Alexander Baron was the greatest British novelist of the Second World War. That the three books in which he covered the conflict –  There’s No Home; From The City, From The Plough and The Human Kind – are not yet established classics is an extraordinary injustice. After all, these were enormously popular books when they first appeared between 1948 and 1953. Is it cynical to suspect that their subsequent disappearance from view has something to do with Baron having been a humble infantryman, rather than a member of the officer classes, like the poets of World War One?  One would like to hope not, but…

Baron was certainly well placed to write about the war. He fought in two of its bloodiest campaigns, the invasion of Sicily in 1943, as a member of Montgomery’s Eighth Army, and the D-Day landings of 1944. He was there when the bullets were flying and the landmines exploding. He suffered both physically and, afterwards, mentally. He started writing about the war as a form of therapy, to make sense of the horror in which he and so many others had been immersed. He wanted, above all, to make sure that no one forgot that this was a war that had been fought and won by the common man.

The first of Baron’s war novels From The City, From The Plough appeared in 1948 and was an immediate hit: the leading literary critic of the time, VS Pritchett, called it ‘the only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me’. It reminded the reader that the most dramatic events of the war were fought not by a warrior elite but by ordinary working-class men, most of whom would have been happier at the dog track or on the farm than on the battlefield.  Instead, these reluctant soldiers were plunged into a conflict that was all too likely to kill them, but one that they faced with the traditional weapons of the British working class: black humour and strong tea.

There’s No Home, the follow-up, was published in 1950 and it’s a wonderful example of a writer sidestepping the reader’s expectations. This is a war novel all right, but it’s one that contains no scenes of armed combat. This despite the fact that it’s set in Sicily, where Baron had been in the thick of bloody battle, clearing mines off the beaches while under constant fire from the Germans. But rather than reprise the action scenes of  From The City, From The Plough, Baron decided to write about one of the war’s lulls, the events that immediately followed the capture of Sicily, when his regiment spent a couple of months garrisoned in the town of Catania, waiting to be sent into battle on the Italian mainland.

Remarkably, for what was ostensibly a war novel, Baron chose to make his focus the fortunes of women during the conflict. More remarkably still, for a book written by a British infantryman who never moved past the rank of corporal, this decision had its roots in his reading of Friedrich Engels, whom he had read while doing his military training in 1940.

But then, Alexander Baron was no ordinary infantryman. By the time he joined up in 1940, he was twenty-two years old and had spent all his adult life to date in the service of the Communist party. Born Joseph Alexander Bernstein, he grew up in a secular Jewish family in East London, becoming a teenager just as Mosley’s blackshirts were starting to mobilise in the area. Like many others of his generation, he was politically radicalised by this experience and joined forces with the most vocal opponents of fascism in the East End, the Communist Party. Although he was never a card-carrying party member, he publicly positioned himself on the left wing of the Labour Party

Obviously bright and able, Baron was soon singled out for advancement by the Party. He was dissuaded from going to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the grounds that he was too valuable to risk. By 1939 he was the editor of the party’s youth magazine, Challenge. That was the year that war broke out; it was also the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact, which meant that Baron was obliged to go from passionately advocating war against the fascist menace to passionately advocating that Britain stay out of the war.

The situation was a shameful nonsense that gradually began to undermine the young firebrand’s political commitment. In 1940, he received his call-up to the army and found himself thrilled at the prospect (he had in fact already attempted to join the RAF but had been instantly rejected when the recruiter saw his glasses). At first, he attempted to rationalise his excitement by persuading himself that he was training for the communist revolution that was to come; and as it turned out, in 1941 with the German invasion of Russia, he was indeed able to fight in good conscience as both an Englishman and a communist.

Baron’s reading matter, as he went through his army training as a member of the Pioneer Corps, included Engels’ ‘The Origin Of The Family’. In his (as yet unpublished) memoir, Chapters Of Accidents, he comments:

I was struck by what this book had to say about the position of women in society. I had formed a generally high opinion of the men around me; perhaps the soldiers and the civilians I met in different countries during the war were more congenial to me than the “people of a new type” among whom I had felt so isolated during my last year with the party. But my juvenile and puritan soul was grieved at the to-me insulting way in which they spoke about women. I bought a school exercise book and wrote by hand a pamphlet on the Woman Question. I started by asking if it was right to refer to a woman as a piece of cunt. Men who had read it accosted me to talk about it. Some came into my room to have an argument; all these discussions were serious.

