This novel, by Alexander Baron, is set in a two-month lull after the fighting in Sicily in summer 1943 as the Allies regroup to launch an invasion on the Italian mainland.

The remnants of a British Battalion – 60 men – are quartered in the bombed-out and poverty-stricken backstreets of the town of Catania and gradually begin to form attachments with the local, mainly female, population.

Observed through the eyes of Sergeant Craddock, who forges a relationship with a young mother Graziella Drucci, whose soldier husband is missing in Africa, the military action is peripheral and the novel focuses closely on these attempts, on both sides, to forge  a new domesticity and some sort of rapprochement on the emotional scars of the war.

Baron was one of the most popular novelists of the late 1940s and his war trilogy (of which this is the second book) was warmly reviewed and the three books were also bestsellers, yet his work has faded while the works of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning remain to the fore.

Perhaps this is because his primary concerns were with the ordinary soldier and the civilians rather than with the officer class. Baron himself had been in the thick of the fighting in the invasion of Sicily, as a member of Montgomery’s 8th Army and in the D-Day landings. In fact, he started writing as therapy after the war. He was Jewish and a former communist whose parents had been party intellectuals and this certainly accounted for his inability to gain promotion. He was never to rise above the rank of Corporal.

The book homes in on the desperation of the individual circumstances of soldiers missing their families and the plight of their starving hosts whose menfolk are missing or dead. A kind of symbiotic  domesticity is created. Some soldiers become surrogate fathers to the fatherless families, others assume the role of the missing men as lovers, and some, such as Captain Rumbold, treat the local women in a purely exploitative manner.

But Baron manages to find goodness in many of these ordinary ‘Tommies’ and Sicilians who strive to make normality out of these unique and desperate circumstances. Both groups long for the war to be over but the narrative follows an inevitable path and one thing is clear from the outset – the men will leave as the Sicilian men before them were forced to do, and the women will be alone again. The author posits the eternal truth of war, the men must follow it, and women must stay behind and weep. Their narratives are doomed to diverge and this is clear from the beginning but does not diminish the empathy and humanity with which this author describes the new community formed by both groups for their own reasons in the idyllic but doomed summer lull.

Scottish readers will be interested to see that the novel is prefaced with a quotation from Hamish Henderson’s poem  The Highland Division’s Farewell To Sicily. Henderson of course was heavily involved in these campaigns and it is a line from the poem, ‘there’s nae hame’, translated into English, that gives the novel its title.

Andrew Murray Scott

Book: THERE’S NO HOME (novel)

Author: Alexander Baron 

Publisher: Sort of Books (2011)

Letters from a Stoic, the title of Robin Campbell’s selection from Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium by Seneca the Younger, is one of those titles that seem unnecessarily offputting. (Two others that come to mind are Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth and Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters, and I shall leave the reader, if sufficiently interested, to find out why.) It is true that Seneca’s book consists of letters, and it is true that he was in the Stoic camp rather than the Epicurean, so the title is not inaccurate. However Seneca’s version of Stoicism is urbane and inclusive – he regularly quotes from Epicurus to make a point – and anyway at this distance his philosophical views are likely to be less interesting than his descriptions of his own life and environment. He sets out a moderate, conservative, balanced philosophy, recommending, as it were, a stiff – but not too stiff – upper lip, and a natural way of life. He demonstrates that he is a practical, down-to-earth Roman by brusquely giving the theories of Plato and Aristotle short shrift. In some ways he could fit into English philosophy before the 20th century – he makes it very clear how little interest he has in the minute analysis of language. Philosophy is an aid to living life well.

