Poor Cow - Nell Dunn

POOR COW – NELL DUNN

My only problem with Nell Dunn is that she was upper middle class writing about the working class and this has never sat comfortably with me because I've always believed the working class should be writing about themselves, not having it done by others. That said, with Nell Dunn all is forgiven because essentially she was an observer and her observations are very truthful. Unlike most other writers from different backgrounds writing about the working class, she's neither condescending, patronising, mocking or critical but rather supportive, sympathetic and participatory.

Poor Cow was Nell Dunn's second book following the success of her début, Up The Junction. It was published in 1967 and with that in mind it's a surprise in just how adult it is in its subject matter and how ribald the language is.

Actually, the subject matter isn't so much 'adult' just unexpectedly honest, open and unflinching. There's no pretension, no coyness, no shame and no agenda just a refreshing transparency in saying how it is whether it's regarding sex or crime or the nuts and bolts of everyday living.

Poor Cow is a series of snapshots of a young girl's life, living in London and bringing up a baby alone. Life, however, is never a straightforward narrative from A to B but more like a ball being flipped around a pinball machine with the bells and the buzzers and the flashing lights adding not only to the delight but to the frustration.

Poor Cow is a patchwork quilt of monologues, plain storytelling, letters (complete with spelling mistakes), snippets of songs, anecdotes and memories. The whole creating a tapestry of working class life described by one of the characters as having one foot in the grave and the other in the gutter.

All that the main character wants is that which she only deserves but life is a perpetual struggle so happiness when it comes is grabbed at with both hands only for it to always slip through her fingers like sand. Her only constant source of joy is from that which she never asked for – her child.

On the one hand, Poor Cow is a depressing tale though on the other hand it contains a lot of humour ('Every bloke I've been with has bin very, very clean that's my main interest – if someone doesn't look clean I won't have anything to do with him – well I'll give him a wank, I'm not that selfish.') and the kind of lust for life that can only come from those with the odds stacked against them. Laughter in the face of adversity is a tool for survival used not only to smite the high and mighty but also wife beater husbands, men in general, nosey neighbours, and anyone really who might be the cause of grief. Tellingly, the main character uses laughter constantly against herself from start to finish.

Nell Dunn isn't what you might call a brilliant writer as such but she is a brilliant observer and Poor Cow is a very good example of this as is Up The Junction. Poor Cow is like the book form equivalent of having the words 'love' and 'hate' tattooed onto a pair of knuckles...

John Serpico

Up The Junction - Nell Dunn

UP THE JUNCTION - NELL DUNN

We all know Nell Dunn was slumming it when she moved from Chelsea to Battersea and started writing about the lives of the working class people there but I'm sure that if I'm able to forgive her for it then anyone can. I mean, did anyone accuse George Orwell of slumming it for going off and living like a tramp then writing about it in Down And Out In Paris And London? Did anyone accuse Wilfred Owen of the same when he went off to the trenches in the First World War and started writing his poems? Not that I'm comparing life in Battersea during the Sixties to the life of a tramp or to the horrors of Flanders but you know what I mean?

Nell Dunn's father was a knighted industrialist and her mother was Lady Mary Sybil St Clair-Erskine, so yes indeed, she did come from a very privileged, upper class background. Bearing this in mind, I must admit that when I hear the word 'culture', unlike Herman Goering I don't reach for my revolver but when I hear the words 'privileged' and 'upper class' I do tend to reach for my surface-to-air missile launcher. In Nell Dunn's case, however, I make an exception due entirely to the calibre of her writing.

She moved to Battersea, in London, with her journalist husband Jeremy Sandford in 1959 having just married, their wedding reception having been held at the Ritz. They bought themselves a tiny house and Dunn took a job at a local chocolate factory. The house, according to Dunn was "the most beautiful place I have ever been to. A grapevine grew wild over the outdoor lavatory and the garden was full of sunflowers six-feet high with faces as wide as dinner plates. At the end of our street were four tall chimneys..."

Her house, her fellow women workers at the factory, the local community and the life therein all enchanted her and it's the observations she made of all these things that went to form her début novel, Up The Junction.

First published in 1963, essentially it reads like a writer's equivalent of an artist's sketch pad. Dunn watched, listened and observed but also obviously joined in to the best of her abilities and became a good friend to a number of people there. It's a very specific style she writes in, focussing primarily on dialogue linked by brief descriptions. It's minimalist but very effective, very evocative and at times very powerful. The dialogue is all. Conversations, quips, exchanges, remarks, exclamations, statements and whispered intimacies; all flow into one and other to create a complete story. Shining through and elbowing its way to the forefront, however, is humour. Whether said in innocence or with the full intention of being funny, the humour is bawdy, sad and stupidly delicious. The stuff of high comedy. At times it's even reminiscent of the humour of Withnail And I, which is no bad thing at all.

Nothing is judged, belittled or mocked. Dunn simply records. But what she picks up on is - as the blurb on the back cover from the Daily Mail correctly pinpoints - harshly truthful yet poetic, and it's this aspect of the book which is the cause of controversy. Lewd banter is recorded verbatim along with racism, upfront female sexuality, the normality of criminality, and - most controversial of all - abortion. Back street abortion.

If you tend to judge a book by its cover then you'd be inclined to think Up The Junction was simply lightweight pulp fiction. Not that there's anything wrong with pulp fiction but Dunn's book is much more than that and to a large degree I think it's been mis-sold and misrepresented. How powerful and heart-rending, for example, is this:

'Rube was shrieking, a long, high, animal shriek. The baby was born alive, five months old. It moved, it breathed, its heart beat.

Rube lay back, white and relieved, across the bed. Sylvie and her mum lifted the eiderdown and peered at the tiny baby still joined by the cord. "You can see it breathing, look!"

Rube smiled. "It's nothing - I've had a look meself."

Finally the ambulance arrived. They took Rube away, but they left behind the baby, which had now grown cold. Later Sylvie took him, wrapped in the Daily Mirror, and threw him down the toilet.'

Mary Whitehouse objected to it, in all likelihood because everything about Up The Junction is so real and so human. It reads like a very accurate depiction of what life was like in a working class area of London during the Sixties, where the times were a-changing and cultures were colliding. All played out to a soundtrack of American pop songs and pub sing-a-longs.

Dunn went on to write Poor Cow and the stage play Steaming, both of which were made into films. Up The Junction was also, of course, filmed firstly by Ken Loach as a play for the BBC and then as a film proper in 1968 starring a host of 1960's British cinema actors and actresses including Liz Fraser, a young Dennis Waterman, Maureen Lipman (who is brilliant in it) and Hylda Baker. It also, of course, formed the title to the classic song by Squeeze...

John Serpico