Alexander Baron

KING DIDO . . . Past times, old crimes

Alexander Baron (1917 – 1999) is a writer who has returned to the consciousness of the reading public in recent times because the Imperial War Museum have republished his two classic WW2 novels From The City, From The Plough, There’s No Home, and the third in the trilogy, the collection of short stories The Human KInd. His compassion and his acute awareness of the highs and lows of men and women at war have embedded the trilogy into the culture of WW2, just as the poems of Owen, Sassoon and Gurney are inescapably linked with The Great War. King Dido (1969) is a book of a very different kind.

We are in the East End of London, and it is the summer of 1911, not long after the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. Dido is, by trade, a dock worker but, after a violent encounter with the district’s 1911 version of the Krays, he takes over the streets and becomes a kind of Reg. Not Ron, because Dido is not a psychopath, but the ‘tributes’ he collects make him a decent living. After a turbulent back alley encounter with a young waitress called Grace, Dido does ‘right thing’ and marries her. They live in redecorated rooms above the rag recovery business Dido’s mother runs. There has been a trend in crime fiction in recent years, which I call ‘anxiety porn’, but it is nothing new. More politely, these are known as ‘domestic thrillers.’ Mostly, they describe perfectly ordinary people whose lives gradually disintegrate, not through epic events, but because normal social tensions, misunderstandings, misplaced ambitions and tricks of fate turn their lives upside down. So it is here. Grace, blissfully unaware of how Dido earns his money, tries to put her feet on the next series of rungs in the ladder that leads to gentrification. However, the family’s journey on the board game of life becomes, via the snakes, a downward one, and it is a painful descent.

Baron grew up as Joseph Alexander Bernstein in Hackney, but he was actually born In Maidenhead, his mother having been evacuated there as a result of Zeppelin raids on London. His father was a master furrier, so it is clear that there is nothing autobiographical about his characterisation of Dido Peach. What is evident in the book is that Baron was aware of the existence of subtle strata within the East End poor. By 1911 the Huguenots had long since moved away, leaving such places as Christ Church Spitalfields and the elegant houses in Fournier Street as their memorials. There remained what could be called the ‘dirt’ poor, and then the ‘genteel’ poor – such as Mrs Peach and her family. What doesn’t feature in the novel, but was exactly contemporaneous, was the upsurge in activity by Eastern European activists, mostly exiles from Russia. The Houndsditch Murders and the resultant Siege of Sidney Street was that same year, while The Tottenham Outrage had been two years earlier. Both events remain writ large in East End history.

In the end, Dido’s downfall is a Hardy-esque orchestration of poor decisions, coincidence and the malice of others. He is denied the dramatic end given to Michael Henchard, Jude Fawley and – of course – Tess. Instead he is doomed – like Clym Yeobright – to still live in the world in which he once stood tall, but bowed and crippled now, alone except for the memories of the people and times he has lost. Baron’s prose here, just as in his better known books, is vivid, clear and full of insights.

June 16, 2025 0

THE HUMAN KIND . . . Between the covers

This is the third novel in Alexander Baron’s WW2 trilogy, and it is rather different to the previous books, although there are obvious links. From The City, From The Plough tells the story of a group of soldiers preparing for, and then taking part in, the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while in There’s No Home the focus is on just a few weeks where an army company takes up residence in the Sicilian town of Catania in 1943. The titles are hyperlinked to my reviews of the novels.

The Human Kind is a sequence of short stories or vignettes, presented as being mainly autobiographical, and they reflect a wide variety of incidents and experiences involving men at arms. I use that phrase intentionally. I an surely not the first person to compare Baron’s trilogy with Evelyn Waugh’s magisterial Sword of Honour trilogy, which comprised Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. There are stark differences, obviously, in that Waugh’s novels saw soldiering through the eyes of middle class officers. The central character, Guy Crouchback, is from a minor-aristocratic Roman Catholic family, while Baron was a Jewish man from London’s East End. What connects the two trilogies, however, is keen social observation, repeated ironies of circumstance and – most importantly – the fact that for many men the war and military life became central to their very being, despite the obvious hazards and unpleasantness. Baron – a communist in his youth – himself probably despised Waugh’s upper-middle-class reactionary views but he admired his writing, saying it was, “a magnificent illumination of a whole complex of human problems.”

