King Dido Read online

  King Dido

  Alexander Baron

  Introduction by Ken Worpole

  New London Editions

  Five Leaves Publications

  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

  Introduction

  Ken Worpole

  Part I

  Alexander Baron was born in 1917 to Jewish parents who had separately grown up in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields prior to marriage and setting up home in Hackney. The new family started with one room in Abersham Road, then two rooms in Sandringham Road, before settling in a small terraced house in Foulden Road, Stoke Newington, the subsequent locus of many of Baron’s most lyrical evocations of street life and community. His father, Barnet Bernstein, was a fur cutter, a “very prim and correct chap”; his mother, a former factory worker in the docks. Baron’s mother never worked after she married and had children. In later life Baron remembered her, by then an avid bookworm, “sitting reading Pride and Prejudice — which she discovered in the public library. A couple of neighbours came in and said, ‘Good lor’, look at ’er, a schoolteacher.’ His father, he recalled, read books of popular science such as This Wonderful World by Sir James Jeans, one of the great popular intellectuals of the time.

  Baron attended Shacklewell Lane Primary School, which was then considered “rough”, though he later described his years there as “the happiest time of my life.” At the age of eleven he won a Junior County Scholarship to attend Hackney Downs Grammar School (also known as The Grocers’ Company’s School), subsequently made famous as the place where the young Harold Pinter was first encouraged to write. In 1954 Pinter adopted the stage name of David Baron, the surname possibly adopted from that of his by now already famous namesake who had anglicised his name from Bernstein to Baron soon after the war. Another Hackney Downs pupil of this era, Henry Cohen, also published two well received novels, Scamp (1950) and Rain on the Pavements (1951), writing under the pen name of Roland Camberton. Baron’s post-war reputation was the first to establish the reputation of the school as a place where the imaginative life flourished, and indeed was encouraged. I was lucky to teach in the English Department there between 1969 and 1973, and some of that seriousness about literature and enthusiasm for creative writing still survived.

  As an adult, Baron never spoke about Hackney Downs with quite the same animation and affection reserved for his primary school years and the pavement games of Foulden Road. This street life later mutated into a youthful political activism on the left, along with a fellow crowd of young Jewish and non-Jewish idealists, much of it conducted at street corners and open air meetings, often in and around Ridley Road in competition — sometimes violently so — with Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. He left school to work for the London County Council and increasing political involvement in the Labour Party, despite the offer of a place at King’s College, London. “For God’s sake, let’s get out and get a job instead,” he later recalled saying to a friend when they were offered the prospect of university education.

  Nevertheless, he remained grateful to Hackney Downs School for the attention and encouragement he received for his writing, though, again, he also believed that this skill had come as much from his own parents’ enthusiasm for the pleasures of reading. From a very early age, he was a story-teller. “In the street when I was a small kid, I used to tell stories. I wasn’t very good at a punch-up. Story-telling gave me status. I could sit down on the kerb, with the others all around me, and tell them a story. I drew the material from the masses of books I read.”

  There were also escapes into the countryside. “My dad was a great one for the open air, parks and so on. He’d come home from work and say, ‘How about some fresh air?’ And we’d get the bus to Wormley. Walk through the side lanes and feel we were in the country, and then come home about ten o’clock.” This appreciation of easy access to the countryside — not always shared in East London immigrant Jewish life, with its residual suspicion of rural atavism and enmity — is powerfully evoked in Baron’s epiphany, “Strangers to Death”, the prologue to his 1953 collection of short stories set during the Second World War, The Human Kind. This lovely recollection of a brief idyll is, alas, only a prelude to the disasters of war:

  “Every Saturday morning from early spring to late autumn, a crowd of young people would meet at the street corner. The cyclists, with rucksacks on their backs, tin mugs and kettles, all a-rattle, tied with string to their crossbars, and cheap little tents slung under the saddles, would stream away along the Cambridge road to their camping-site by the River Lea.”

  This collection was made into a Hollywood film in the early 1960s, under the title, The Victors, co-written and directed by the blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman. Until the outbreak of war, Baron’s writing was restricted to campaigning journalism for the Labour League of Youth, where he worked alongside Ted Willis, later Lord Willis, a prime mover in the establishment of Unity Theatre, and more famously the script-writer for Dixon of Dock Green and other stage and television plays. It is likely that this friendship stimulated Baron’s later, and highly successful, move into screenwriting and television drama.

  At the outbreak of war Baron joined the Pioneer Corps as a sapper, and was involved in several of the most ferocious battles involving British troops, in Sicily and at the Normandy landings. In a letter to me he once wrote that, “I always carried at least one small volume (Golden Treasury in Sicily, Oxford Book of French Verse in Normandy) and we were dished out Penguins from time to time. It was six years without books but full of experience.”

