King Dido Read online

  More recently the historian Sarah Wise has devoted a whole book to de-mythologising the story of the “Old Nichol”, the slum on which Morrison’s Jago was based. While admiring the pace and skill of the novel, Wise strongly objects to its “obnoxious moralising and sneering arch tone”; she also highlights, with much evidence, the fallacious basis for much of the story’s implied realism of detail. For example, while murder seems commonplace in the Jago, in reality there was only one murder in the Old Nichol between 1885 and 1895, the period when the novel was set. The Jago inhabitants are portrayed as illiterate bruisers prone to drunkenness and rape, whereas, according to Wise, the area was rich in clubs and societies, and many read the newspapers and commented upon political events as a matter of course. And where Morrison portrays the clergy as selfless paragons, Wise evidences on occasions a priestly predilection for incense, frocks, boxing and rough trade.

  King Dido, while exhibiting the same narrative energy as A Child of the Jago, nevertheless eschews the moralising and reform-mechanics of “the social novel”. It is a taut revenge tragedy about a man who tries to break free of his surroundings but is doomed by his own pride. It is as geographically specific as Morrison’s work, and though in King Dido Hare Marsh becomes Rabbit Marsh, nearly all the other streets mentioned in the novel — Brick Lane, Curtain Road, Kingsland Road, City Road, Old Street — are real. The novel is expertly plotted, full of twists and turns, and unexpected reversals and surprises. If it has a weakness, and this is one shared with Morrison and Dickens before him, it is that sometimes the attempt at transcribing “Cockney” speech comes across as owing more to the melodrama and the chapbook than the more heterogeneous babel of the living street.

  It is significant that at least one critic has mis-remembered the novel as being about Jewish gangs; it is not. The origins of the principal character, Dido Peach, and his family, are, it is suggested, connected to Romany antecedents. Dido has clear linguistic affinities with didicoi, a common slang word for Romany people; otherwise it was commonly a woman’s name with regal aspirations. This is an interesting device for suggesting the “otherness” of Dido Peach, which in different writers’ hands might have become an allusion to Jewish origins or suppressed homosexuality. Queen Dido ruled Carthage. King Dido rules a scrap of Bethnal Green.

  Dido Peach dominates the novel from start to finish. There is something of a Heathcliff figure about him: elemental, willing to pull the heavens down about him rather than compromise or seek redemption. In this violent, expressive novel, Baron created a complex, mysterious figure whom it is hard to like — perhaps impossible to like — but who represents some kind of vital force in the back streets of Bethnal Green, only matched, and in the end defeated, by the equally frightening Metropolitan Police Inspector Merry, his archetypal class nemesis.

  The reader is told many things about Dido that go towards explaining him, but never quite enough. He is described as strong-jawed, brutal in aspect, with the bearing of a “Teuton warrior”; he is always clean-shaven, always wears highly polished boots, and is as meticulous “as a Guardsman”. He is also, at the age of thirty, celibate, and unable to express his emotions in any way whatsoever: his feelings were “an enclosed violence” we learn early on. And it is this inflexibility that leads to his destruction. For, having “challenged power” in the neighbourhood when he fights and vanquishes one of the local villains, he inadvertently sets himself up as the target of both the criminals and the police. Never a man to walk away from a fight, his early innocent actions are interpreted by others as deliberately provocative, and so he enmeshes himself further in the tangled net of local criminal and corrupt police power. Lacking imagination, he cannot see the traps that are being laid for him. By contrast, Inspector Merry has “a chess-master’s grasp on life, quite naturally seeing several moves ahead, patiently sure of the larger results that would flow in future from presents acts apparently insignificant.”

