The Battle of Cable Street

Hats off to Tanya Landman for finding a way to tell a politically-engaged story about a real event in the past that has stacks of relevance for today, to tell it from the viewpoint of a child and, at the same time, to make it so readable. I went through it one sitting. It might be short but it packs an enormous punch.

It starts as a sketch of life in the East End of London in the 1930s, with kids being kids: messing about and playing games. But then, when Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt followers in the BUF (British Union of Fascists) begin to make themselves heard, it gathers momentum, building in fear and tension until the battle of the title explodes in the streets, with anti-fascists taking on both the BUF and (a detail I hadn’t been aware of before) mounted police sent by the Home Office to protect the BUF!

It's a fierce and timely reminder that some battles are never over. Or, as the narrator of the book puts it: ‘Once you defeat an evil like fascism, that should be the end of it. It took me years to realize that it’s like housework. No matter how often you clean up, the dirt just keeps on coming back.’

And hats off to Barrington Stoke for publishing it.