I set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 24 in the series. Thanks to Richard Derecki for bringing it to my notice.
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Alexander Baron, born in 1917, grew up in Hackney. He attended Hackney Downs School, whose many illustrious alumni also include Harold Pinter, Arthur Gold, Michael Levy and Eric Bristow.
In the 1930s, Baron and his friend Ted Willis, who would later create Dixon of Dock Green and become a life peer, were leading activists in the Labour League of Youth and campaigners against fascists in the East End. Baron was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein. His father was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who had settled in east London in 1908.
Baron’s post-war novel, Rosie Hogarth, published in 1951, is set in and around the fictitious Lamb Street near the Angel and Chapel Market in Islington. It is more about Jack Agass, a local man seeking a settled life in the neighbourhood where he did most of his growing up after completing an extended military service, than it is about the female character of the novel’s name.
This increases the temptation to read it as an expression of the disillusion Baron came to feel with far-left politics: Rosie, the orphan Jack’s adopted step-sibling and subsequent romantic obsession, turns out (spoiler alert) to be a coldly-dedicated communist.
The London Baron depicts is the proverbial city of villages, with Lamb Street the heart, if not the totality, of one that is bound together by a code of working-class respectability. That code is not, however, either unfailingly generous or socially liberating. Neither is the life of the area timeless, much as Jack wishes it was. He yearns for the remembered warmth of his upbringing in a house the Luftwaffe has flattened, and gets little respect from younger workmates for his skill as a carpenter or his overseas service in a war that had ended just a few years before.
Jack, good-hearted but frustrated, confused and inarticulate, secures lodgings in the Lamb Street home of Mr and Mrs Wakerell, to whose daughter Joyce he becomes awkwardly betrothed. The descriptions of the small London they inhabit are affectionate and evocative:
“The outward aspect of Lamb Street changed with the seasons. In spring and summer there was a touch of the fairground about it. Doors were left open. The characteristic noises of each household issued forth to mingle in a cheerful background to the common life. Old folk sat in front of their doors, and the babies were put out in their prams to enjoy the long hours of sunlight. People gathered to gossip or came out to watch street entertainers. Children swarmed at their play.”
Sometimes the inhabitants of this closed community roamed further afield, but not too far:
“From every street in the borough contingents had set forth at the same time, every side turning contributing its trickle to the flow of people that streamed along Upper Street, thickened into black tides as it poured through Highbury and, reinforced by thousands of men and women coming from other directions, surged in a great crowd at the approaches to the Arsenal Football Stadium.”
The final chapters are rather sad, revealing the impatience with Lamb Street life that had led Rosie to a high-minded idealism that often looks like hard-faced contempt for those she says she wants to free from bondage and drudgery – people like Jack, her once-devoted playmate, and Joyce, who draw their curtains against history and the future. The novel’s closing sentences are these:
“All they knew was that, in alliance, they would always be able to make the best of a bad job. That was what made their world go round.”
A longer and fuller appreciation of Rosie Hogarth has been written for the Literary London Society by Andrew Whitehead, who has also contributed an Introduction to the 2019 Five Leaves Publications reprint of the novel.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.