  There are obvious literary precursors to this almost diabolical relationship between a relatively innocent, but wronged fugitive, and a tenacious detective, notably in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables where the escaped convict Jean Valjean is ruthlessly hunted down by Inspector Javert. Baron’s Inspector Merry is also within that tradition of the Victorian detective exemplified by Dickens’ Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, or the intrepid Mr Whicher most recently canonised in Kate Summerscale’s remarkable history. On several occasions Merry refers to himself as God, as far as the people in Rabbit Marsh are concerned, and even Dido is not surprised when at every turn Merry is ahead of him, for it “was taken for granted that Merry knew everything.” Not only is the detective all-seeing but he possesses an assured psychological instinct for human fallibility, and even when deliberately instigating the framing of a criminal, he “always brought his subject to the correct boiling point. He could not see that he falsified or invented anything. He believed that he was merely by informed experiment demonstrating the properties of his subject.”

  As with A Child of the Jago, it is the women who bear the brunt of poverty and violence. Dido’s mother is a pious Christian, a former domestic servant who has learned to speak the “prim English” required of such posts, and who labours to keep her three sons respectable, but hardly dare open her mouth unless spoken to. Her fears are that Dido will “inherit the sins of the father”, a common Victorian trope. It is revealed early on that her deceased husband had proved to be a violent and abusive drunk. Grace, the orphaned waitress who is raped by Dido and then quickly married by him, is an intriguing mixture of the naïve, the put upon, and latterly, towards the end of the novel, the desperately calculating.

  Dido is a lost man amongst women. He idealises his mother, but time and again betrays her; he is incapable of showing any affection for his young wife, and yet he would love to be a decent husband. More than anything, King Dido is an unusually penetrating exploration of a frustrated, violent and uncomprehending masculine world, in which women are cast as victims and drudges. Where there is poverty, the novel suggests, there can be little or no love or familial affection. In this brute world, sympathy for others is only a sign of weakness. By the end of the novel Dido is a man with “nothing laid on his conscience”, even though he is responsible for the deaths of four people, including a child, whose slum hovel he had deliberately set on fire as an act of revenge.

  There are, though, two moments in the novel in which Baron allows Dido to lift his eyes from his own existential predicament. The first is when, anxiously waiting in Tommy Long’s stables to settle scores with one of his worst enemies, he sees a Jewish sabbath meal being prepared in the Burskys’ kitchen. Despite the poverty of the family, on this and all other ritual occasions, the single room becomes a temple, where a clean table is laid, prayers are said, food is taken, and sanctuary and peace reign. It raises in Dido’s mind, “drifts of longing which he could not follow.” The second occasion is more commonplace though no less affecting, and occurs when he sees his newborn daughter, whose innocent gaze returns his and transfixes him: “pure life, unspoiled by experience.” Yet neither potentially transforming moment is powerful enough to deflect him from self-destruction, and King Dido ends with his sovereignty and kingdom in ruins.

  Ken Worpole

  Ken Worpole is a writer who has lived and worked in Hackney for most of his life. His study of early 20th century radical and working class fiction, Dockers and Detectives, is also published by Five Leaves.

  NOTES

  1 Nearly all biographical and autobiographical details in this introduction are taken from a long, tape-recorded interview I conducted with Alexander Baron in his home on 7th June 1983.

  2 The anglicisation of surnames was common, indeed encouraged, amongst Jewish immigrants. It is surprising that Baron retained his original surname throughout the war, as I always understood that Jews were encouraged, on enlisting, to register under an anglicised surname. This was what my own father-in-law told me had happened to him. The reasons for doing so were obviou
s.

  3 John Williams, Obituaries: Alexander Baron, The Guardian, 8 December 1999.

  4 I am grateful to Iain Sinclair for providing me with the transcript of an interview he made with Baron for a film called The Cardinal & The Corpse by Sinclair and Chris Petit. Hare Marsh was a street in Bethnal Green where Baron’s mother lived, just off Cheshire Street. It is still there today.

  5 Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, London, 2008.

  6 There is a good account of the Victorian admiration of the tenacious police detective in Kate Summerscale’s recent, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, London, 2008.

