Bomb Weary Family Cries Against War (1950)

Book Review from the 21st May, 1950, issue of the Los Angeles Times

My Time, My Life. by George Camden. (Doubleday: $2.75.)

George Camden, we would guess, might never have written a book if there hadn't been a war. The son of a London rag-and-bones man, he worked since he was 14 as a barber's assistant, and later as a tailor. For five years he, his wife and child lived with the bombs in London.

While "My Time, My Life" may not be strictly autobiographical, it surely is drawn from bitter personal experience.

Bill Smith, Pat, his wife, and Curly Goldstein, his friend, were too busy earning a living and keeping off the dole to worry about a war they had no part in making. War came anyhow. Curly enlisted, Bill was in an essential industry and faced the war in London with his family in the midst of a holocaust.

So, we have another war novel by another new author. And we can't treat this one casually. We can't treat any of them casually, no matter how badly they write—and George Camden does not write badly at all.

They all have one thing in common—an anguished sincerity, a great inner need to cry out against war. George Camden writes simply, entertainingly and sincerely. He deserves to be read.

Helen O. Schrader

Blogger's Note:

'George Camden' was the pen-name of Sid Rubin, a very active speaker and writer for the SPGB in the thirties and forties. The Socialist Standard review of his novel can be found at the following link.

John Berger (1964)

Book Review from the June 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corker's Freedom by John Berger. Methuen 21/-

In the post-war world we have become accustomed to the oft-repeated story of working class prosperity. The term "the Affluent Society" has now become an overworked joke, but not so very long ago it was taken most seriously. Cosy articles in newspapers and magazines, and cynical adverts on the television screen, have painted a picture of workers leading lives of unparalleled richness and variety.

Even the outbursts of brutish stupidity and violence which have hit the headlines from time to time, far from destroying this image, are presented as offshoots of this same prosperity. Pleasant indeed us the lot of the fortunate worker in this charming dream world. It is therefore refreshing in the extreme to read descriptions of life as it is really lived by the vast mass of the people. Description that we know, only too well, to be true.

John Berger, who is well known as an art critic with the New Statesman, and for his excellent book of essays Permanent Red, is a writer with the ability to sum of the contemporary scene with a crisp economy of words. Berger claims to be a Marxist, although nothing very much appears in his works to justify such a claim. He is also described on the dustjacket of one of his books as a Revolutionary Moralist, whatever that may mean. There is however no doubt about his ability to put a mirror up to the world in which he lives.

His latest novel, Corker's Freedom, describes a day on the lives of two people who run a dingy employment bureau in South London. They are the elderly proprietor—the Corker of the title—and his youthful assistant, and linked with their story are the people who come to see them.

The novel is a short one, and many of the scenes are amusing, but the overall picture is one of drabness and futility. Even the crooks are small-time and poor, like so many of the lesser criminals. The stakes for which they play seem hardly worth the trouble. But it is in its description that the book really comes to life, as in the description of Clapham seen through the eyes of a man fresh from the country.

Outside the window it is the acres of roofs that interest him. The hundreds of chimneys, serving old fireplaces with black grates and rook for only three lumps of coal, are like stumps of trees in a forest long since cut down. He is able to see end to it. He is in London.

The final scene, of a speaker in Hyde Park subjected to moronic interruptions, is one which will appeal to anyone with a knowledge of Speaker's Corner.

Les Dale

My Time and What a Life! (1950)

Book Review from the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

"My Time, My Life," by George Camden, Dent, 8/- 254pp.

They say that sick people cannot read enough about their particular complaint. In the same way many workers, not content with witnessing the misery and unhappiness around them, are eager to read another's experiences of their own conditions. As a result such volumes as William Goldman's "East End, My Cradle," and "Tent of Blue," dealing with the slums and sweat shops of Whitechapel, and Max Cohen's "I Was One of the Unemployed" have earned a fair measure of success. It is likely that "My Time, My Life," will be equally successful. Of its type it is a well-written work.