These letters have been described as the first essays, and are known to have inspired Montaigne, among others. Their chatty, discursive style, roaming from point to point, is designed to set one thinking. Sometimes they remind one of other writers. Two of the letters brought two of Cavafy’s poems to mind, one echoing Socrates on how a change of scene does not necessarily lighten one’s mental load. In another letter, sounding very like a devotee of the ‘modern’ movement in architecture, he enjoins Lucilius, to whom the letters are addressed, to spurn everything added to a house ‘by way of decoration and display by unnecessary labour’. Now and again in discussing the past he offers a political viewpoint, for example advising us that when Cæsar came to power he was supported by the revolutionary mob. (That could stimulate the reader to go and remind his or her self about how Julius Cæsar tried to revive Marius’s popular party, perhaps by picking up another Penguin Classic, The Fall of the Roman Republic, and reading Plutarch’s lives of Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Cæsar, not to mention Cicero.) When Seneca describes visiting the house where Scipio Africanus lived (over two hundred years before), he says how much he admires Scipio for retiring rather than weaken the institutions of free Rome. Free only up to a point, of course, yet Seneca does not ignore the position of slaves in his society, and while he does not suggest that slavery should be ended, at least he writes humanely on the subject.

But as is often the case, it is what the writer does not say that may give the clue. No criticism of Nero, of course, once his pupil and subsequently the Roman equivalent of a ‘Great Helmsman’. Seneca mentions the Varus disaster but not the revolt of the Iceni, for which he allegedly bore some responsibility. He writes about a great fire that destroyed Lugdunum (Lyon), but refers to the fire that devastated Rome only obliquely. He talks about wealth, but not openly about his own wealth. Having fallen out of favour with Nero, no doubt Seneca chose his subjects and words with extreme care. It is possible, nevertheless, to imagine that he was setting out his political stall – look at me, he seems to be saying tacitly, compare the restrained, sensible person that I am with a certain other capricious, self-indulgent murderer. If so it did him no good, and in the end Nero did him in.

One great charm of this book today, however, lies in its occasional vivid glimpses of a vanished era. He may be presenting himself to his fellow-citizens or to posterity. It may be that he writes about everyday things merely to demonstrate how well-adjusted he is, but for us today the reason for these word pictures is secondary. When Seneca is describing the house of Scipio Africanus, he notes how people have come to expect more, comparing Scipio’s simple, small, dark bath with the luxurious, well-lit marbled bath chambers dictated by fashion in Seneca’s time. Indeed Seneca is withering on the subject of fashion, pouring scorn on people’s search for novelty in their clothes, their furniture, their interior decoration, their meals, which he links to the quest for novelty in literary style. He mentions that the latest fad is to bring the kitchen out to the table, and cook in front of diners, so that the food is hot enough for palates that are like leather. In another letter he argues that one does not need silence to study, and goes on to describe the noises in his lodgings above a public bath-house – the grunts of exertion, the splashing, the smack of the masseur’s hand, the yells of brawls, of hawkers, of men having hair removed. Eerily, as we read, two millenia fall away.

Steve Savage

Book: LETTERS FROM A STOIC

Author: Seneca, translated by Robin Campbell

Publisher: Penguin 

After eight years of exile, Seneca was recalled to Rome and given the task of tutoring the son of Claudius’s new wife Agrippina. This boy was to become the emperor Nero. When Nero succeeded the murdered Claudius, Seneca became one of the most powerful and wealthy figures in Rome, a power behind the throne, once more arousing envy on the part of others, which grew to the point that Seneca retired from public life, with Nero’s consent. He spent the next few years studying philosophy and writing, including the Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium (a selection of which was published under the title Letters from a Stoic). In 65CE a conspiracy against Nero was uncovered, in which Seneca was implicated, and he was ordered to commit suicide.

By Ngugi wa Thiong’o, this novel of Kenya in the years and days immediately leading up to Uhuru – Independence Day – in 1963 ranges over the country’s social history and through powerfully drawn characters knits a convincing portrait of society in the ridges (townships) of Gikuyu or the ‘White Highlands’ – which could be seen in opposition to the picture presented in ‘White Mischief’ in which black faces are rarely glimpsed.

The Gikuyu people had been forcibly removed and forced to become labourers and squatters on the land they had, until the late 19th century, thought their own.

