There's No Home

by Alexander Baron

  In spite of this, what lends There’s No Home its power, its sympathy and its tragedy, is that Baron – and his proxy, Sergeant Craddock – understand and respond to the demands of the women. Looking back many years later, Baron wrote:

  The women of Sicily were to be the subject of my second novel. They lived a life of their own. They were more natural and knowing than English women. Those over forty all wore black. Those a few years older than that had faces as aged and seamed as my grandmother’s. The girls wore short print dresses faded by much washing. They walked clack-clack down the street on wooden sandals. They had a quick energy of movement and voice, emotions and tempers that flared easily, and a way with men that was at once wary and frank.

  Once, in some back-street hall, I sat squeezed on a bench among an audience of women who were all weeping loudly. The cause of their grief was the film we were watching, Wuthering Heights. They rocked in sympathy with Cathy Earnshaw. From all parts of the dark hall they cried, ‘Ah, la poverina, la poverina!’

  The contrast between the (mostly) emotionally volatile Sicilian women and the (mostly) phlegmatic British squaddies could easily be the stuff of stereotype, but in Baron’s hand it seems, instead, to be elemental. There’s a scene towards the end of the book when Graziella, in an attempt to bind her lover closer, prepares a huge feast for him and one of his friends (a meal, incidentally, that resembles very closely one described in Baron’s letters home). Instead of being pleased, however, Craddock is repulsed by the huge plates of oily and, in some instances, barely cooked food, and by the unabashed appetite of Graziella who gorges herself on her share, mopping up all that remains. With dismay he learns that she has walked fifteen kilometres into the countryside to her uncle’s farm to beg for food, leaving at sunrise and returning on blistered feet only an hour earlier; hence her hunger and the hastily prepared dishes. Craddock’s terse rejection of this sacrifice triggers in Graziella an overwhelming grief that both obscures her character – normally careful and dignified – and echoes the earlier theme of voraciousness.

  There was an empty second, then a sudden vomit of sobbing burst up from deep inside her. She wailed, in a cracked voice that forced itself through the thickness in her throat, ‘I wanted to please you.’

  On this occasion there is a rapprochement between the two of them, but we, the readers, know that it cannot last, that their narratives are doomed to diverge. And it is a measure of Baron’s talent that, in the end, we don’t know who to pity more – the men heading into the horror of war or the women left behind. Out of an instinctive empathy with women as well as men, Baron has fashioned a novel that is at once masculine and feminine, a war story and a love story, an affirmation of the human spirit, and a tragedy: in short, a book about the whole of human life.

  The wide-ranging scope of There’s No Home made it clear that Alexander Baron was not simply a war novelist. His next novel, Rosie Hogarth, was set in peacetime, in Islington, and told the story of a man returning from war to find his world much changed. It was the first of what have become known as his London novels. His 1952 novel, With Hope Farewell, was about a Jewish Londoner; set between 1928 and 1948, the war inevitably played a part in it. And a year later, he went back to the war in earnest for a third and last time with The Human Kind, a wonderfully well-wrought set of linked, evidently autobiographical vignettes. A decade later it would be filmed by Carl Foreman as The Victors. However, in the film the soldiers are American, rather than British, and Baron himself was most unhappy with the result.

  All of his early novels sold well. The three war books, in particular, were ideally suited to the democratic new wave of British paperback publishing, and became key Pan Books titles of the time. But Baron was never comfortable with literary celebrity. He used to tell the tale, with some relish, of how his hardcover publisher, Jonathan Cape, decided to throw a party for him in his grand Bedford Square offices. Taking the bus in from Hackney, he was overcome by nerves and stopped off at King’s Cross for a quick shot of Dutch courage. Three more shots later he arrived outside the Cape offices, saw the party in full swing through the windows of the first floor, promptly turned round, and went home.

  Throughout the 1950s Baron continued to put out first-class work. Following The Human Kind he drew a line under the war and thoroughly enjoyed himself with a couple of historical novels: The Golden Princess and Queen Of The East. After these technicolor entertainments Baron returned closer to home for the most cultish of his novels, The Lowlife, a beautifully observed and understated study of an East End Jewish gambler that deals subtly with the consuming guilt of those Jews who took no part in the war. It’s also one of the first British novels to include as characters members of the new wave of Caribbean immigrants. On a grander scale was King Dido, an historical epic about the Jewish gangs who held sway in the East End in the years before Baron’s birth, and one of his own favourites.

  Baron then began a parallel career as a scriptwriter, one that was ultimately to take over from his novel writing. His first successes were the East End anarchist drama The Siege Of Sidney Street and the western Robbery Under Arms. In the 1960s, he became increasingly involved with TV. He was a regular writer on Play For Today, wrote mainstream dramas like Poldark and, in latter years, a number of classic adaptations for the BBC – Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair among them. Appropriately enough, perhaps the best loved of them was his 1981 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility.

  Baron’s novels continued to appear until the early 1970s, most of them set in the past. His last published novel, Franco Is Dying, returned to the present with the story of an ageing ex-Communist who revisits the battleground of the Spanish Civil War at the time of Franco’s long-drawn-out death.

  It is Baron’s darkest work, a requiem for the years of grand ideals and untold deaths. He also wrote an unpublished sequel and an autobiography, and when I first met him in the 1990s, to interview him for a national paper, he was working on a history of communism. However, it is the war trilogy for which he will ultimately be remembered: three books offering proof positive that there need be no contradiction between the serious and the popular.

  Meeting Baron at his home in Temple Fortune, north London, I encountered a shy, courteous man, though one with a dry wit and a piercing intelligence. He was a devoted husband and father, who maintained a keen interest in literature, politics and the arts. At the time there was a revival of interest in his work: he was pleased, if not a little bemused, to be included in Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s eccentric East End TV film The Cardinal And The Corpse, alongside such other fine London writers as Derek Raymond and Emmanuel Litvinoff. He was not, however, keen to be pigeonholed as any kind of cult writer. He had spent long enough in a very large cult and had little enthusiasm for new ones. Crucially, though – and unlike many former Communists – he had never drifted to the right. Although his experience of the war robbed him of his initial zeal, it also instilled in him a profound belief in the essential decency of ordinary people. He developed a tolerance for the weaknesses of both men and women trapped in difficult circumstances, and a monumental suspicion of those in power touting big ideas.

  Gradually, over the next few years, I became friends with Baron and came to know the warmth and kindness of this very private man. He took a gratifying interest in my writing and left me with the abiding lesson that a writing life is about the work and not the surrounding flim flam. Baron died of cancer in 1999. I had seen him just a few weeks earlier and he’d seemed in fine form. The disease took him unnervingly quickly, though at least he avoided prolonged suffering.

  The following week I wrote an obituary for The Guardian. I concluded with a sentence I see no reason to change: ‘His work is characterised by a humanity that deserves to endure.’ And that humanity is never more apparent than in this, his second novel, There’s No Home.

  Copyright

  THERE’S NO HOME by ALEXANDER BARON

  Published in print and as an ebook in 2011 by<
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  Sort Of Books

  PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL

  www.sortof.co.uk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Copyright © Alexander Baron 1950

  First published by Jonathan Cape UK. All rights reserved.

  Introduction © John L. Williams 2011

  All photos © Nicholas Baron 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  Typeset in Sabon (9.7/14.2) to a design by Henry Iles

  286pp

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  print ISBN 978–0–95630–860–3

  ebook ISBN 978–1–908745–04–0