Each of the stories except one, which I will return to, references the military campaigns – Italy, Normandy and Belgium – described in the earlier books. The one that affected me most was Mrs Grocott’s Boy. Raymond Grocott comes from The Potteries, where he lives with his widowed mother. He is, to use an old word, gormless. Nowadays, I suppose, he would have been long since diagnosed with ‘special needs’, and he has failed the basic intelligence test required to be admitted to the army. Having persuaded those in authority to let him join, he takes part in the invasion of Sicily. Contracting malaria, he is invalided out, but is desperate to rejoin his unit which, with some degree of innate cunning, he does. In a stroke of irony that Thomas Hardy would have loved, his company is selected to be shipped home to prepare for the Normandy landings. Out of a misplaced sense of kindness, Raymond’s fellow soldiers cover for him and try to keep him on the straight and narrow paths but, as the landing craft approaches the French beach it finally dawns on him that he could be killed, and he pleads to be sent to the rear for medical attention. It is too late. Somehow, he survives, having been driven on by an NCO. But when what remains of the platoon finally bivouacs in a relatively safe place, he is handed a written order transferring him away from danger and into the care of the medics. As he trudges away, he has a solitary flash of self awareness and he curses the well-meaning men who have delivered him to a place of shame. His parting words to his colleagues are, “I hope you die. I hope you all die.”

There is black humour in some of the stories, as well as a dark awareness of sexuality. In Chicolino, the soldiers in Baron’s platoon ‘adopt’ a homeless Sicilian boy, just into his teens. They share rations with him and treat him kindly, but are shocked to the core when he assumes that they will want to have sex with him in return for their kindness. He would have been quite happy to oblige, and is hurt and humiliated by their rejection. In The Indian, Baron retells the story from There’s No Home of how Sergeant Craddock comes to sleep with the beautiful Graziela. It is the appearance of a drunk but harmless Indian soldier that brings them into each other’s arms. Readers who, like me, are long in the tooth, will remember watching a 1963 movie called The Victors, directed by Carl Foreman. Alexander Baron was the screenwriter, and the story Everybody Loves a Dog, which relates the unfortunate consequences of a friendless and inarticulate Yorkshire soldier befriending a stray dog, was one of many memorable scenes in the film.

One of Baron’s colleagues is an intelligent and educated man called Frank Chase. In The Venus Bar, we read of his liaison with a beautiful but ruthless Ostend brothel owner. but in Victory Night, the war has taken its toll and Chase is shipped home, psychologically broken. He is hospitalised, but can make no sense of his situation.

“He was too bewildered to fight against his loneliness. He did not visit London. It was only to the immediate past, to us, that his memory was able to reach. Peace time had passed out of his life. He was afraid to go to London in search of the ends of long-broken threads. He wondered about in a days, hardly aware of anything that happened except the arrival of letters from his old comrades. He hugged these to him, for they were the raw material of dreams, daydreams that burst inside him like magnesium flares, illuminating with brief, ghostly intensity the supreme experiences he had to live through.”

When victory in Europe is finally declared, Chase is horrified by the drunken celebrations in an English village.

“The faces streamed past him, faces for a Bruegel, red and ugly with drink, the fat faces of alewives glistening with the distant firelight, the suet- lump faces of men who had not been judged young or intelligent enough to die, the vacuous whore-faces, pathetically greedy for pleasure, of little village girls. They squealed and shrieked, filled the night with graceless laughter, bawled idiot songs, coughed, screamed, yelled and belched.”

There are twenty five stories in all in The Human Kind, and all but two are reflections on Baron’s war service. The last one, An Epilogue, is a brief story of something that happened in the Korean War, by which time Baron had been in ‘civvy street’ for some time, but Strangers To Death, the first tale in the book, recounts an incident from Baron’s childhood. He says he was sixteen at the time, so this would place the events in the summer of 1933. He is the proud owner of a new sports bicycle, and he joins a group of local youngsters who cycle out from their East End homes to nearby countryside to camp on the banks of the River Lea. Here, they swim, smoke, cook meals and relish the fresh air, but when one of their number is trapped in the silk-weed growing from the river bed, and drowns, the atmosphere becomes sombre. It was probably Baron’s first intimate encounter with death, but with the insouciance of youth, he and his mates are soon back in the river, daring each other to play tug-of-war with the silk-weed and trying to get as close to the treacherous currents of a weir as they dare. On the way home, Baron comes even closer to death when, his spectacles blurred by rain, he collides with a tram. Miraculously, he is thrown clear, unharmed apart from a graze, and even his precious ‘Silver Wing’ bicycle is undamaged. He would of course, come to stare death in the face all too frequently just ten years later.

