The L-Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks’ 1960 novel about the pregnancy of a young (ish) single mother, is a superb evocation of a time when women’s choices were limited and attitudes to sex and marriage had not yet been challenged by the ‘permissive’ 1960s.
Single mothers in the 1950s and 1960s faced prejudice and opprobrium, and were advised to hide their shame by pretending to be married or widowed. You could choose to confer a kind of legitimacy on the child by legally adopting it and giving it your name.
London was starting to swing in 1966 but away from the glamour there was widespread squalour that was shown unflinchingly by director Ken Loach in Cathy Come Home.
The 1969 film All Neat in Black Stockings is based on a novel by Jane Gaskell, a prize-winning writer whose literary output over three decades consists mainly of fantasy novels. Her mid-1960s’ vampire romance The Shiny Narrow Grin has been acclaimed as the Twilight of its day, and some say is superior to it.
Chips With Everything by the playwright Arnold Wesker, who died recently, opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1962, and the following year there was a production in Wimbledon which a gang of us went to see.
‘Mr Kalinda’ is actually more than a little unfair and inaccurate, even on the basis of our first meeting with Jason Crouse, who becomes Alicia Florrick’s go-to investigator in the latest (and perhaps the last) series of The Good Wife now showing in the UK.
As aspiring Beat Girls, our Girl Squad, as we didn’t say back then, responded promptly to the discovery of Edmond T Greville’s film, Beat Girl, which was first released in 1960.
