Red badge of courage

The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up.

The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up. The autobiography is of the stammering, sensitive figure of Roy Kerridge, the victim as a child of horrifying domestic circumstances. But the central character is really his mother, Thea, a misguided, naive but heroic figure who clings desperately to her ideals and her faith in humanity despite repeated disappointments and betrayals.

Thea is the daughter of Adolf Frankel, a prosperous Polish businessman and communist, and his much younger Danish wife, Magda, who emigrated to England in the 1920s and were living at the start of the second world war in North Wembley, Middlesex. Thea had attended London University, but left early after a shotgun marriage to a fellow student, Sam Barber, by whom she was expecting Roy. They were both communists, but with Sam subsequently away with the army in Northern Ireland, Thea was left alone in London to fly the red flag

She worked doggedly for the cause, selling communist newspapers in all weathers outside a factory gate. She not only earned the derision of the factory workers for her middle-class ways but also was barely tolerated by her comrades, who eventually branded her a Trotskyist for urging them to come clean in public about their communism and stop feigning allegiance to the Labour party.