It would be inaccurate to say that Baron is a ‘forgotten’ writer, but his name would not be included in most people’s list of great English writers of the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of his other novels, often set in the Jewish London of his youth, are still in print, but his take on what war does to men, women and children is astonishing. His compassion, empathy and simple understanding of humanity should put his books up there with the best contemporary accounts of a disastrous – but necessary – conflict. The Human Kind is republished by The Imperial War Museums,and is available now.

April 24, 2024 1

THERE’S NO HOME . . . Between the covers

Sicily, 1943. A company of British soldiers, serving with the Eighth Army, has arrived in Catania, an ancient port that sits at the foot of Mt Etna. A full size army company would have numbered around 150 men, but this unit is much reduced in size. Although they have experienced battle in North Africa, by the time they get to Sicily, the war has moved on, as the Germans are engaged in a fighting retreat towards the Straits of Messina, where they will hope to cross – with as many men and as much materiel as possible – to the mainland. The Italian army is no longer a viable force,and it would officially surrender in September.

In Alexander Baron’s book – part of a trilogy based on his own war service – the British soldiers are not engaged directly with the enemy. Instead, they arrive in Catania and are assigned billets in the Via Martiri. For both themselves and the residents, it is something of a shock:

“They studied each other with a hostile curiosity. Each group looked the same to the other: filthy, exhausted, more animal than human, the soldiers swaying over their rifles, the civilians at bay before their houses. Each was looking at ‘the enemy’. There across the road (on which ever side one stood)were the people responsible for these last three weeks of suffering. The roadway was wide-miles wide, it seemed at this moment-sunlit and empty. A baby squalled and the children began to creep out from amongst their elders. The people looked at their children with a dullness that was worse than a visible agony. The distress that came into the soldiers eyes was the first human feeling they had betrayed since their arrival. The children all had the same appearance; heads that seemed monstrous on their shrunken bodies; big, appealing eyes; twisted, scabby little legs; and flesh whose colour, beneath the dirt, was a deathly toadstool whiteness.”

As in most of the rest of Catania, there are (with a couple of exceptions) no men in the Via Martiri. All are gone for soldiers. Many are now dead, and the rest are prisoners of the Allies. This creates an unusual problem for the officer in command of the company, Captain Rumbold. He is puzzled when, after a few days, many of his men are unofficially ‘adopted by various women in the street. Publicly, he says nothing, but he views his clerk as something of a confessor: To Piggott, however, who was his confidant as well as his clerk, he was indignantly eloquent.

“Would you have believed it? Chaps out of decent homes! You’d have thought wild horses wouldn’t have dragged them into the kind of pigsties that these people live in. Dark, dirty, smelly, bloody holes – that’s all they are – holes in the wall-full of flies and bugs and fleas. People in rags, scratching themselves day and night, look as if they’ve never had a bath in their lives! I can’t imagine what’s got into the chaps.”

One such soldier is Sergeant Joe Craddock. He has a wife and young child at home but, as the book’s title ominously suggests, ‘home’ has become a foreign concept for many men. They are where they are, with little or no expectation of being reconciled with their families. All they can do is adapt to what the ‘here and now’ offers. In Craddock’s case this takes the shape of a beautiful woman called Graziella. Her husband has gone away to fight, and she has no idea if he is living or dead. After a brief tussle with her conscience, she enthusiastically embraces – in every sense of the word – what Craddock has to offer.

Many of the company have been ‘adopted’ by women in the street. It is a symbiotic process; the men have their washing done, get a break from the abrasive all male life in the billet; not all of the men are claiming conjugal rights, but they can provide basic army rations, and their pay can buy luxuries from the shops and market stalls gradually re-opening after the fighting which caused the departure of the Germans. Inevitably the orders eventually come for the company to move out, and for Graziella and Craddock this is traumatic. She begs him to stay, but the thought of desertion appalls him.

As William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is all hell, boys”, but despite the privations and the real chance of serious injury or death, for many men, the army provides a structure, imposes boundaries, and obviates the need to make decisions or wrestle with moral problems. As the weeks of casual life end and the company prepares to move on, the army reasserts itself:

“Pride returned at the sight of the company forming up, the shuffling ranks closing into a neat, solid block of khaki that filled the whole length of the street; the straight lines of helmets swathed in dun sacking, the straight lines of rifles, the straight lines of packs, the straight lines of red faces. It was a single organism into which all individualities and all worries vanished, self sufficient and aloof from the untidy throng of civilians who surged around it as a tall ship is from the sea through which it cleaves.”