The action of the novel is concentrated in the four days preceding Uhuru with earlier periods on the 1950s and 60s interwoven into the narrative. It is a period of conflict when many Kenyans joined the Mau Mau and became Forest Fighters and the book alludes to earlier periods of struggle ever since the arrival of the Christian missionaries and in their wake ‘white settlers’ in the late 19th century.

The novel was written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o when he was a student at Leeds University and it was directly influenced by his reading of radical authors such as Fritz Fanon, Marx and Engels while at Leeds and by his own tragic personal experience while still living in Kenya. One of his brothers joined the Mau Mau, another, who was deaf and dumb, was shot by security forces when he ran away from a patrol – this incident is used in the early pages of the book.

Five main characters represent the disparate strands of thinking in the fictional village of Thabai. The beautiful Mumbi is connected with the four young men who seem to represent the leaders of ‘the Movement’ in the village. Her quiet brother Kihika is destined to become the leader of the Forest Fighters until betrayal and execution. Gikonyo – carpenter – who takes no part in politics, is eventually destroyed by years of detention so that he betrays his oath and is then allowed to return home and to his wife Mumbi. His rival for Mumbi, Karanja, betrays his comrades by becoming a Chief and leader of the Home Guards whose excesses of zeal on behalf of the British make him a target after Uhuru. Mugo, the orphan who simply wants to be left alone to farm his small strip of land – shamba – almost accidentally saves a pregnant women from rape and a beating – and is then made into a hero. But Mugo is tortured by guilt and finally confesses that it was he who betrayed Kihika. Mugo’s self-doubt and mental anguish mirror the misery of the many under British rule but it is clear throughout the whole course of the novel that Uhuru in itself is unlikely to live up to expectations.

This is revealed in a number of ways; the local MPs take no part in village celebrations as they are all glad-handing in Nairobi and even enriching themselves at the expense of their constituents.

The novel attempts to balance the picture with regard to European characters, including an a balancing of the Gikuyu view of the fearful District Officer John Thompson by showing him with his wife and other Europeans trapped into his situation so that his real character is merely that of a misguided intellectual deceived by the false belief that the British Empire is doing good in the world.

For me the most effective aspect of the novel is its method of narration; the framing voice is in the third person yet sometimes that voice is clearly aware of the political context and at other times seems to express a kind of general, ‘mass’ consciousness. Yet within this exterior view, each of the main characters tells their own story in confessional or interior monologues cleverly stitched into the ongoing third-person narration. The narrative also slips easily between time periods of past and present so that it appears seamless, all-knowing and yet never overtly destroying the ‘trick’ of its presentation.

The result is a gripping, compelling and at times painful picture of the political narrative of Kenyan Independence as we follow the intertwining stories of its main characters through their journeys to Uhuru and beyond.

The version I read (1986 revised edition, reprinted 2002) had been substantially revised by its author who had originally published it as James Ngugi. In the interim, he had changed his name to the more correct Gikuyu form, rejecting the ‘missionary’ construction James and made similar radicalising changes to the text to incorporate a more political approach.

Subsequently this led him into conflict with the Kenyan authorities and he was detained him for a year as a subversive. They were concerned at his criticism of corruption in the newly-Independent State, and Ngugi was forced to leave the country in 1982 and has lived and worked abroad ever since. History has proved that his warnings against the betrayal of Independence were proved correct and this novel remains a compelling and prescient account of Kenya’s struggle towards democracy.

Andrew Murray Scott

Book: A GRAIN OF WHEAT (novel)

Author: Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Publisher: Penguin (1967) rev edn 1986

Wilson of Garson, Manson of Quoys, Seatter of Sandside, Skinner of Gorn, Lyon of Clett, Towers of Fillets, The Mowats of Ramray and Western Horn…

That litany of names and holdings was compiled from order-books and labels, on articles for customers on Graemsay, when a youthful ‘bike and barrow boy’, son of the proprietor, Cecil Steer, speculated about the inhabitants of that island, seemingly remote from Stromness’ North End.

