Up The Junction author on her unlikely bond with the barmaid who inspired her work
Nell Dunn was a baronet’s daughter. Josie a teenage bride from a council flat with a colourful turn of phrase. Yet 50 years ago they formed a friendship that endures to this day
PROMISCUITY was simply not a suitable topic of conversation for those with her aristocratic background in the 1960s, so Nell Dunn, a writer in search of material, left her family’s Chelsea home and went to live among the impoverished working classes.
In doing so, this champion of female sexual freedom gave an unforgettable voice to the women of the slums of south London with her short story collection, Up The Junction, and made a lifetime’s worth of friends in the process.
We are talking today about her new memoir, The Muse, which takes up the story of one of those friendships.
“As in many families, sex wasn’t talked about when I was growing up,” Nell says, with glorious understatement. “That’s why I found it so amazing in Battersea. There was such talk of sex, and people were very witty about sex. It was a different culture entirely.”
Indeed it was, but to understand just how far from her own privileged background Nell strayed to discover the earthy stories that became hallmarks of her writing, you need to know a little more about her family.
Her maternal grandfather was the 5th Earl of Rosslyn – the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo – making her a direct descendant of Charles II and Nell Gwyn.
Even if she was not officially royal, pure blue blood ran in her veins. Her father Sir Philip Dunn was a hugely rich baronet and her elder sister Serena married the peer and investment banker Jacob Rothschild.
Cecil Beaton took her photograph and artists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were friends. Yet in 1959, Nell turned her back on the upper classes and her home in supersmart Chelsea and, together with her Etoneducated writer husband, Jeremy Sandford, headed south across the river to Battersea.
There they bought a little cottage in a busy street and Nell started to make friends among the locals. As a seriously posh girl, this made her a genuine outlier at a time when London was far from the gentrified fusion it is today.
“I just wasn’t interested in Chelsea,” Nell, now 84, says. “I found it all boring, actually. People didn’t relate to you or talk to you.”
NOT so in the working class enclave of Battersea where she was in her element. In possession of the only telephone and bathtub in the road, her home was soon full of chatty neighbours.
She found herself beguiled by their colloquial dialogue and started writing down the best bits. Some were gleaned from the local sweet factory where she took a job packing liqueur chocolates.
“I think my greatest talent is overhearing other people’s conversations,” says Nell wistfully. “I think I hear everything that other people don’t hear. I’m really very nosy; terrifically nosy about language.”
Her first book, Up The Junction, a prize-winning collection of short stories inspired by the struggles of working class women, came out in 1963 to huge acclaim. In the same year, her husband’s seminal play about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, was published. A controversial and harrowing backstreet abortion scene in Nell’s book caused a furore, but it did help shove the issue under the noses of parliamentarians, and helped lead to the groundbreaking Abortion Act.
“I was just saying around me – everyone what was all knew,” she explains.
A feature film version of Up The Junction was released in 1968. Her first novel, Poor Cow, published in 1967, was a bestseller and praised for its funny and frank account of women’s sexuality. In 1967, it was made into a film directed by Ken Loach and starring Terence Stamp and Carol White.
Dunn’s play Steaming was produced in 1981 and, four years later, was made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Dors. These two later works were inspired by the life of her muse – the subject of her new memoir, a woman whom she calls Josie – who now lives in Bognor Regis,West Sussex.
Josie was a working class girl from the Roehampton estate in south-west London who married at 16.
Nell was attracted by her colourful turn of phrase. Fifty years on, they are still friends and talk every day on the phone.
“I was drawn to her because she was a very delightful human being and I was also interested in her lifestyle, not worrying too much about tomorrow but living in the day,” explains Nell. “I was terribly impressed she could run a bar but I think it was her use of language that particularly attracted me. “It conjures up, very vividly, a way of life and a way of thought – that ability to be very present. You are never lonely with her and she knows the answer to everything in life. If you said you had a sore toe, she would have a remedy for it.”
Josie encouraged Nell to write the book, which quotes extensively from the letters she wrote Nell during various love affairs and features all her original spellings.
“She read The Muse in one day and loved it,” says Nell, who now lives in Fulham, close to her Chelsea roots and her adopted home of Battersea.
“I did ask if we should take out the bit about her having beautiful t**s. But she wanted me to leave it in. Most people don’t have that kind of confidence. “A friend was reading The Muse and he said, ‘I don’t warm to her very much’ but I didn’t in the least mind. She is very narcissistic, but why not be? Why not be interested in yourself?”
It’s a comment reminiscent of the one Nell made on live television
‘I just wasn’t interested in Chelsea. I found it all boring. People didn’t relate to you or talk to you’