UP THE JUNCTION

Keep never minding. It's only for life."" Life as it is in London's Battersea-- in the juke box clubs, laundries, lavatories, workshops, clip joints; youngsters (they're married by the time they're sixteen-- it's usually obligatory) in cheap serge suits, leather jackets, jeans; girls in beehives, plastic curlers; and all making out, or talking about it, in deserted houses, bomb sites, vans.... These three or four or five page sketches of life are seen through old-young eyes or spoken in a sassy, scrappy vernacular. They have considerably more authority than one would suspect since the slice of life is only snack-sized. The random violence, the short-lived pleasures, the restlessness, the hopelessness, it's all caught here in a series of casual impressions which could not be more insistent.... It's a small book, easy to lose, hard to place; but the talent is there.