Emma Smith Obituary, Death – Emma Smith, who passed away at the age of 94, was one of the few authors to have a second chance at success. After an absence of more than 50 years following the publication of her first work, Emma Smith, who has since passed away, enjoyed that rare experience with two memoirs that received high praise. Maidens’ Trip, her first novel, was an account of life on the Grand Union Canal during the second world war. It was published in 1948 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for best first novel.
During the postwar years, when she was working as a runner-cum-secretary for Laurie Lee, who was a young screenwriter at the time, she wrote both of her novels, this one being one of them. He suggested that she use the pen name Emma Smith because she did not like her birth name, which was Elspeth Hallsmith. The sibilance of her birth name earned her the nickname “Spitty” when she was in school.
She urged him to write Cider with Rosie and he eventually did so. However, despite the fact that they were very close, their friendship was never romantic. Smith pointed out that this was in part because Lee was only capable of loving one person: himself. In 1946, she went to India with Lee for a documentary that they were making. The soon-to-be independent country made an impression on Smith, and when he was under pressure to write a follow-up to Maidens’ Trip, he used the trip as inspiration for the comedy The Far Cry (1950), which went on to become another bestseller. In the year that followed, she tied the knot, and in the decades that followed, she did not publish very much.
The author Susan Hill went to a school jumble sale more than 20 years after the publication of The Far Cry and found a copy of the book there. Hill gushed in her World of Books column in the Daily Telegraph that it was “a forgotten masterpiece.” Hill was referring to the book. She made efforts to have it republished, but it was not until 2002 that the novel was made available again. Not long after that, the author was sought out in order to have them compose a memoir.
The Great Western Beach (2008), which was a lively account of the author’s childhood in Cornwall during the 1930s and was an immediate success, was typed on the same machine that she had used for her earlier works. Smith accomplished the same thing once again in 2013, when she published As Green As Grass, in which she recalled her experiences after the war.
She was born in Newquay, Cornwall, the second of four children to be born to Janet Hallsmith (nee Laurie) and Guthrie Hallsmith. In order to break free from the stifling conformity of their middle-class parents, Elspeth and her siblings spent their childhoods exploring the nearby beaches, playing in rock pools, swimming, and reading. She was forbidden to associate with the “hoi polloi,” so she rebelled against this rule. After having fun with a boy who lived in a Barnardo’s home, Smith related in The Great Western Beach how he narrowly avoided getting hit with the belt.
The marriage of her parents was fraught with unimaginable misery. Janet had served as a nurse during the First World War, and Guthrie had been a soldier. Guthrie’s valor during the war earned him the Distinguished Service Order and a promotion to the rank of captain. However, the experience left him psychologically scarred. He was a domestic tyrant because of his anguish and his frustration at the daily humiliations he suffered in his day job as a bank clerk. His anguish was made worse by his frustration.
Her father had a significant impact on Smith’s development as a writer; the two of them would read poetry together. However, Smith’s daughter later expressed relief that her father had left the family after he suffered a mental breakdown when she was 12 years old. Her parents had just recently relocated to Dartmoor, and her father had just moved to St. Ives in order to pursue a career as a painter there.