Chapters of Accidents:
A Writer’s Memoir
By Alexander Baron
Vallentine Mitchell £16.95


Alexander Baron was one of the great Anglo-Jewish writers. He wrote over a dozen novels and numerous screenplays. His best were about the war and working-class life in London.

His most famous book, From the City, From the Plough (1948), sold half a million copies. The Guardian called him “the greatest British novelist of the last war and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period.”

When Baron died in 1999, he left three unpublished works including a memoir, Chapters of Accidents, which has now been published in a handsome edition by Vallentine Mitchell, with an excellent introduction by Colin Holmes.

The book is made up of three parts. The first is a wonderful evocation of Baron’s childhood, growing up in the East End between the wars; the second is an account of his time in the Communist Party in the 1930s and ’40s; and the third is about serving in the war. The book finishes in 1948 as he writes his first novel.

Baron was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein in 1917, the son of two East End Jews. His father was a fur cutter, born in dire poverty in a stetl in Poland, who came to the East End in 1908.

Baron’s mother was born in Spitalfields, the daughter of two immigrants from Lithuania. “I never saw her resting,” he writes. “She was cleaning, cooking, baking and mending; and for hours playing with me.”

But, above all, she was a “good and serious reader” who led a “solitary life with books”. It was from her that Baron developed his life-long love of literature.

These early chapters are full of fascinating memories of veterans from the First World War, flats without electricity or indoor toilets, street vendors like Mr Brodsky the dairyman, “a Cossack with a swarthy face covered with boils under a wild head of hair”.

It was a bygone world of rag-and-lumber men, any-old-iron men and knife-grinders.

As a child he witnessed the General Strike and then later the Battle of Cable Street and in the mid-1930s he became a Communist.

These were the “most intensely-lived” days of his life. For 14 years the Party replaced his family as the centre of his life. In 1940 he enlisted and served in the Pioneer Corps and then the infantry for the rest of the war.

In 1948 he left the Party and wrote his first novel, based on his wartime experiences, changing his name from Bernstein to Baron.

This is where his book ends: “I seized the chance to shed my communist identity and start life again with the new name.”