It was a summer holiday on Graemsay that gave form and identity to the farms, and put a face on owners whose names had been so resonant in Tim Steer’s mind for a considerable time. Forty-odd years on, the people who made him welcome are paid tribute to in a book, by the lad who worked hard for his Saturday ten bob.

Well-known for his exploits in the Holms Race, on sports field and debating room, Tim was to go off for higher educational studies, qualifying impressively in arts and, in time, extending what he had to offer as a teacher, by religious certification.

For many years he has been a conscientious and inspiring member of a prestigious school’s staff, English, Religious Knowledge and Directorship of Sixth Form Studies being among his responsibilities. Now, contemplating retirement, he has produced a selection of verse written over the years. Poems contains 29 pieces on a number of themes, whose sentiments and technical proficiency would impress, coming from an established author, but as the first publication of a new and clearly gifted poet, the volume is an exciting one, indeed – as early sales indicate.

Stromnessians will appreciate the visual dimension given by another townsman. Sandy Young, art teacher and headmaster, has supplied 11 illustrations evocative of island life, beside which his former schoolmate has placed works of direct or general relevance – the most notable example of the former being the pair’s treatment of Craw – last of the drawings to be composed. Another striking juxtaposition is Good Friday – Travelling Aimlessly, in which the poem’s conclusion is flanked by Sandy’s rendering of the famous inscription, still much photographed by tourists, God’s Providence Is My Inheritance – whose solid assurance matches the poet’s certainty: ‘I make my choice and only say “My Lord.”’

That ‘choice’ was made by Tim Steer many years ago now. Naturally, his steady Christian commitment is evident, but it is seen to have been tested by illness and changing social norms – without diminution of the strength and compassion that seem to be distinctive characteristics of the author.

Equally positive is the latter’s account of the incidents and relationships within his family, including a poignant, honest admission of a mistake, and the different stages of married life.

If security in these respects is a consistent feature, the role of boyhood scenes and activities is more complicated.

A trip to the peat-bank, lyrically described, a generation later, occasions regret at failure to appreciate an experience which reflection in later life would prove to have been precious:

‘We kids look bored,
Just wanting to go home, nostalgia still
Long years away. It’s now I feel a loss …’

(In the peat hill).

Another illustration of how maturity can affect interpretation of events, is the poet’s acceptance of a perfect morning’s physical features – ‘obliteration’ by sea-mist, which has no power to detract from the original scene and mood. Longer lines in verse paragraphs are replaced decisively, by a succinct concluding couplet:

‘But I was up early,
And I had seen clearly.’

No need for disappointment… Religious faith is affirmed at the end of a poem on a walk to the kirkyard, Warebeth: Easter 2004.

With nature awakening and the day improving, there is an optimistic note:

‘On the horizon lies a line of light,
Suddenly fragmenting as it overspills
And sun breaks through’,

before thoughts of how each layer is one of ‘Provisional marker posts until time ends’ invigorates the walkers:

‘With resurrection in the air,
Our spirits lift.’

The conclusion is unpredictable, at first sight, but it communicates the poet’s conviction effectively.

Fortitude is the word one would choose to characterise the mood in which Tim Steer confronted diagnosis of a serious medical problem.

A visit to the doctor employs water imagery throughout, to convey the uncomplicated aspect of life before the ‘visit’.

‘No set arrival date or time / Means no plans need be fixed’ has a leisurely, unconcerned tone and import which a tightening-up of the rhythm rejects:

‘But now I have a diary date
So set it seems an order…’

With the water of a stream changed to that of a river which has to be kept pure, the element is used figuratively. How can the patient prepare for a possible development? His faith provides the answer:

‘How can I use the time that’s left
To set my life in order?
I only know my certain need: A passport for the border.’