  Chapter One

  In June 1911, the Coronation ceremonies of King George the Fifth, who had been on the throne for a year, were celebrated throughout Britain by two days of public holiday. Stands to accommodate fifty thousand people were built on the routes of the two State processions. A hundred and twelve gated barriers were erected in the central areas of London to keep the crowds under control. At night the facades of public buildings were outlined against the darkness by coloured lights that streamed like a continuous firework display. Twelve thousand policemen were drafted into the West End to keep order.

  The new King, the Sailor King, was immensely popular, his trim beard and honest firm gaze looking out from so many cliff-high portraits in coloured lights, and from tens of thousands of photographs in windows, an exemplar of the national respectability, as was his sedate and stately Queen. Their Majesties had presided at a brilliant Derby. A great Pageant of London was in the offing. Two thousand five hundred beacons were to be lit from hilltop to hilltop throughout the country, as on that night over three hundred years before when the Spanish Armada had been sighted. Among the throng of great ones from abroad were fourteen Grand Dukes or Archdukes and fifteen Crown Princes; and in the central streets were to be seen a host of picturesque representatives of the worldwide Empire come to pay homage. How fitting it all seemed, the universal tribute to the Imperium on which the sun never set, the pride and high spirits of a nation breathing an air of power, prosperity and peace.

  “Rich and poor alike,” wrote the leader-writers; and truly the excitement was no less in the East End slums of London than in Mayfair and Westminster. The great breweries and emporia of the Whitechapel Road put up their chains of electric lights. The schoolchildren had a week’s holiday and swarmed shrieking and sportive in the streets. Families tramped westward to see the sights and others crammed the penny buses. Even the old folk in the workhouse were promised an egg for breakfast on Coronation Day, along with their usual cocoa, and such other wonders as jelly for tea, sweets, tobacco and entertainments.

  Rabbit Marsh, in Bethnal Green, acquired its name at the end of the seventeenth century, when it was a green and pleasant country place on the outskirts of London city. Artisans came here to picnic, practise their sports and trap the rabbits and other small game which abounded. Here, as in other parts of the East End, a cluster of Huguenot weavers had settled and had built for themselves a row of neat houses. The houses, surrounded by well-kept gardens and vegetable allotments, were three stories high, two floors for habitation and the top floors laid out in long weaving-rooms with big windows. Within a hundred years the industrial revolution and the growth of the London docks had turned the whole eastern quarter into an immense slum which had overrun Bethnal Green. Rabbit Marsh was swallowed up with the rest. Gone were the rabbits and the gardens. The houses were filthy, overcrowded tenements.

  In 1911, although the crowding was less abominable and the old, Hogarthian bedlam had vanished, the street was still a slum, the roadway narrow and cobbled, the houses black and decayed, many of the ground floors turned into miserable shops and workshops. Rabbit Marsh, God knows, had little enough to celebrate, and on Coronation Night one might have thought that it had turned its back on the national occasion. There were no fairy lamps. No bonfire blazed. Unlike more prosperous streets (for poverty has an infinitude of strata) there was no street party with benches set out laden with beer, lemonade and sandwiches, children scampering in excited swarms, families dancing to the jangle of barrel-organs. Such corporate efforts called for a level of community spirit that did not exist in Rabbit Marsh, where each family guarded its crusts and looked warily upon all the others.

  When darkness had thickened between its walls it lay almost silent, the occasional gas-lamp casting no more than an uncertain stain of yellow light upon the cobbles for a few yards, leaving a patch of blackness before the light of the next lamp was reached. Hardly a glimmer showed through the shutters over the ground-floor windows. From time to time a few dark-clad figures scurried (seen from above, like so many rats) down the street and vanished into a doorway.

  Yet in its own way Rabbit Marsh was celebrating. To the labourers and unemployed, who with their families formed the majority of the inhabitants, all festivities were consummated in one form: the booze-up. And on this night there was one window from which light streamed. It was at the end of the street, and it belonged to a public house; not one of those magnificent pubs of the main thoroughfares with resplendent panelling and counters, ornate glasswork, shining brass, blazing lights and music; but a dingy dram-shop, distinguished from its neighbours only by a surround of green tiles. This was “The Railway”, so called because of the railway line which ran behind high brick walls on an embankment behind Rabbit Marsh. This was the doorway which swallowed almost all the occasional groups that hurried down the street. From here came the vague, ugly bray of noise that alone marred the silence of the dark street.

