One Green Bottle

Elizabeth Coxhead was one of the foremost literary/narrative novelists of the 1950s. Ranked alongside such writers as Elizabeth Taylor and Pamela Hansford Johnson, she was a major voice in a golden age for the novel. One Green Bottle concerns the cultural and emotional journey followed by Cathy Canning, a young woman factory worker from the slums of Birkenhead when her boyfriend is sent to Borstal. Taken by chance to the Welsh mountains, she proves to be a born rock-climber and she falls for both the excitement of the sport and its milieu, enjoying one summer of blissful love with a handsome school teacher. The sex is not explicit, but was enough to get the book criticised by the then bishop of Chester. OGB is a roller-coaster story, as Cathy blossoms in her new environment, yet always remaining aware of the tug of her jailed boyfriend. Her final decision, which shocked many, remains hotly debated. Several critics suggested OGB would make a great movie. But in the 1950s filming in mountains was a technical challenge too far. In that, and in its modern, human and positive take on a slum girl, OGB was ahead of its time. The book stands to be ranked alongside the work of such writers as Alan Sillitoe, who followed on.