Reading the 20th Century discussion

Up the Junction by Nell Dunn was joint winner in our poll to determine which book to discuss for our February 2020 group read theme - Working Class Writing

Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.

This discussion will open on or around 1 February 2020

Here's to another enjoyable RTTC discussion




Up the Junction by Nell Dunn

I enjoyed this article....


The London of Nell Dunn and Up The Junction



Her stories of a long lost, early 1960s Battersea broke new ground and generated TV and movie adaptations

Nell Dunn was a “posh bird” from Chelsea, a knight’s daughter and the maternal granddaughter of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. In 1959, she moved south of the river to what was then run down, working-class Battersea and wrote a series of short stories about her new life there. They were published in 1963 under the title Up The Junction.

Up The Junction won both plaudits and disapproval for its spare but vivid social realism. Dunn was accused by some of slumming, but New Statesman, which published one of the stories before the book came out, defended her, saying she was “reworking a national literary tradition, the love affair between the classes”.

Ken Loach was an admirer. He and Dunn adapted the book for a BBC Wednesday Play, which Loach directed. Sylvie was played by Carol White, who became famous the following year as the protagonist of Cathy Come Home, the epochal TV drama about homelessness, also directed by Loach, and written by Dunn’s then spouse, Jeremy Sandford. In 1967, White starred in another Loach-directed adaption of a Dunn book, Poor Cow, this time turned into a feature film.

Click here for the rest of the article

Also in the above article, here’s the Wednesday Play version of Up The Junction. It’s an hour long and on YouTube...

The Wednesday Plays: Up The Junction


Three years later, in 1968, a film version came out, starring Suzy Kendall as Dunn, along with Maureen Lipman (Sylvie), Adrienne Posta (Rube) and Dennis Waterman.

Up the Junction - Trailer

Onto the book version of Up The Junction (1963), which I read a couple of weeks ago, overall I found it quite dated however was very glad to have finally read it.

It's an interesting period piece: a collection of dialogue-driven short snapshots of a group of young working class Londoners in the Battersea area.

It must have been quite shocking and ground breaking when it was first published.

I won't say any more for now.

Who has read it?

Or is reading it, or plans to?

I'm really looking forward to finding out what the rest of you think about this slice of London literature and social history.

I have read it and, as you say, a slice of social history. I found it a fascinating glimpse of London working class life, if a little disjointed in places.

I read this many years ago, but don't remember it very well. I have reserved a library copy, so will be able to refresh my faulty memory, but I remember it as being set in an ordinary working-class area, not a slum.

Was Battersea considered a slum in the early 1960s? Probably not, thought it would have been quite deprived by modern standards. Some of the scenes in the book certainly suggest this.

I recently finished it and my review is:

This is an odd little book, a series of short stories with some of the stories connected by characters. At first I was a little disoriented by not really having a feel for the characters but I soon adjusted by just thinking I was in a coffeeshop overhearing a discussion in the booth behind me. It wasn't as important to identify or know much about the person speaking; I just listened to the rhythm, tone and details of what was being said. As I did with the Don Camillo stories, I limited my reading to just a few stories at a time and found that I really looked forward to my daily taste of the junction talk. Not for all tastes, though. I also think that 130 pages was long enough. I rate it 3.7 stars rounded up to 4 stars for the different, yet interesting, reading experience it provided.

For me, the book brought back memories I had while an Anglophile in my tween years in the 1960s. There was a Brit movie I saw at that time, called The Boys, starring Richard Todd, about young London lads on trial for murder that came out in 1962, that I kept picturing when I was reading. That made me enjoy the book more.

Thanks Brian for your interesting review


Like you, I didn't try to keep track of who was who....

It wasn't as important to identify or know much about the person speaking; I just listened to the rhythm, tone and details of what was being said.

I saw each incident as a snapshot or vignette of life in that community at that time.

I've just started and have only read the first story so far, so am not sure what to think as yet. I've already noticed that it won't be possible to keep track of who is saying what, though!

Will start it today.

It was interesting that we saw London through the eyes of the author, who was - although accepted by the other women - not of the same class. I think it gave her a unique perspective. It was published in 1963, a few years before I was born, and I think it was a time when the, more typical, rows of terraced housing was being replaced by those Sixties high rise blocks.

Looking into tower blocks in London, I was interested to learn the first 3 were built in Bow in 1951, probably to help replace housing lost through bombing. London was certainly changing at that time and communities faced re-housing and separation.