Baron’s writing is immensely powerful, and his understanding of fighting men is deep and thorough. In another time and place, he might have been a poet. As the company boards the train taking them who knows where, it is the end of something for the people of the Via Martiri.

“The train gathered speed and passed round the bend. Now there was only the blank end of the rear truck. Now it was gone. The sun’s glare, pitiless, blanched the blue sky, glittered on the deep blue sea, reflected, dazzling, from the walls of the tumbled white houses and drew an oven heat from the bleached pavements. The last tremor died from the rails. Now there was no sound in the blinding white sunlight; no sound but the weeping of women.”

First published in 1950, There’s No Home is republished by The Imperial War Museums, and is available now. For other titles in this superb series, click the link below.

April 19, 2024 1

THE WARTIME POSTMAN DELIVERS . . .

In September 2019, to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, IWM will launch a wonderful new series with four novels from their archives all set during the Second World War – Imperial War Museums Wartime Classics.

Originally published to considerable acclaim, these titles were written either during or just after the Second World War and are currently out of print. Each novel is written directly from the author’s own experience and takes the reader right into the heart of the conflict. They all capture the awful absurdity of war and the trauma and chaos of battle as well as some of the fierce loyalties and black humour that can emerge in extraordinary circumstances. Living through a time of great upheaval, as we are today, each wartime story brings the reality of war alive in a vivid and profoundly moving way and is a timely reminder of what the previous generations experienced.

Alan Jeffreys, (Senior Curator, Second World War, Imperial War Museums) searched the IWM library collection to come up with these four launch titles, all of which deserve a new and wider audience. He has written an introduction to each novel that sets them in context and gives the wider historical background and says:

“Researching the Wartime Classics has been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on in my years at IWM. It’s been very exciting rediscovering these fantastic novels and helping to bring them to the wider readership they so deserve”.

Each story reflects the IWM remit to tell the stories of those who experienced conflict first hand. Each author has a fascinating back story. These are Second World War novels about the truth of war written by those who were actually there.

FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH by Alexander Baron

This is a vivid and moving account of preparations for D- Day and the advance into Normandy. Published in the 75th anniversary year of the D-Day landings, this is based on the author’s first-hand experience of D-Day and has been described by Antony Beevor as:

“undoubtedly one of the very greatest British novels of the Second World War.”

Alexander Baron was a widely acclaimed author and screenwriter and his London novels have a wide following. This was his first novel.

TRIAL BY BATTLE by David Piper

This quietly shattering and searingly authentic depiction of the claustrophobia of jungle warfare in Malaya was described by William Boyd as:

“A tremendous rediscovery of a brilliant novel. Extremely well-written, its effects are both sophisticated and visceral.”

VS Naipaul described the novel as:

“one of the most absorbing and painful books about jungle warfare that I have read”

David Piper was best known as director of the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The novel is based on his time serving with the Indian Army in Malaya where he was captured by the Japanese and spent three years as a POW. His son, Tom Piper, was the designer of the hugely successful Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation of ceramic poppies at the Tower of London to commemorate the First World War Centenary.

EIGHT HOURS FROM ENGLAND by Anthony Quayle

Anthony Quayle was a renowned Shakespearean actor, director and film star and this is his candid account of SOE operations in occupied Europe. Historian and journalist Andrew Roberts said:

“As well as being one of our greatest actors, Anthony Quayle was an intrepid war hero and his autobiographical novel is one of the greatest adventure stories of the Second World War. Beautifully written and full of pathos and authenticity, it brings alive the terrible moral decisions that have to be taken by soldiers under unimaginable pressures in wartime.”

PLENTY UNDER THE COUNTER by Kathleen Hewitt

This murder mystery about opportunism and the black market is set against the backdrop of London during the Blitz.

‘With a dead body on the first page and a debonair RAF pilot as the sleuth, this stylish whodunit takes you straight back to Blitzed London and murder most foul. Several plausible suspects, a femme fatale, witty dialogue, memorable scenes and unexpected twists – it boasts everything a great whodunit should have, and more.“

Kathleen Hewitt was a British author and playwright who wrote more than 20 novels in her lifetime. She was part of an artistic set in 1930’s London which included Olga Lehman and the poet Roy Campbell.

A full review of each novel will appear on the Fully Booked site in September.