became to grate against her present like a tectonic plate before a major earthquake.

Within a month of her arrival in Halifax she began to shake uncontrollably at night. Her moods shifted the way a summer sky above Yorkshire moves from sun to rain in the blink of an eye. Friede grew withdrawn, morose and profoundly unhappy. To be honest I didn’t know what to do: I made little money, had few connections and wasn’t wise to the world of emotions. Fortunately a female friend saw how much Friede had changed since their first meeting, and told me that it was imperative I take her to a doctor for a consultation.

Friede registered at a local surgery which luckily enough had a female GP who accepted my wife as a patient. Over the course of several visits, the doctor determined that Friede was suffering from what we would now call PTSD and mild depression after leaving the country of her birth for a new life in England. She knew Friede needed support from other immigrants, and helped her connect with some other newcomers to our community. The doctor also encouraged her to speak to the Women’s Institute about her experiences in Germany during the Hitler era, so that she could let others know that not all Germans were Nazis. It took a while, but with the help of that NHS doctor, Friede overcame her PTSD and found great joy in her new adopted homeland.

That the NHS provided us with a doctor who treated my wife without any cost was miraculous to me. In many ways at that time I couldn’t believe that our country could be so caring to ordinary citizens, because I had seen the indifference of our government to widespread poverty and disease during the depression.

I am not sure what would have happened to Friede, me or our marriage if the NHS hadn’t be there to provide the medical support we required when we were young and in need. It’s the reason I have tried as best I can to support our NHS and all those who work for public healthcare in this country in the last years of my life. I find it’s the least I can do to show my thanks for helping me and millions like me for 65 years.