  The story of Baron’s entry into the world of the novel is best told by himself:

  I had no time to think about writing novels before July 1940, when I was called up. I was in the army until the spring of 1946. All the time, through those years, I was seeking experience. And knowing exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to write a novel about the war. When I came out of the army, I was interviewed by a committee. They said, “What do you want to do? And how can we help you?” And I said, “I want a typewriter.” There was a twelve month waiting list, yet they got me a portable typewriter straight away and I just went home. I was quite ill for the first two years after the war. I went back to live with my parents. And then, as I got better, I began to stay more and more with my friends. I fell in love with Paris. I’d gone over there for the first time.

  For two years, after the war, I lived in Hackney. I never got into real journalism. I was a member of the NUJ. Ted Willis, a man of many enterprises, started a theatre magazine which was very successful in its time, in the profession. He made me the editor. I used to work in the office until — at least — half-past eight at night. Then go home, have supper.

  After the war, the first novels to get published were all by officers. Either by officers or people who’d come through Penguin New Writing, which was a great influence at the time. Stories were by the kind of intellectuals to whom the army was an agony. They wrote about it as an awful experience, sleeping with thirty-five ruffians. The officers didn’t seem to have the Robert Graves touch. Graves, Sassoon, knew the Tommies were the men getting the rough end of the stick.

  I read those books and I thought that nobody was writing about the ordinary soldiers. Soldiers were the nation in arms, they were the whole people. They were the young men of the nation. Obviously, I was on the left then. My writing was also therapeutic. I wasn’t in the thick of the war all the time — but I was in some fairly big actions. Leading a troop on D-Day, all that. Towards the end of the war I had two fairly hectic concussions. I was pretty ill at this period. And it may be that writing this novel, From the City, From the Plough, really put me on my feet.

  It would be hard to over-estimate the impact of From the City, From the Plough, when it was published in 1948. Th
e novel was unanimously praised and sold over half of a million copies. Baron — who died in 1999 — was, as John Williams wrote in his obituary of the writer, “the greatest British novelist of the last war”. This first novel was also one of his finest, creating the basis of his subsequent literary reputation.

  Part II

  Nearly seventy years after the events it describes, From the City, From the Plough remains a gripping and poignant book, though there is a barely suppressed anger beneath the surface at the tragic enormity of everything to do with war. All of the author’s sympathies and affections are for the assorted anxious young men from all walks of life who make up 5th Battalion of the Wessex Regiment, training on the south coast and waiting for D-Day. Baron wrote sympathetically of the officers too, equally anxious and missing their families, though often being older they also waited for news of their own adult children fighting and sometimes dying in other theatres of war.

  Amongst the men are the Swedebashers (the farming lads from the West Country and rural Wales), the Doggy Boys (the city boys unendingly pre-occupied with dogracing and gambling), and various loners and misfits who, for the most part, treat each other with an embarrassed comradely respect due to others whose support in battle may well be a matter of life and death. In the course of the first half of the novel we get to know some of these men intimately, often through their quiet conversations late at night after lights out, as their reserve breaks down and they tentatively reach out to each other in fear of the horrors to come.

  The more these people are individualised — and Baron was adroit at swift and vivid characterisation — the greater is the shock when, within hours of landing on the Normandy beaches, most of them are dead. They have been drowned, blown to pieces by grenades, crushed by tanks, their limbless, eviscerated corpses left lying in the cornfields and orchards. The sheer horror of close quarters fighting and the constant need for terrifying sacrificial sorties to keep the enemy pinned down, is nowhere better described than in Baron’s tender, but heart-breaking novel. It is not too much to suggest that rather than simply expressing the democratic mood of the post-war social settlement, novels such as From the City, From the Plough, helped shape it. Baron’s quiet humanism and common decency became, for a brief period, the language of popular politics and everyday life. This was not to last.

  There were other novels and collections of short stories set in the Second World War to come, as well as historical novels, and novels about the Spanish Civil War, which Baron himself had volunteered to join in 1938. “I, like several of our friends in the Labour League of Youth, was very much involved with Spain. Virtually every boy in our crowd volunteered. But the people in charge of recruiting, the communists, sent us home.” It has been suggested that Baron was more useful politically in London, writing and campaigning. In another of his Second World War novels, With Hope, Farewell (1952), Baron told the story of a Jewish fighter pilot. On publication this caused some public disbelief, though as he told me, the Jewish comic writer Denis Norden had been a fighter pilot, and on several occasions Jewish flying officers with DFCs (Distinguished Flying Crosses) had turned up at Ridley Road after the war when there was a concerted campaign to put a stop to Mosley’s gatherings there. In general though, Baron eschewed the opportunity to put the specifically Jewish experience, either of London’s East End or of the war, in his writings. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, because he said that he “always had a personal rebellion against the idea of a separate Jewish identity. My father and both my grandfathers were free-thinkers and so am I.” Secondly, because he saw his respectable, free-thinking Hackney childhood as being beyond the classic Jewish East End, even though both parents had once belonged to it.

  In later life he changed his mind on this, publishing The Lowlife in 1963. This was the story of one of the last of the luftmenschen, the elderly Jewish gamblers and street philosophers, who once filled the pavements of Whitechapel, Mare Street and Stoke Newington of a summer’s evening to put the world to rights, exchange news of casual work in the rag trade, and discuss the evening’s dog-racing at Haringey, Clapton or Walthamstow. “I had to write a Jewish novel,” he told me. “I had to get something off my chest.”

