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Welcome to Part Two of my ‘Summer of Love’ series, examining some of the defining women’s writing of and about the 1960s.
If you missed Part One, you can find my essay on Lynne Reid Banks and pregnancy narratives here. This week, I want to look at two mid-sixties books by the author Nell Dunn, as well as examine her unorthodox life and work, charting the height of the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’ of London life.
Born in 1936, Nell Dunn was a member of the British aristocracy, being the daughter of Baronet Sir Philip Dunn. She was educated at a convent up until the age of 14. Despite her advantageous position in life, her father did not consider education a priority for his two daughters, and she was unable to read until the age of 9.
In 1959, Dunn took the radical decision to move to the South London district of Battersea, taking a job in a sweet factory where she studied her fellow female workers in order to write about their lives.
Her 1963 award-winning collection of short stories, Up the Junction, features much of her observations and characters drawn from her time spent in the factory.
The stories depict the lives of people inhabiting the industrial slums of Battersea and Clapham Junction in the early 1960s. Written with the use of observed colloquial speech, the stories portray petty thieves, sexual encounters, births, deaths, and back-street abortions. The originality of the narratives provided a view of 1960’s London life that many did not recognise. It was praised for its vibrant and realistic portrayal of London life, with what many felt was a non-judgemental portrait of the working-class inhabitants of the area.
The collection went on to win the 1963 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and was adapted for television by director Ken Loach in 1965, with a further cinema version in 1968. (Incidentally, it also inspired this hit song by UK band Squeeze, ‘Up the Junction’.)
The so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’ was a period generally thought of as occurring between 1964 and 1970 in Britain, which saw a swift shift of social and cultural change for the UK. The term originated from the more permissive 1960s culture as well as the prevalence of British pop music.
The term most accurately applied to the teenagers of the 1960s, particularly amongst working class communities, with more relatable portrayals of their lives on screen and in literature. There was also a plethora of jobs available at this time for the younger members of the working classes.
Gone were the days of teenagers emulating the dress codes and music of their parents. They had their own music and fashions to inspire them to develop their unique looks and tastes. They were the original teenage activists: many joined groups like C.N.D (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and anti-Vietnam rallies. Like today’s teenagers supporting the Free Palestine camp-outs and the Extinction Rebellion causes, these young people discovered they had a voice and they intended to use it to shape their futures.
1965 became the heyday of the Mods; a group into bespoke tailoring, often purchased from boutiques in Brick Lane, as well as Biba in Kensington and the popular Carnaby Street, with Mary Quant’s infamous mini-skirts and the first ‘supermodels’ such as Twiggy setting the scene for how to dress to embrace this new cultural moment.
The Beatles, of course, dominated much of the pop music charts of the 1960s, with ‘Beatle-Mania’ following them across the world, and with other bands such as the Rolling Stones attracting teenage fans. It really was a youth-driven cultural revolution, with the UK scoring highly on its music and fashion exports.
As we saw in last week’s essay, however, although there was a burgeoning sexual revolution taking place, women’s lives beyond teenagehood wasn’t all fashion and music.
Nell Dunn’s 1967 novel Poor Cow further explores the realities for the working-class women of Battersea. Despite the more permissive society of the 1960s, the book caused scandal with its explicit frankness about female desire and unsentimental portrayal of central character Joy.
Set in 1960s Fulham, at the time an area of yellow-brick terraces belonging to predominately working-class renters, the novel opens with Joy taking her new-born son to a café.
‘She walked down Fulham Broadway past a shop hung about with cheap underwear, the week-old baby clutched in her arms, his face brick red against his new white bonnet’.
Britannia Road, situated just down the road from Fulham Broadway, lies on the boundary between the fashionable swinging Chelsea and its poorer neighbour Fulham. The contrast between the two are evidenced in the novel, with Joy shopping for cheap fashion from the local market, rather than the fashionable King’s Road boutiques.
Joy is 22 and married to Tom, a thief who has been sent to prison, forcing Joy to move into her aunt’s one-room dwelling. She begins a relationship with Davey, a friend of her ex-partner, eventually moving into a council flat with him. After an abusive and controlling relationship with Tom, Joy is happy in her new relationship with Davey, who is a kind and warm boyfriend, though still a thief like Tom. After a burglary goes wrong, Davey is also sent to prison and Joy is forced back to her aunt’s house.
