(I recommend all the books listed below. Please note that I do not earn commission on any sales.)

Up The Junction ~ Poor Cow

In Up the Junction, a collection of loosely connected episodes, young girls in Battersea work in factories, go out at night and pick up boys, take prams laden with washing to the public baths, and pay – or try to evade paying – the Tally Man for their new underwear and bedroom suites bought on instalment. The boys work in scrapyards or cleaning windows, go thieving, ride their motorbikes and cheat on the wives they married too young. In one story Sylvie squats behind a truck to relieve herself and the truck drives off. 'Here, wait till I've pulled me drawers up!' she shouts. In another, girls in a home for unmarried mothers talk about sex and a black girl is delivered of a (maybe) stillborn baby and is never seen again. Ruby has an agonising, illegal abortion brought on by a backstreet abortionist and suffers through the birth at home, refusing to have the doctor called in case he tries to save the baby.

The existence described is bleak and hopeless but the book simply pulses with life, the stories of young and old alike told mostly through long passages of ripe dialogue. Pop music of the Sixties plays both as a backdrop and as indirect, often ironic commentary on the action – Ben E King's Ecstasy thrumming on a juke box in a dirty café, Rube singing He's Got the Power by the Exciters after an afternoon doing washing at the baths.

The utterly astonishing Up the Junction was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature written by a young author, and became both a scandal and a runaway bestseller. Some critics positively raved. 'A new and exciting young writer with an ear for the authentic idiom of the Smoke.' 'Razor quick, abrasive, hugely comic...'. The BBC play of the novel in 1965, directed by Ken Loach, was watched by nearly ten million people and a record 464 viewers complained to the BBC. The film version in 1968, which departed from the original novel, starred Dennis Waterman and Suzy Kendall.

Not to be missed.

Books by the
’Angry Young Women’

Shelagh Delaney

Lynne Reid Banks

Penelope Mortimer

Nell Dunn

Margaret Drabble

Margaret Forster

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