Up the Junction

by Dunn, Nell

• ISBN13: 9781582430669
• ISBN10: 1582430667
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-14
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Nell Mary Dunn is an English playwright, screenwriter and author. She is known especially for a volume of short stories, Up the Junction, and a novel, Poor Cow.

Table of Contents

Out with the Girls	9	(6)
Up the Junction	15	(8)
The Gold Blouse	23	(8)
The Deserted House	31	(8)
Dinner Hour	39	(6)
Sunday Morning	45	(6)
Wedding Anniversary	51	(8)
The Clipjoint	59	(10)
Bang on the Common	69	(10)
Wash Night	79	(8)
Out with the Boys	87	(6)
The Trial	93	(6)
Prison Visit	99	(6)
Death of an Old Scrubber	105	(6)
The Tally Man	111	(14)
The Children	125