Taking a job as a barmaid, she befriends a colleague, Beryl, and gets on well with the local punters, enjoying sexual relationships with several of them, as well as posing as a glamour model for extra cash. When Tom leaves prison however and takes her and her son to Catford, she falls pregnant again and their abusive relationship continues, with Joy feeling unable to leave the marriage due to her children. Her lack of agency is palpable, with the limited choices this brings.
‘I don’t want to be down and out all the time…’
The narrative is shaped around Joy’s voice and uneducated position, with the letters she writes to Davy in prison full of spelling errors and it’s difficult not to see Dunn as a little patronising in the way she portrays the plight of the working-class Joy.
The decision by Dunn to up-sticks and leave her comfortable Chelsea existence to live amongst the working classes, mining their lives for inspiration, has sometimes been criticised. She could, after all, simply return to the life she was used to at any time. Unlike her characters, she was not caught in a perpetual fight for survival, and her writing could be suggested to diminish some of the very little agency they had.
However, Dunn’s business owner father did not feel that women needed education, and Dunn responded to criticism of Joy’s uneducated letters to Davey by stating that she could not spell much better than Joy, and was not very educated herself.
Dunn was brought up in Chelsea and married another writer, Jeremy Sandford, in 1957. Giving up their smart Chelsea home, the pair moved to the less desirable, unfashionable area of Battersea in order to observe a different class and society. There they brought up their three sons, a place which provided material for both writers (Sandford wrote the script for the groundbreaking film Cathy Come Home), with director Ken Loach being a frequent visitor, leading to the film production of Poor Cow as well as the earlier mentioned Up the Junction.
Dunn also immersed herself in the scene by taking a job in a sweet factory in order to assimilate into her surroundings. Here she met Josie, a worker who inspired the character of Joy, and the pair became close friends. Arguably, Dunn’s personal circumstances allowed for her to live amongst working-class people and utilise them within her fiction in a way that feels a little voyeuristic.
She has however indicated in interviews that she found friendship in the communities she encountered in Battersea that she couldn’t find from the people within her aristocratic background, bringing her a sense of liberation.
Dunn’s portrayal of Joy shows a character who presents with little regard for how her life is going or with any sense that she may be able to take agency within it. Frustratingly, she appears resigned to the misfortunes of her life. She does not seem to have any remorse for living on the rewards of crime, nor wish to better her circumstances by working. Her feelings towards her son tend between an initial ambivalence to a close affection as the novel develops.
‘Even when she wasn’t with him, she could feel his weight in her arms and his mouth, after drinking, wet against her cheek…all that really matters was that the child should be all right and that they should be together’.
Dunn’s Talking to Women released in 1965 is a collection of interviews she conducted with nine friends, varying from ‘society heiresses to factory workers’. Dunn could claim both for herself and her life experiences. These friends included writers Edna O’Brien and Ann Quin. She was also a celebrated playwright, with her first play Steaming appearing in 1981, winning her a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and film scripts for the BBC.
Dunn’s depiction of working-class life in 1960s London evokes a city coming to terms with the austerity of the 1950s, with factory jobs in plentiful supply. Dunn found a sense of freedom within the streets of Battersea where she chose to relocate with her young family; somewhere she could absorb the realities of the time perhaps, regardless of whether you agree with her methods.
She claimed to remain good friends with Josie, the former barmaid. However, unlike Josie and the others, it must be remembered that she could leave her situation at any time she wanted, and did in fact leave Battersea for Fulham eventually.
Whether you consider Dunn a voyeur who dabbled in the life of the working class woman for her own artistic rewards, or a valuable chronicler of an important era of changes within working-class life, her life’s work provides a remarkable blueprint for the study of the lives of the ordinary inhabitants of a city in the middle of a period of great change.
Thank you for reading Part Two of my Summer of Love series. Next week in the third and final part, I shall be examining the essays of Joan Didion, exploring her observations of the 1960s as the decade ended. See you next week!
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I met Nell Dunn once. She was so completely charming , curious and open that I later regretted not pursuing a friendship. That generation was so interesting.
I love this! Nell Dunn sounds fascinating, I’ve added Up the Junction to my list. It’s getting longer and longer after reading your newsletter… I confess I’d only heard of this one because of the Squeeze song - I’m looking forward to checking it out :)