She certainly has an ear for dialogue. Brian's 'overhearing a discussion in a coffee shop' analogy is a good one.
Some of the stories had been first published in the New Statesman, according to the preface, and were then collected into this book.

I've read the first two 'chapters'.
In way the a photograph is a snapshot of a moment in time, which is full of detail, I find these little chapters a snapshot of moment of someone's experience.
So far not so London centric, I see these moments replicated across the country.
I'll keep in reading, I'm interested in how the working class is portrayed in London in Nell's stories, as she appear to identify as working class.

The others living in the area do point out that her family have money from time to time, but she doesn't seem to have much herself and she is working in the sweet factory along with the women who grew up there.

Yes, that's true, Val. She is working with them and they sometimes seem to like pointing out that she's different, as an enjoyable eccentricity. Lots of the speech reminded me of when my grandmother (now long dead) took me into work with her, in the early Sixties. She worked in a Post Office sorting office in West Ham and there was that same, over-whelming sense of noise and cheerful banter. I suppose the book just feels very 'London' to me because of the accents, but, of course, similar groups of young women were having very typical experiences around the country.

Nigeyb wrote: "Was Battersea considered a slum in the early 1960s? Probably not, thought it would have been quite deprived by modern standards. Some of the scenes in the book certainly suggest this."

There seem to have been some slum areas - I've just read the first three stories, and in one of them there was a mention of a bulldozer knocking down slums. Maybe a tower block would be going up there?

There are mentions of dismantled prefabs and an empty terrace as well, and it is certainly referred to as slum clearance, but later opinion seems to be that all this clearance was somewhat over-enthusiastic and that a programme of putting bathrooms in existing properties would have been a better option.

My mother lived in a prefab after the war and she loved it. I went to the Chiltern Open Air Museum a while back and that is a fabulous place, with lots of buildings - including a post-WWII era prefab. It has lots of really unique buildings.

https://www.coam.org.uk/

They seem to be coming back.

and some never went away:
ndependent.co.uk/property/gardening/t...

We had prefabs in our road in East London. My mum was always quite jealous of them at first, as they had bathrooms and indoor toilets. Ours was a two up , two down with no bathroom and an outside toilet. In fact the more I think about it our road was unique, there was a maternity hospital at one end, and a cemetery at the other. A pub in the middle, and a sweet factory. Almost as if every thing was provided.

Jill wrote: "... there was a maternity hospital at one end, and a cemetery at the other..."

So walking down your street was, in the words of Mark Knoepler, the proverbial Walk of Life

I've read a few of these now and am trying to get used to the lack of plot and just concentrate on the details of life in the time and place being described, but it isn't always easy to stick to that.

Yes, I found both our choices this month interesting, but I don't think I will return to either. Like A Kind of Loving, though (for those who have read both) there is a common theme in some stories, which is the spectre of unwanted pregnancies. In this book, with main female characters, we see the other side of this, with back street abortionists, while, in A Kind of Loving, it is the expectation of marriage that the male character faces. I am not sure the situation has improved much, even in modern times, but that probably shows that ignorance and youth combined still have similar results!

Susan wrote: "I am not sure the situation has improved much, even in modern times, but that probably shows that ignorance and youth combined still have similar results"

The contraceptive pill and abortions both being available on the NHS; widespread acceptance of one parent families; and lack of stigma about modern divorce have surely made a huge difference Susan? Or were you thinking about some other aspect of unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock?

I really meant that, even though those things are available, many young people don't necessarily avail themselves of them, so end up with unplanned pregnancies through youthful embarrassment, etc.

Susan wrote: "Like A Kind of Loving, though (for those who have read both) there is a common theme in some stories, which is the spectre of unwanted pregnancies. In this book, with main female characters, we see the other side of this, with back street abortionists, while, in A Kind of Loving, it is the expectation of marriage that the male character faces."

Yes, there are interesting parallels between the two books, and they work really well together as a pairing. I'll add another comment about AKOL over on that thread.

Susan wrote: "I really meant that, even though those things are available, many young people don't necessarily avail themselves of them, so end up with unplanned pregnancies through youthful embarrassment, etc."

Right. Got you. I am sure you're quite right too. It must happen all the time. I guess the difference is that the consequences are nowhere near as dire as they once were.

In addition to having to get married, young women were sometimes sent away to have their babies which were then forcibly taken from them. It really was a terrible thing back in those more traditional times.

Yes, that happened to a friend of my mother's and she never got over it. That was in the 1950's.