For the first year of Baron’s military training he and his fellow members of the Pioneer Corps were preparing for a German invasion. For Baron this period was an opportunity to learn about life as it was lived outside the magic circle of committed communists that had been his world since childhood:

I had come into the army as ignorant of human nature and full of illusions as a schoolboy, having been preserved as one by my years in the party machine. Since then both my ignorance and my attachment to the party had diminished, but only slowly, for I clung to them, being reluctant to acknowledge that people lived largely for the satisfaction of simple brute instincts. I was still repeatedly taken aback by what I saw of sexual behaviour which was like that of dogs trotting about in the street. I remember one occasion when we picked up an Air Force girl while we were travelling in the back of a covered truck. She was fair and pretty. I took her to be the kind of girl toward whom one ought to be protective. Soon she was lying on the floor with her legs up, giggling and gasping pleasurably. Among the men who went to her were some I had thought to be faithful husbands. She dropped from the tailboard outside an Air Force camp and walked off, as bright as ever, while the men waved and called cheerful goodbyes after her.

I thought, how do they know? Why are they so sure of each other? How can all these transactions take place so instantly and confidently without a word being spoken? I decided that I lacked some kind of psychic antennae that other people possessed.

We can see right there the seeds of what made Baron the writer he became – a determination to understand how people act: not how they say they act, or would like to act, but how they actually act when under pressure.  And, of course, there could be no time of greater pressure than those war years. Also, as we will see, the matter of ‘the woman question’ stayed with Baron. It was clear to him from the start that the war was impacting not only on the men charged with fighting it, but also on the women around whose lives it swirled.

During this training period Baron applied to become an officer but was turned down on political grounds. He became increasingly frustrated, feeling he was marking time while the action went on all around him but, with the allied victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein, things began to look up. In the summer of 1943 Baron’s battalion finally got the call to travel overseas and in July landed in Sicily as part of Montgomery’s Eighth Army. Operating as sappers, they cleared the beaches and battlefields of mines while under constant enemy fire, and fought on until the Germans were ousted from the island.

With the German withdrawal on August 17, Baron and his comrades moved into the town of Catania, where they remained for two long, hot, summer months. At first they were simply resting after the rigours of battle, but soon they started to explore the town in which they were billeted, and before long to strike up relationships with the locals. During this period Baron wrote regular letters home to his mother and father which offer a remarkable insight into the actual experiences that would eventually provide the basis for There’s No Home.

It’s a measure of the man that his first letters, written in July while still in the midst of warfare, ask his mother to send a copy of Hugo’s ‘Italian in Three Months’ and an Italian English dictionary. When the fighting finished in late August the first request in his letter home is for copies of the New Statesman. And then, after a brief discussion of the weather - talk of military matters was expressly forbidden in letters home, lest they fall into enemy hands – he describes about his recent reading:

I’m just reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The book is a real refuge from the sweat and slog of this life, with its calm unruffled style, its early 19th century heroines and its storm in a teacup adventures. As a matter of fact I am always staggered when I think of Jane Austen. Here was a parson’s daughter, born in the country a century ago, educated at home, never seeing the outside world – yet she saw right through the social stupidities that she lived amongst, and the snobbery and shallowness of the minor rural gentry.

It’s an arresting notion, that of the young soldier, swept up amid the blood and dust of war, not just escaping into the lost world of Austen’s England but also seeing beyond that into Austen’s ability to find the universal in the most particular of milieus.

Six weeks later, Baron’s October 15 letter to his father shows how quickly life has moved on in Catania:

I have been “adopted”. I have been going of late to the house of a docker and his wife – very fine and simple people, with whom I’ve become very friendly indeed. He is a broad-shouldered handsome fellow, who talks very intelligently (+ often very poetically). His wife, who must have been beautiful when she was younger, is still pleasant and cheerful of countenance though worn (as all these women are) by a lifetime of work and grief.

They are desperately poor and I try to eat in there as rarely as possible, Sometimes, however I have to, to avoid offending them. I stayed for supper the other night, for instance. They put out a spotless white tablecloth and beautifully pressed and embroidered napkins. We had fried fish, olives and bread, cheese, wine and grapes. It doesn’t sound much, I know, but to a family where the husband’s pay is 2/6 a week, it’s a feast.