Physical threat and decay affect another species. In Eu Thanatos: a Good End, a plum tree which has given years of ‘…blossom, shade and fruit / And branches for the girls to climb,’ becomes irremediably diseased, until a storm blows it down, fit only for burning, but leaving memories of happier times when it was the focus of family enjoyment – remembered at blossoming time, perhaps allegorically as a parallel to the unforgettable period of life when it flourished:

‘Each spring, my memories renew;
We never did dig out the roots.’

It may be that symbolism is at work, too, in the very powerful Craw, whose precision of descriptive detail and forceful language bring to mind those aspects of Ted Hughes’s work on that creature.

Tim Steer’s bird seems to be observing a world which will be very different from the one that Man has made – it may even be the less admirable aspects of that activity and its emblems. Change is the theme of Circular Walk, in which the poet has difficulty negotiating a strange landscape, before he sees his road home. Illness and the need to exercise may be providing the bulk of narrative, but the conclusion, with its realism and guarded sense of some achievement, testifies to the courage of a man who can face up to ‘No doubts or fears have been allayed,’ with the positive statement, ‘Yet progress has, I feel, been made.’ That ‘progress’ continued, gives colour and vitality to subjects arranged later in the book: a car drive, cycle run, the ability to raise a smile at a pushy, patronising interlocutor, and a series of poems on family life comprise an optimistic conclusion. The writer’s sense of vocation is expressed memorably:

‘…stirring minds to be awake,
Placing lives in time and space.
To teach, to act – a means of grace.’

That purpose and activity necessary to achieve it were carried into private life, as a magnificent, moving Teaching and Learning monologue illustrates with remarkable honesty in its self-evaluation.

Having decided not to give daughter Sophie a book as a present because there was none ‘suitable’, although her sister Katy received one, with rapture,Tim explained what life was like, to the little girl who ‘…sat up and listened and nodded / with a smile that was fragile and bright.’

His ‘parenting skills’, including the instruction that life doesn’t always seem fair, proved to be illusory, in this case:

‘Years later I learned what I’d taught her;
I had told her that she wasn’t loved…’

The sequence of family poems brings out the poet’s unfailing thankfulness for the children and wife he loves: understanding and tolerance, contentment, openness, obvious, but never mawkish in their expression. Romantic love, playful enjoyment of conversation, adaptation to the children’s leaving home and the tenderness of Sex at Sixty, are the inspiration of a strong conclusion to Poems.

A few of the book’s items have been looked at, but readers have many treats in store. Tim Steer has found his own voice, while echoing other poets for different purposes: Donne, Frost, Betjeman, Wordsworth, Yeats and GMB have written on themes that he takes up. Occasionally, they are quoted or hinted at, but it is meant to be the strongest praise, when one declares that he can stand the comparison. It is to be hoped that this exciting volume will be followed by another, very soon. In the meantime, hasten to purchase Poems by Tim Steer (for £2!) before it sells out.

Brian Murray

Book: POEMS

Author: Tim Steer

Publisher: Tim Steer

Highly successful on publication in 1954 when events of a decade earlier in India were still fresh in the mind of John Masters, its author, and the public at large, Bhowani Junction is set at the time of Indian independence and therefore has superficial similarities to the slightly better known work of Paul Scott. But while the Raj Quartet has been popularised by a successful TV series, Masters’ work has rather receded from familiarity like the film made of this novel starring Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner.

The novel has three main protagonists and is a more focussed and narrower study of the personal and social problems of three of the main social groupings in India just before Partition, particularly of the Anglo-Indians, or ‘half-castes’. While in Scott’s work this grouping was rarely glimpsed or alluded to only in minor characters, in Bhowani Junction, two of the three main protagonists are Anglo-Indians, and the third is the British officer, Colonel Rodney Savage, effective though rather brusque. By far the largest part of the narrative is given by the first person narration of Patrick Taylor, an anglophile ‘Anglo-Indian’ Railway official, and Victoria Jones, a beautiful Anglo-Indian WAC(I).