  That something was not the common account of poverty and politics, or the religious impulse to radicalism, which characterised much Jewish writing about London, but was a celebration of a more tangential aspect of Jewish life, the bohemian, sometimes semicriminal sub-culture of the eponymous “lowlife”: a common Jewish expression for a gambler, workshy intellectual or bookworm, or habitué of basement jazz clubs and Soho drinking dens. In short, a latter-day boulevardier or flâneur. The novel also portrayed, with only a gentle hint of satirical intent, the security and satisfaction afforded the post-war generation of upwardly mobile Jews who were steadily moving northwards and westwards, via Stoke Newington, into suburbia and professional respectability. It is a great novel of cultural transition, capturing the pleasures and anxieties of a generation caught between two worlds, and of one particular character unwilling to adapt or change.

  It is also geographically specific. “Physically, The Lowlife is Foulden Road, completely. I’ve always had a great love for Foulden Road.” In this and other London novels, such as Rosie Hogarth (1951), the evocation of place is extraordinarily detailed and specific. More than anything, Baron was a London novelist when he was not writing about war. “I have always loved London. From childhood I used to roam about. Nobody was afraid of the traffic. I don’t know if Londoners still love London. A city should be accumulated memory.” Foulden Road is simply renamed Ingram’s Terrace, where Harryboy Boas rents a room, and sorties out daily to walk the streets, or call in at the barber’s shop and the bookmaker’s. Very occasionally he visits his sister and her family in Finchley where he is guaranteed a good meal as well as the inevitable lecture on getting a proper job and settling down. It is a warm, humorous novel, with a tragic back-story, but it succeeds overwhelmingly as a novel of a place and a way of life that was shortly to disappear. Three years later there was a sequel, Strip Jack Naked, rather less successful as far as the critics were concerned, though even then Baron had still not got Hackney out of his system. A couple of years later he returned to an area he knew well from his childhood, Hare Marsh, on the fringes of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. This was the setting for King Dido, published in 1969.

  Part III

  Today, just north of Bethnal Green Road, is to be found a series of monumental brick and terracotta tenements clustered round a Victorian bandstand in Arnold Circus. The pioneering Boundary Street Estate, designed by London County Council architects in an Arts & Crafts style, was erected on the rubble of the “Old Nichol”, once London’s most notorious slum. Of the appalling poverty which previously existed there was little doubt, and it came to fame as a result of Arthur Morrison’s 1896 bestseller, A Child of the Jago, a work which early on captured Baron’s literary imagination, and which he decided to emulate in spirit — but with a very different interpretation — towards the end of his fiction-writing career.

  Baron’s interest had been awakened in this particular part of east London from childhood. His mother had grown up in Hare Marsh, just off Cheshire Street. “I visited the area often to see my grandparents. And I think, from what I notice now, that fiction absorbs the power of legend and folklore. Local myths contributed so much to the formation of my novels. The final clash between the actual police inspector who ruled the area and a villain who thought he had the upper hand took place in Spitalfields. The story was told to me, as a very small boy, on the knee of my grandfather who lived in Spitalfields.”

  A Child of the Jago was a hard act to follow as it had then, and retains today, the aura of a fictional classic, representing a turning point in late Victorian literary realism. Published in the last years of the 19th century, it quickly became the definitive “slum novel”, and not without reason. It was deftly written, fast-paced, had a strong sense of geographical accuracy, employed an authe
ntic slang, and displayed strong enough roots in Dickensian melodrama to keep the reader gripped. However, even Morrison never regarded it as a novel of working class life, but more pointedly as a novel of semicriminal life located in a ghetto of its own making, lawless and defiant of all social and political conventions. Four years earlier, Israel Zangwill had written and published his collection of inter-linked short stories and vignettes of Jewish life in Whitechapel, Children of the Ghetto (1892), which had also enjoyed critical success and to some extent paved the way for Morrison’s novel.

  It was presumed in A Child of the Jago that there could exist a neighbourhood without any connections to the social and political changes unfolding in the wider world, and it was this insistence on the total moral isolation of the “Jago” that caused a number of critics to qualify their otherwise wholesale approval of the novel. There is no doubt, for example, that the narrative voice issuing from this netherworld is sympathetic to the then current eugenicist arguments, suggesting that it would be better if such desperate communities were wiped off the face of the map. In reality, more than 10,000 children from the district were transported to new lives in the colonies over the years. Did the pig make the sty, or did the sty make the pig? This formulation of the problem was posed by many social reformers in this period when attention was turned to the plight of the people inhabiting the worst of Britain’s city slums. On at least two occasions in Morrison’s novel ostensibly sympathetic characters — including Father Sturt, modelled on the real life High Anglican priest Father Jay of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch — describe the inhabitants of the Jago as breeding like rats — and with little more worth to the world.