My mother had a relative who was sent to an asylum because she was pregnant out of wedlock. The feeling being that she was mad to have let it happen. Apparently she was there for the whole of her life. No one knew what happened to the baby. This was Victorian times.

I think my great-grandfather's second wife may have been an illegitimate baby who was taken away from her mother, or possibly abandoned by her. She was raised by nuns in an orphanage in Ireland and had no birth certificate (which was a problem when they wanted to marry).

You discover all these things if you start doing your family history, don't you? I couldn't discover anything about my maternal great-grandmother at first, or my great-grandfather, for similar reasons. It was untangling names, as they, and their parents, used 'married' names, when they were not married - at least to each other! - which caused me to give up and get a specialist to work out who was who. I also, delightedly, discovered I had a relative who was sent to Australia, so I come from a ne'er do well background of convicts and workhouse inmates. No country houses for me, unless my relatives were in the scullery!

I've got a bit further with this now and it's certainly very well-written, but I do feel the characters remain rather distant - a lot of the time it is all very matter of fact and we don't really know how the women feel about what is happening.

I agree, Judy. I found both this month's reads more interesting than really engrossing. This felt to me, more social history than anything else.

I agree too. We hear what people are saying, but that can only give hints of what those people think and feel. There are some events later in the book which must have been more upsetting than they appear.

I agree too. Most of the events are very mundane and repetitive, and the more interesting ones are never developed so we have to put our own interpretation on what happened. It was a quick read but not very satisfying.

Thanks, Susan, Val and Pamela - sounds as if we have all been noticing the same things with this.

Has anyone watched the TV play or the feature film? I think it would be interesting to see how they compare.

Judy wrote: "Has anyone watched the TV play or the feature film? I think it would be interesting to see how they compare"

I've watched about 15 minutes of the TV play

The YouTube link is above

I thought it was a really convincing and clever evocation of the book

To save you trawling above, here’s the Wednesday Play version of Up The Junction. It’s an hour long and on YouTube...


The Wednesday Plays: Up The Junction

As I say, based on what I've seen it's excellent. Really good. Director Ken Loach did quite a bit of location filming which really adds to its impact, that and the incredibly naturalistic performances of the actors


Three years later, in 1968, a film version came out, starring Suzy Kendall as Dunn, along with Maureen Lipman (Sylvie), Adrienne Posta (Rube) and Dennis Waterman.

Up the Junction - Trailer

Thank you, Nigeyb, I will give them a try.

I could actually see this working better visually, if they link the stories and keep a core of characters.

I've almost finished reading now - can't say I really like it. It does give a vivid visual portrayal of the poverty and desperation but never goes very deep.

There is only a short author's preface in the Virago ebook I read, but Nell Dunn wrote a longer preface to Poor Cow, which I think from Goodreads reviews is also in some editions of Up the Junction. I read this preface online by looking up Poor Cow on Google Books, and it does give a bit more background about Nell Dunn's time in Battersea.

I had a similar reaction to both our main books this month, Judy. I was interested in the social history, but not very engaged by either of them. I was disappointed by this one, but it was really a series of stories and I often struggle with short stories.

Nell Dunn seems to have been better known as a playwright and scriptwriter. I have not watched the film, but I can see why. These are scenes from Battersea life, so we get the conversations and the visual descriptions, but I agree with Judy that it does lack depth.

I have finished the book and....
Having read it, I found it could been written in any town or city in the UK not just London. The style is easy to read but, a style most writers could easily replicate and to be honest we all could write in that style about our life experiences. Maybe we should and read back to ourselves years later?
The subject matter must therefore of greater importance. It is a selection of experiences of three working class young women. I was disappointed as it could have been so much more, but it centred on their quest for quick temporary happiness rather than hopes and aspirations beyond the narrow local lives they seem to be trapped in. Because of which there is a danger that the reader may believe this is a real and true overall depiction of the working class.....it isn't. They are a selection experiences and snapshots in time of three women, you may ask why it was those experiences were more worthy of note than other experiences, what was the author intention?
One thing it did do, is make me think of my late teenage years etc and if the 60's were any different to the 80's. To me in the 80’s there were greater opportunities and social mobility was possible and generally accepted and encouraged, although I’m unsure of the situation was in the 60’s.
All that said, I did enjoy it and enjoyed more as I progressed through the book.

Thanks Michael

The film adaptation of Up The Junction is on TalkingPictures TV tomorrow (Saturday 13th June) at 9 pm

(Freeview channel 81)

Thanks Nigeyb - off to set it to record!

Thanks from me as well.