Books: Dead End Kids

THE WORLD IS A WEDDING by Bernard Kops. 261 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.

SWEETLY SINGS THE DONKEY by Shelagh Delaney. 186 pages. Putnam. $4.

Each year brings evidence that the lower orders of Britain have acquired another caste mark of the old upper crust. Now it is autobiographies, hitherto the prerogative of retired generals, statesmen, colonial officials and men of letters who are willing to design their own public monuments.

Shelagh Delaney, 24, and Bernard Kops, 37, are none of these things. They graduated into the welfare state from two of the most ferocious slums in Brit ain: she from one of the uglier neighborhoods around Manchester, and he from the ghetto of London's Stepney and Bethnal Green. In the nature of things, the stories of their own brief lives are more manifesto than reminiscence. Delaney pokes out her pert proletarian tongue at the Establishment; Kops throws a whole coster's barrowful of dead haddock. Both have produced fascinating documents and useful items for those who like to plot the course of British society now that the imperial ballast is gone, and the old class compass is out of whack. Both work in the theater; Delaney's A Taste of Honey was a hit play when she was 19, and Kops is resident dramatist at the Bristol Old Vic. Both are virtuosos at the art of self-dramatization.

"This Girl is a Liar." Great dollops of sensitivity and rebellion may be expected in reminiscences of childhood, and poor little Shelagh Delaney is no exception, though the tough, sullen delinquent pose she adopted to protect her secret soul is fairly new in this genre. She is adept at putting the false comic nose on the face of authority, and all get a good laugh from the schoolmaster who told her she was "a long streak of nothing," from Mum, and from the dear silly nuns who had her in charge for a while. We learn without astonishment that they were more pious but not so clever as little Shelagh. But did she really believe that they slept at night hanging upside down from the rafters? And did she really win all the arguments about sexual morals with welfare officers? A school report she claims to remember is enlightening: "Unwilling to accept discipline. Has some originality of thought. A likable girl. Inclined to sullenness. Uncommunicative. Overimaginative. Has difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. This girl is a liar. Expect improvement next term."

This is the most honest thing in an autobiography that breaks the rules by offering no one quite credible except the subject. But the last we see of Shelagh, in "gintears" and alone among the eyeless houses of a condemned slum, is vivid enough.