Stan Barstow
Thursday, March 14, 2013 at 8:10AM 
Stan Barstow, 1928-2011. author
I came across this photo of Stan Barstow whilst tracking down something else. Looking like a young Orwell, he actually was the author of A Kind of Loving, published in 1960. He was born in 1928, thus the officer's moustache which he was too young to qualify for. This is, perhaps, one of the things that made that generation angry. They couldn't help being born in 1928 and so being only 17 when WWII ended – they'd missed it all. And angry they were, John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Britain's 'angry young men' writing in the late 1950s, gritty portrayals of postwar northern urban life that cracked the tin ceiling of the working class.
I'd read these books, because my father was a librarian and they were all around the house, and then in the early 1960s they were all made into films – black and white, wonderfully bleak, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey – all seen in grade 8 or 9 at the Capitol Theatre in Nanaimo. I fell for it all like a ton of bricks, as they say. Profoundly passionate, hopelessly romantic within the tough strictures of working class morés; clearly I wasn't reading Virginia Woolf – that came in grade 10, nonetheless I absorbed it all, as a 14 year-old will do. It didn't have anything to do with a life in Canada, but that's the thing about reading books, one is transported. Completely.
Thinking of re-reading Barstow, I find the Calgary Public Library which lauds itself for being the most active in the country, has none of his books.
Reader Comments (3)
Did not read Barstow but fell hard for Sillitoe, repulsiveness and all! Time to revisit the Angry Young Men and the Kitchen Sink.
I read A Kind of Loving purely by accident. At junior school (under-11 in England) we read a book called The Goalkeeper's Revenge by Bill Naughton and much later on I fancied re-reading it, but I couldn't remember either the title or the author. For some reason I thought it was by Stan Barstow so I got A Kind of Loving out at the library and read it.
I also read Walter Greenwood's fantastic Love on the Dole while searching for that Naughton book. I've still never re-read it.
Once in a while I re-read some of these books and find them terribly innocent, on the brink of huge social change but not able to see it yet. Although it was new to be writing the kitchen sink novels, and to be reading them, the writers and the people they describe grew up in that interwar period that initiated 25 years of great material hardship.
The past week of the examination of Margaret Thatcher's legacy has repeated over and over that the England she 'inherited' was broken. I'm not sure it was broken as much as it was a very poor, L-Shaped Room sort of place. The frustration and anger of all these writers was what led the working class to turn to Thatcherism I suppose -- the frustration of being caught in such limited social mobility.
I'm not nostalgic about the life in Barstow, or SIllitoe or any of them, one wouldn't want to go back, but I'm not sure that all our longings have been fulfilled by more and more 'things'.