Trouble on Cable Street by Joan Lingard was first published in 2014 and it was the author’s last book, she died on the 12th of July 2022.
The setting is the East End of London, 1936. With Hitler in power in Germany his ranting speeches and ant-Jewish laws are making the people in Britain nervous. It feels like they’re heading for another war, when they haven’t even got over the horrors of WW1. War has already broken out in Spain between the Nationalists and Republicans, and some of the younger men have already signed up to go and fight in Spain.
The British Fascists, known as the Blackshirts and led by Oswald Mosley are taking advantage of the situation and are planning to march into an area of London which has a population of Jewish people.
Isabella works in a factory which is owned by a Jewish family. Her mother is of Spanish descent but within the family things are fraught, her two brothers are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and one of them is just about to leave to fight in Spain on the side of the Republicans and against the Fascist Nationalists, but unknown to everyone the other brother has been attending meetings of the Blackshirts.
When the Blackshirts march through their neighbourhood there’s mayhem and the family inadvertently gets involved.
This one was a great read, there is of course some romance involved, but it’s quite depressing that the same political problems are coming to the fore again in so many countries.
I just finished the fourth Kevin and Sadie book (not sure I ever read four and five) but I’d love to find this one eventually. Glad you shared this because I knew little about her other books. She seems to have made exposing intolerance a mission!
Constance,
I think it’s a bit of a Scottish trait as we have a phrase – “we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns” which means we’re all the same under the skin, and of course it was Robert Burns who said – “a man’s a man for a’ that”. But it’s still true that in some places that depressing Catholic/Protestant thing gets in the way! I have yet to read any of the Kevin and Sadie books.