Should Pamela Kellino have written this book? Set in the East End of London and narrated by the pretty but not very bright daughter of a cleaning woman and a fairly useless former soldier, it’s a grim but vivid story of the bad things desperate people can do. The sins and crimes committed range from petty theft to grand larceny, from white lies to false accusations, from prostitution to illegal abortion, from hot- to cold-blooded murder. A book with few nice things and no nice people, This Little Hand is a long way from your typical middlebrown English novel of its time.
Young Flo lives with her parents, sister and orphaned cousin Ol in what they consider a rather plush flat: two rooms and a kitchen. “We didn’t have any water and you had to go down to the end of the street to get any. It was about five blocks down — they had a lavatory there too. It was a wonderful building.” Ma does the morning cleaning at Greenaway’s, the local department store specializing in cheap and shoddy goods. Flo gets a job wrapping packages at Greenaway’s, and the store serves as the object and instrument of much that happens from then on. As with Raskolnikov’s old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, when you’re dirt poor, the most miserable enterprise can seem like Fort Knox.
One night, looking for a back-alley abortion for a friend, Flo meets Karam, an Anglo-Indian whose operations aren’t limited to helping out desperate young women. Flo is immediately attracted. “He was the last thing in the world I would have expected. He was so beautiful that tears had come in my eyes. He was an Indian, but lovely, lovely, like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Struck by Karam’s good looks, confidence, and smooth manners, Flo allows herself to be seduced and then drawn into his other shadowy affairs. From there, the story quickly swirls itself down into a vortex of corruption and violence that ends with Flo holding a knife to Karam’s neck.
This Little Hand could be seen as the distaff counterpart to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, with Kellino’s Flo and Karam as parallels to Greene’s Rose and Pinkie. In both stories, an innocent — perhaps not truly good, but at least not overtly bad — is pulled over to the dark side by the strength of one truly corrupted and evil.
And yet I knew too much about Pamela Kellino to be fully drawn into This Little Hand. At the time she wrote it, Kellino was roughly the same age as Flo, but at that point their similarities end.
Kellino was born into wealth and comfort. Her father, Isidore Ostrer, was a banker who became own of the moguls of British film when he took over as president of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the 1920s. By the age of 24, his daughter Pamela had married twice: first the cinematographer Roy Kellino and then the actor James Mason. She’d also starred in a number of stage and radio productions as well as in a couple of films. Although she wrote two further books as Pamela Kellino and continued to use that name in films until the mid-1950s, she was known as Pamela Mason for most of her career (despite her contentious divorce from Mason in 1962).
So Pamela Kellino and Flo, the narrator of This Little Hand, lived at near-opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum in England. When Flo was being packed off to reform school, Kellino was being photographed for The Tatler and Bystander society pages. Which raises the question: should This Little Hand be criticized in the same way that Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt was?
In the letter that 142 American writers sent to Oprah Winfrey calling for her to pull American Dirt from her book club, they argued that Cummins’ novel was not “imagined well nor responsibly, nor has it been effectively researched. The book is widely and strongly believed to be exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed….” They acknowledged that “Many of us are also fiction writers, and we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences: writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves.” So their reservations about American Dirt were, in effect, about degrees. One has to assume that they wouldn’t have objected if the book had been imagined well and responsibly and effectively researched.
I’m at an even farther remove from Flo and her world as depicted in This Little Hand than was Pamela Kellino, so I’m not in a strong position to be passing judgment. But I could not shake a certain skepticism about the book when reading it, in a way that I never once considered when reading G. E. Trevelyan’s story of a London bag lady, William’s Wife (for the sake of comparison). Trevelyan immersed herself in the sensibility of Jane, her bag lady. Jane’s paranoia and extreme avarice becomes the reader’s. In the case of Flo, however, I had more the sensation of watching rather than experiencing — rather like looking at an animal through the bars of a zoo cage. Perhaps Pamela Kellino could have gone on to write better, more convincing accounts of the lives of people far from her experience had she been willing to commit as completely and intensively as G. E. Trevelyan did. But there is throughout This Little Hand an air of dilletantism that the stench of sweat and dirt from Flo’s East End never quite overcomes.
Other Reviews
- • Times Literary Supplement
- This Little Hand is the story of a young girl brought up in hideous slum conditions and of her introduction into the London underworld. Although it may seem a little too meaty towards the close, the reader is left with an impression of sober imaginative truth, of genuine power also, possibly as yet immature, to convey such truth.
- • Edwin Muir, The Listener
- [T]he book … is written with an astonishing passion and directness that burns up the squalor. Flo herself is an originally conceived character, a baffling but quite natural mixture of innocence and toughness, only seventeen when she stands her trial… [I]t is quite without the mechanical quality which goes with that kind of writing. It is the work of a sensitive writer whose mind is possessed by the extremes of human misery. As a mere story it is sometimes magnificent.
- • Britannia and Eve
- When I first met Pamela Kellino, the daughter of a film magnate, she was starring in her first film and was officially listed as a starlet. What she had learned since those days seems to be a lot about a very grim type of life, a London girl who goes to live with an Indian ‘doctor’ who performs illegal operations.
- • Vernon Fane, The Sphere
- It is all very tough and sordid, yet at the same time it has a warm and human quality, and it is Miss Kellino’s achievement that she never yields an inch in her sympathy for her tragic little heroine. There is a good deal of power in this book, and some signs that when certain immaturities can be overcome the author may have a long way to go on the literary road.
- • A. P. West, The New Statesman
- One has a feeling that this promising first novel is a failure because the author is writing about a world in which she has no first-hand experience: one recognises vestiges of a number of cases which were reported in newspapers in the narrative, one detects patches of guesswork. If Miss Kellino abandons the practice of dealing in second-hand experience she should become an interesting writer.
- • Kate O’Brien, The Spectator
- The merits of the book are its simplicity, its truth of dialogue and physical detail, its hurrying sense of life, and its clean, unshrinking characterisations. Its especial merit is in the central character of Flo, who all the way down to disaster never puts a foot wrong — that is to say, never blenches before herself, and never, in the thick of her temptations and sins, really loses love of life, or her curious, much-battered sense of moral obligation to it.