I was invited out last night too. Laurie (my friend) and I spent the evening with the family of two very pleasant and attractive Italian girls we know (It’s all right, there’s no danger of me coming home with a wife and family!). We learned to play cards in the Italian fashion…

Here, as you will find out, are the seeds of There’s No Home, and the central relationship between Sergeant Craddock -  a heartier, more confident version of Baron -  and Graziella, a ‘very pleasant and attractive’ Italian girl (among Baron’s wartime papers there’s a teasing photograph of an Italian girl, perhaps the model for Graziella). Apply the clear eye that Baron so admires in Jane Austen and the result is a book about the horror of war which takes place almost entirely on one small street in a Sicilian town, a long way from the front line. In this novel, unlike the Russian epic, war and peace are not two separate narrative strands but have become indivisible. There’s No Home also offered Baron the perfect opportunity to introduce his concern with ‘the woman question’.

It has long been a cliché to suggest that war is a man’s game, that if women ruled the world there’d be no more conflict. On one level this is patently absurd: warrior women from Boudicca to Condoleezza Rice have not shied away from armed conflict. What is true, and what Baron dramatises brilliantly here, is that for the most part women and men experience war in very different ways.

At one point Sergeant Craddock receives a letter from his wife , full of desperately cheery news from home But home now seems almost unimaginable to Craddock after what he and his comrades have been through. The only reality is that of the moment, this strange eye-of-the-storm period of quasi domesticity among the Sicilians. And so the letter serves only as a reproach:

At the sight of the envelopes he had felt a stab of resentment; it was a fresh blow from the outside world, at the sealed, timeless life he was leading. But the letters touched at his heart and aroused a sense of guilt. He tried to remember home. After all, he told himself, it ought not to be so hard. It was only – how long was it? – Good Lord, it was only four months since they had sailed. It had been easy to remember home on the warm decks on the troopship. Home in those days had been something of which to talk and sing sentimentally. It had been easy to remember home in the first days ashore, on the white, wandering roads, passing through the deserted ruins of towns, lying among the olive trees in the green hills. Every letter had brought a beautiful pang. Where had it all died? On the plains, yes, on the parched white plains where so many men had died. The heat had killed it; the stink had killed it; the noise had killed it; the endlessness of the whole thing, the twitching, fear-burdened, obsessed endlessness, the days when men were afraid to move from their oven holes and the nights when the sky had been lit with great jagged flashes and flares had winked like traffic lights in the darkness. Home – he tried, clenching his fists, to remember.

The men in There’s No Home, the British soldiers, aren’t macho blowhards in love with fighting; they want nothing more than for it all to be over. But they are nonetheless propelled forwards; they know there’s a war waiting for them and that they will, sooner or later, be in the midst of it, participating rather than hanging around on the sidelines. They feel the imperative of narrative, the need to move forwards.

The women, on the other hand, want life to stand still. They have all lost men to the war: husbands and lovers, fathers, brothers and sons. Their domestic lives have been upended and yet they have carried on. When the British soldiers arrive in Catania, they are incorporated into this powerful domesticity; and if the women there had their way, there they would stay, simply replacing the men they’d lost. The women essentially want the narrative to stop - they reject the headlong linear drive of the war story, preferring the circular mode of the soap opera. And in the end, of course, they lose: it’s the narrative of war, with its relentless forward march, that triumphs, disrupting their precarious domestic life and tearing the men away from them once again.

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 and her friend Paloma cook a huge meal for Craddock and one of his friends (a meal, incidentally, that resembles very closely one described in Baron’s letters home).

Afterwards, though, Craddock asks Graziella how on earth she managed to afford such a feast. She’s horrified that he should ask such a question: ‘Now, after this beautiful evening, you start a quarrel. Why?’ Craddock won’t let it go. Graziella tells him how she walked for fifteen kilometres into the countryside to her uncle’s farm to beg for food to feed her English lover. Then she bursts into tears. Craddock has rejected her culinary declaration of love. The feast she designed to ensure he would never leave her has instead driven them apart:

He sighed and looked down at her in perplexity. ‘You must never do it again.’

‘Why not?’ she said defiantly. ‘For you I would do it every day.’

Craddock said, with an edge of anger in his voice. ‘I am serious. You must listen to me, or it will be finished between us.’

She stared at him. Her face was taut with incredulity; muscles quivered beneath the skin, and her full cheeks went slack and ugly with grief. 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. But the measure of Baron’s talent is 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. It’s out of this instinctive empathy with women as well as men that 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.

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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 fifties 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 sixties, 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 seventies, most of them set in the past. His last published novel, Franco Is Dying, returned to the present with the story of an aging 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.