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Leigh Smith: A life on the edge?

"I loved my brothers, they were very violent people but they were violent times and I just wonder if they'd had just a little bit more of a chance would they have been different people?" It's an important question for someone whose brothers, by his own admission, were 'villains, gangsters and criminals' in gangland London: "They were accused of many things and one of them was even murdered, shot dead in London in gang warfare". It's these shocking early experiences which are the basis for Leigh's hard-hitting - and decidedly adult only - first novel, Norvern Monkey. It's a riches-to-rags story of a well-to-do 1950s northern family escaping an abusive father only to end up in abject poverty.

1950s Leigh: 'Run-of-the-mill poor'

To merely describe Leigh Smith as a Sowerby Bridge author doesn't really do him justice, though! He also happens to be a top karate expert and a former bodyguard who's looked after a Pope and various royal personages, his apartment's been blown up and he was nearly shot for taking pictures of a Soviet nuclear missile silo. More of that later! At the forefront of Leigh's mind today is his debut novel - a work of fiction which took longer than he ever expected to get from first word to final full-stop: "I've been writing this book for 18 years. Each time I thought I'd finished I realised I hadn't told enough of the truth in my writing. Now, after a couple of years of my legal team looking at it, the official verdict by them is that it's a work of fiction based loosely on my life. I like to put it this way: anything that won't get me into trouble is true and anything that will get me intro trouble is fiction!"

Soviet dis-Union: Exciting times

One escape from the harsh poverty of Leigh's early years was karate, which unknown to him was to lead him on to some truly 'Boy's Own'-style adventures later in life. But, he admits, the martial arts hadn't been his first choice of sport: "When I started it was because I was a lousy boxer. I was never going to make it as a boxer, the gloves were too heavy and I was only a skinny little thing! My brothers were efficient at boxing and they wanted me to be the same, but unfortunately I wasn't up to it. I tried judo but it seemed like there was too much rolling around and getting your nose near another fella's bum for my liking! Then I saw a demonstration by some of the top Japanese masters and in those days it had a mystique to it!"

Leigh's most memorable time, though, was during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s - and that brings us to perhaps his closest brush with death. It all started innocently enough - with a few photos!: "I was bodyguarding a Chinese and an American businessman. I had some of my security forces with me and we went along to the harbour at Ventspils [a major Latvian city and port on the Baltic]. Back in the early '90s it was a standing joke about this submarine fleet which was quite old and quite sunk! It had just been let go, the old [Soviet] Baltic Fleet, but they had titanium hulls which are very expensive. Every man and his dog were trying to get them as scrap metal. When these businessmen found out that I had a lot of freedom around these areas, they approached me and I said I'd arrange the deal...We'd go along and after a breakfast of one-and-a-half bottles of vodka being swigged, the Admiral became very amiable and decided to show us around. Now, I saw this enormous black rubber-covered thing in the harbour and knew it was something different. The Admiral was proud to tell us it was a Typhoon class submarine. I asked him if I could take some photographs for my students, he posed and I put him in front of the submarine and got plenty of pictures."

Leigh today: "I love West Yorkshire!"

Amazing and dangerous times, says Leigh, but they had to come to an end sometime: "It was a blast. It was so exciting. The adrenaline rush was great...But now, at my age, I've got a 10-year-old daughter as well as a grown-up family. It's just not the done thing to take those risks. Also, it's a lot like the Wild West: a lot of it's tamed. Once it was all out in the streets, but now it's just like everywhere else with serious crime and organised crime hidden away."