The autobiography covers his early life as a working class boy from a non-practising Jewish immigrant family in Hackney up to the sale of his first novel. One note describes the sounds of East London between the wars:
“‘Won’t you buy my pretty flowers?’, ‘I’ve been 7 years in prison…’. Other ballads — Victorian London, Dickens’ London — continued until the war scattered a way of life in 1939.” (p. 344)
It’s not the only reference to Dickens. For example, while his father read science books by such authors as James Jeans, Baron and his mum would visit the library on Northwold Road each week “with oilskin shopping bags”, where Baron read huge, bound volumes of adventure stories by GA Henty and Percy Westerman before progressing to PG Wodehouse’s PSmith.
“about one of the vast army of clerks which still existed, now swelled by women typists, who were the cleverer children of working-class families which were proud of their status (escaped!) Although almost all worked for wretched wages, often in Dickensian offices.” (p. 349)
Baron read some Dickens at this point, citing Barnaby Rudge and,
“its effect on me as a small boy — lurid, a phantasmagoria, those Gordon Riots — the unspeakable ecstasy of reading books you cannot understand when you are small” (p. 347),
He also speaks of the “effect on me” of The Pickwick Papers, while David Copperfield was a formative read later, while he was stationed in Southampton as a soldier during the war. I’m fascinated by all this because he later dramatised Oliver Twist for the BBC, broadcast in 12 episodes in 1985. The novel was first published in 1838 but I wonder how much Baron and producer Terrance Dicks (born in East Ham, 1935) were conjuring the London of a hundred years later; the one they’d both known as children.
As with Terrance, cinema was another key influence on Baron — he explains, pp. p. 347-48, how it shaped the structure of his writing. But his literary interests had another powerful consequence: it was on a trip to a library while still at school that he was first enthralled by the communists. Though he didn’t join the Community Party officially at that point— they thought it better he didn’t so he could infiltrate the Labour youth movement instead — he was a keen adherent. They even sent this schoolboy revolutionary on an errand to France.
“It was of all days Yom Kippur, the supreme Jewish fast. My parents had taken my sister to the East End to visit my grandparents. I left a note on the kitchen table, ‘Gone to Paris. Back Monday.’ The reader would have to understand the nature of the times, the moeurs of a working-class Jewish family and the particular character of my parents to appreciate what a bombshell that was going to be for them, how incredulous they would be.” (p. 168).
When he returned, all that his parents asked of him was whether he had a nice time (p. 170).
There’s something a bit Boy’s Own adventure about much of this stuff, with brassneck and dodges and pluck — such as his role in the Labour League of Youth’s weekly street-corner meetings.
“I was too shy to speak at these, but I was given the job of heckling our own speakers to draw a crowd, which I enjoyed.” (p. 147)
It’s in the mode too, I think, of Kipling’s schoolboy stories, Stalky & Co, which Baron dramatised for the BBC, the first time he worked with Terrance Dicks.
On another occasion, Baron explains how one night he escaped a gang of young Fascists keen to beat him up by running on to Hampstead Heath then lying down with his arms around himself, so that he resembled one of the other copulating couples (p. 156). It’s another funny dodge — but a bit less heroic than what happens in The Lowlife, where the main character evades his pursuers thanks to a native grasp of London buses and trains, then beats them up single-handed.
Things become more serious as the war approaches. Baron speaks of his own horror at having to recruit men to fight in the Spanish Civil War — and his relief that he never succeeded. At the same time, he says how easily he might have done in Spain what a contemporary did, working for the Republican Army’s secret police (Servicio de Informaction Militar), befriending young soldiers and then reporting those who criticised the party. He cites another case, another friend, who was accused of writing “calumnious letters” home and seems to have been shot.
“I am an old man now but I am ridden by the memory of these distant events, of him and of Monty, the one murdered by the secret police, the other in their ranks, both brave, honourable in intent and so alike; and I am all the more fervently relieved that I did not send Bill Featherstone or anyone else to fight where I did not go myself.” (p. 181)
In all this and what follows, Baron doesn’t mention Malcolm Hulke, who must have been in and out of the King Street HQ of the Communist Party around the same time, and who he might just have bumped into after the war when they both worked in management at the Unity Theatre. Baron says that while he was at Unity,
“we wiped out a large and chronic debt, which must have been a feat unique both among fringe theatres and organisations of the left.” (p. 332)
In part, this organisation was because Baron avoided the “tantrums and cliques” of the actors; as with his reticence at public speaking cited before, he seems to have been a bit quiet and shy.
“My own nature kept me apart from a crowd who were serious in their intentions but involved with all the scattiness and temperamental quirks that are to be found in theatricals.” (Ibid.)
There’s also the suggestion that he’d not been well after the war, suffering from some kind of PTSD. The war certainly had a profound effect on him, not least in undermining his communist zeal. There was no single cause but that loss of faith went in tandem with his new-found interest in writing. Soon after the war, he had a chance meeting with his old friend Ted Willis — who had also left the party to become a writer. Baron tells us that,
“This was a drastic step for a member of the inner core [of the party], since writing was regarded at King Street as a trifling and contemptible occupation.” (p. 331).
They referred to Ted as a “deserter”. Later, Baron explains why it was thought so contemptible, quoting what he was told by his former mentor John Gollan:
“What does a writer do, even a good writer, even one of ours? He describes the world. You are one of the people who have to change it. And one day to run it.” (p. 336)
I wonder how convincing Baron found this? Earlier, he speaks of the,
“Communist ability to show a fair face in any company, display charm, patience, reasonableness and willingness to listen and a persuasiveness that provide irresistible to many.” (p. 208)
If his first novel had not been a success, how easily might he have been drawn back into the fold?
For all he was compelled to write a novel based on his own wartime experience, Baron put it away in a drawer and says he later showed it to Ted Willis unwillingly. It was Willis and his wife who submitted it to Jonathan Cape, and Cape’s wife who came up with the title under which it was published.
Baron tells us that he thinks much of history is accidental like this — hence the title of this autobiography. But I think something else is going on: this is a bildungsroman, showing the development of a man’s character through his experience and choices. When he bumps into Ted Willis after the war, its because Baron has chosen to buy a typewriter — that choice surely compelled the conversation that followed. Willis, facing the opprobrium of his former comrades, must have been glad to find in Baron a fellow scribe. And what Baron went on to write was infused with all the things he’d soaked up in Dickens and cinema and the life he’d lived.
His escape was no accident at all.
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