  Number 34 Rabbit Marsh stood three doors from an alley which led to the railway. In this alley a steep flight of steps ascended to a bridge over the railway track. Another flight of steps at right-angles led down to a narrow street called Jenner Street which backed on to Rabbit Marsh and faced the railway.

  In the first-floor back room of Number 34, a man sat under the faintly snoring gas-mantle. He was dressed in his best clothes, a suit of thick navy serge; but he had as yet put no collar on and he was in his socks. One of his boots was in front of him, on a last fitted into a post which he held between his knees. With great concentration and deliberateness he was nailing iron rims on to the sole.

  He was thirty years old, short and square. His fair hair was cut to a stubble with a fringe in front. He was cleanshaven and his cheeks were shiny from the razor. His face was a frame of strong, brutal bones, so hard, the set of his jaw so aggressive, that it brought to mind Teuton warriors, shouts, swinging of axes, berserk; an impression contradicted by the grey eyes, their gaze level and patient. His name was Dido Peach.

  His two brothers stood by the door watching him, Chas, aged eighteen, and Shonny, fourteen years old. Neither of them spoke and there was no sound but the tap of the hammer and the throaty burning of the gaslight. Dido put down the hammer. He took the boot off the last and stooped to put it down next to the other. He pulled the boots on to his feet and started to lace them up.

  “I’m coming,” said Shonny. He and Chas were like two dolls of identical appearance but different sizes, both so different from their brother that they might have been of a different race; two young gypsies with cheeks like red apples, eyes like black berries and shining black hair. Both were dressed in their best clothes. Dido went on lacing his shoes as he looked up. He did not speak. There was nothing in his direct gaze but the same “No” that is presented by an obstructing wall.

  Chas said to his younger brother, “You stay with mum.”

  Shonny said, “I’m coming.”

  “You’re stayin’ ’ere.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  “You’ll be in the way. You got no more weight than a new chick.”

  Dido stamped his feet gently in the boots, then stood up. “You’re both staying.”

  Chas said, “You can’t tell me.” He looked into Dido’s level gaze. He said, “’E’s a big feller.”

  Dido turned to the door. Chas said, to his back, “�
�E could ’ave ’is mates with ’im.”

  Dido shook his head and opened the door. He beckoned them to go out and they obeyed. He took his cloth cap from a hook on the door, crossed the room, wrapped something in the cap and went after his brothers. The wooden staircase was uncovered and their footsteps echoed as they went down. Chas said, “I’m not ’avin’ it. Fancy a drink, I can go in the pub if I want.”

  “I’m not frightened,” Shonny said. “I’m coming.”

  Dido reached the ground-floor corridor and opened the door of the back kitchen. “Do as you’re told, both of you.”

  They followed him in. Their mother sat at the table by the back window. She looked up from the paper she had been reading. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles. She was small and pinched, and her fair hair had become a tarnished grey, worn in a drab bun. Her plain black dress made her look like a parson’s housekeeper rather than an inhabitant of Rabbit Marsh. She said, “You’re not going out?”

  Dido answered, “I am. Not them.”

  “We —” This came from Chas. He broke off as Dido, very close to him, turned on him. Dido’s face frightened him. Dido turned to Shonny. “You too. Not another word.”

  He jerked with his thumb towards the table. “Go on.” They hesitated. “Give ’em their cocoa,” he said to his mother. And to them, again, “Go on.”

  They moved like daunted animals towards the rear of the room. Dido, standing by the door which led into the shop, watched like their tamer.

  His mother said, “Dido, I don’t want you to go.”

  He said, “You read your Christian Weekly, mother.”

  “I’m telling you. I’m your mother.”

  “That’s right.” Now it was towards the shop that his thumb motioned. “And I know what he done to you. In there.”