Need I recapitulate the story? The pre-1939 unemployment, life in two rooms: the economic fear of a young wife at the signs of a second pregnancy; the deep-felt horror of the blitzes; the tragedy of a man returning from work to find his wife and baby dead; these are things we know only too well from the realm of hard experience. Yet Mr. Camden has set it down with a reality which excludes any of the false heroics which so frequently mar a work of this nature. In fact so honestly does Bill Smith, the "S" of this novel, react to his surroundings, that several critics, presumably in search of some treacly glorification of the "man in the street" at war, have condemned him as a cynic and a misery.

Bill Smith, just like his counterparts throughout the whole of the modern world, does not like his position in society, spending the best part of his life on the "ball and chain," released only to the dole or the army. He says, with typical bluntness:

"Brother, it's all double Dutch to me! We don't deal with this type of goods in our neighbourhood. We like each other or hate each other and there's always a good reason for both. We've got no territory except what we pay rent for. And when it comes to our turn in the wooden box we'll all have the same landlord."

How many workers make statements such as this; how many workers are aware of the contradictions and fallacies of the world around the, yet unable to recognise their cause and their cure! If Mr. Camden's work will prompt his readers to answer such questions as the one he poses above and many others besides, it is well worth while, but for those actively seeking a solution we suggest a little less consternation with effects and a lot more with causes.

Ronald.

A vivid picture of the East End (1963)

Book Review from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Tears in Aldgate, by Ralph L. Finn (Robert Hale 18s.)

When we are young, particularly in our childhood, we may live in the most degrading slum conditions but often fail to appreciate the fact fully. Indeed, with kindly parents, we may even manage to get by with a tolerably happy childhood, unappalled by the stench around us. Maybe that's as well. There is no evidence to show that an unhappy childhood makes better people of us, or that we are any more able to face the rigours of adulthood having had severe parents. The reverse is more likely.

To say all this is one thing, but it does not excuse nostalgia as we grow older. having once got away from slumdom, no one in his right mind wants to return to it, although it is, of course, understandable that he may miss his former friends and neighbours and long for their company again. Now Mr. Finn is a very able writer. He has painted a vivid picture of the early years of his life in London's East End. Yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he yearns to go back and live there even after all these years.

Who knows, perhaps the nostalgia, the quiet little sighs for the old days, are a luxury which he can allow himself since it seems pretty certain that he will never go back to them. Broughton Buildings, the slum tenement in London's East End where he spent his youth, was bombed to the ground in the second World War. But he and his family had left there, anyway, some years before. They had shifted just as soon as their financial position allowed them to.

Nostalgia apart, this book is interesting for its description of life in London's dockside slumdom not so very long ago. Mr. Finn was born there in 1912. His parents were Polish Jews and had come to England in search of a better life. "Go to England," they were told, "the streets are paved with gold." But all that they could find was the grime, dirt and decay of the East End. It is interesting to see how history has repeated itself many times since then and, although the immigrants in recent years have had darker skins, behind their arrival has been the same desire to escape from poverty. Again, many of them have drifted into broken down hovels where they have met resentment, prejudice and even downright hatred.

But racialism is not a failing from which only white men and gentiles suffer. Mr. Finn rightly condemns anti-semitism, but in his haste to do this, betrays a similar weakness. To read his comparative descriptions, you would think that most Jews—in his home area anyway—were thrifty and hardworking, yet very kind, while their Gentile brothers spent most of their spare time boozing, neglecting their children and being stingy. Yet on his own admission there was something common to Jew and Gentile alike, and that was the poverty and degradation from which they all suffered, and which had little to do with personal faults or  virtues. Incidentally, we find it incredibly naive of him to suggest in one part of his book that anti-semitism did not really appear on the scene until the rise of the Nazis.

Mr. Finn has been mainly concerned with reminiscences, of course, although he has not been able to resist riding one or two pet hobby horses here and there. For example, "Let's face it," he says early on, "Intelligent people in those days did not frequent pubs. Nice people didn't. They were home from home of the loutish, the stupid, the ignorant, the intolerant—the salt of British democracy. Long live the working class sots!"

But the book is worth reading and there is a lesson to be learnt from it, which Mr. Finn himself would do well to heed, intensely proud as he is of being a Jew. And that is the hard fact of working class identity which cuts right across all other divisions and makes them trifling by comparison. It is in the interests of every worker to recognise this so that the day will be that much nearer when all the Broughton Places of this world will be no more.

E. T. C.