Unlike in the Scott novels, the role of Muslims and their potential breakaway and insurgency is much less obvious and nearly all of the action is centred on Bhowani and within a hundred miles of it whereas the Raj Quartet ranges across the sub-continent.

I came to the novel and the novels of Paul Scott through recommendation by my mother whose childhood was spent in India and who indeed served briefly in the WAC (I) as a teenager before being repatriated to Scotland in 1947. This family ‘connection’ became an underlying part of the context of this period of history during my reading of the novel.

The predicament of the Anglo-Indians is sympathetically presented, as by far the largest portion of the novel is narrated by either Patrick Taylor or Victoria Jones, and the first section and final section are narrated by Patrick. Thus priority is given to the Anglo-Indian viewpoint and it is the British officer Savage whose narrative later seems slightly intrusive and out of kilter with everybody else.

Patrick Taylor is a senior manager with the Delhi Deccan Railway. The Anglo-Indians’ main role was to run the railways; this was their niche and the source of their ubiquitous social status and value. Patrick aspires to being British, looks down on the ‘Wogs’ and venerates his old school, St Thomas’, which is in danger of being sold off. It is a time of transition for India with the future role of the Anglo-Indians in doubt. Through Patrick’s eyes we see Victoria, her sister Rose Mary and their father, a railway driver very fond of showing visitors the uniformed portrait of his British grandfather ‘Sergeant Duck’ which hangs on their living room wall. The self-revealing nature of the narrative allows the reader to glimpse the rather pompous yet pathetic reality of Anglo-Indian society.

The second and by far the longest portion of the novel is narrated by Victoria Jones who is desired by men from all the social groupings. Victoria is less hide-bound and restricted than any other character in the book and is an ambivalent figure, able to wear WAC (I) uniform or sari, keep company with Indian Congress activist Ranjit (whom she almost marries in a Sikh ceremony), then have an affair with Colonel Savage and end up with Patrick. Because of her beauty and social skills she is apparently able to move freely among and be trusted by local Congress leaders, Trade Union activists, the Anglo-Indians, the Communist Sirdarni-Sahiba (mother of Ranjit), the civil authority ‘Collector’ Govindaswami – and of course she hops into Colonel Savage’s bed too. Such is the ease of her social mobility that it is clear Masters is making a point about his hopes for the future direction of Indian society. The reader is never quite clear about how ‘white’ Victoria is. Maybe her beauty blinds everyone to her colour? She identifies with India and intends to stay put yet has a sense of the ridiculousness of the Anglo-Indians’ attachment to a place (Britain) which they have never seen. Unlike Patrick and the other Anglo-Indians she does not dream of ‘Home’ and has no intention of ever going there.

There is a strong sense of reconciliation and potential integration by the end of the novel, when all groupings unite to defeat the ‘terrorist’ K.P. Roy (loosely based on Chandra Bose) at which point Victoria elides from her affair with Savage to her long-term destiny with Patrick and the book comes full circle.

This assimilation is also signified by Colonel Savage’s unexpected but crucial assistance to Patrick in his effort to save his old school. St Thomas’ future is ensured but only if Indian children too can be educated there. This is, in microcosm, the message of the book which is resolutely inclusive and optimistic.

The success of the structure of four consecutive first-person narratives is that it humanises and extends the appeal of the characters and creates a kind of unity or synergy in a positive portrait of the Anglo-Indians and suggests that all can live within a new India – while not detracting from the obvious pathos of their situation.

Andrew Murray Scott

Book: BHOWANI JUNCTION

Author: John Masters

Publisher: Michael Joseph

His many novels include Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), The Deceivers (1952), The Lotus and the Wind (1953), Bhowani Junction (1954), Coromandel! (1955), Bugles and a Tiger (1956), Far, Far the Mountain Peak (1957), To the Coral Strand (1962) and The Ravi Lancers (1972).