Dangling awkwardly between my teens and my 20s, between working class and middle class, between the staid 1950s and the jaunty pop revolt of the 1960s, I went looking for authenticity at the movies, and found it — or if not, then the romance of it — at the kitchen sink with the British new wave. There, feral proles in brilliantined James Dean ’dos lounged charismatically against walls, caroused their sorrows away down the pub, knocked up cocky young women in dank alleys or tawdry fairgrounds, or tried to claw their way out of dead-end lives by marrying the factory boss’s daughter or making it big in workerish sports. What I, an owlish schoolgirl growing up in a demure London suburb where a child falling off his bike was as close as we got to rowdy behavior, found to identify with in all this rough-and-tumble is anybody’s guess. Slumming, most likely, amid the studiously dreary inner-city vistas where these tragic working-class heroes fought their lonely battles, which helped rub a retrospective sheen onto the drab London tenement my family had squeezed into when we arrived in England... More >>>