by Jilly Cooper
The aristocrat, when he wants to, has very good manners. The Scottish upper classes in particular have that shell-shocked look that probably comes from banging their heads on low beams leaping to their feet whenever a woman comes into the room. Aristocrats are also deeply male chauvinist, and although you get left-wing extremists like Lord Weymouth who sends his children to a comprehensive school and has revolutionary ideas, on the whole they tend to be reactionary.
Harry Stow-Crat, Caroline and Snipe
While writing this book I found that there were very much two strands in the character of the aristocrat: first the wild, delinquent, arrogant, capricious, rather more glamorous strand; and second the stuffy, ‘county’, public-spirited, but publicity-shy strand, epitomized by the old baronet whose family were described ‘as old as the hills and infinitely more respectable’.
Or, as a small boy writing in my son’s school magazine pointed out: ‘Gentleman are of two types: the nose-uppish and the secluded.’
In order to write this book I have dealt in archetypes. The aristocracy and upper classes are represented by The Hon HARRY STOW-CRAT. Son of the sixth Baron Egliston, educated at Eton, he served in the Coldstream Guards. He now runs his diminishing estate, selling the odd Van Dyck to make ends meet, but does more or less what he pleases. He lives in a large decaying house in the North Riding of Yorkshire and has a flat in Chelsea. He has a long-suffering wife, CAROLINE, who does a great deal for charity, an eldest son, GEORGIE, a daughter called FIONA, and several other children. He has numerous mistresses, but none to whom he is as devoted as to his black labrador, SNIPE. He has had many moments of frustration and boredom in his life, but never any of self-doubt.
THE MIDDLE CLASSES
‘Would you come round the world next year in the France with me? I got a letter from Gerry Wellesley on a cruise saying he’d never met middle-class people before, and they are quite different from us. Isn’t he awful?’
Nancy Mitford
The middle classes are in fact quite different—being riddled with self-doubt, which is hardly surprising after all the flak they’ve received over the years. The upper classes despised them for their preoccupation with money, and because they suspected it was middle-class malcontents rather than the rabble who had plotted and set alight the French Revolution. ‘How beastly the bourgeois is,’ mocked the working-class Lawrence, and in fact épater le bourgeois has always been a favourite sport of both high and low. Marx, of course, divided society into two classes—the splendid workers, and the wicked bourgeoisie who owned the means of production. Even members of their own class, like Hilaire Belloc, attack them:
The people in between
Looked underdone and harassed,
And out of place and mean,
And horribly embarrassed.
And they have even been blamed for the evils of the class system. It is the middle classes, wrote one sociologist, with their passion for order and reason, who have sought to impose a kind of stratification on what is in fact an eternally malleable and bubbling class system. Which is rubbish because, as we have already seen, the aristocracy is just as obsessed with rank.
Occasionally they have their defenders—‘I come from the middle classes,’ said Neville Chamberlain, ‘and I am proud of the ability, the shrewdness, the industry and providence, the thrift by which they are distinguished.’
In a way the middle classes seem to suffer as the middle child does. Everyone makes a huge fuss over the firstborn and everyone pets and coddles the baby, (who, like the working classes, is shored up by the great feather bed of the welfare state), but the child in the middle gets the most opprobrium, is often left to fend for itself and is ganged up on by the other two. It is doubly significant that in the Civil War, the rabble joined up with the King against the Puritan middle classes. For if Marx was the champion of the working classes, Calvin was the prophet of the middle classes. They believed implicitly in the Puritan Ethic, in the cultivation of such virtues as diligence, frugality, propriety and fidelity. Work to keep sin at bay, feel guilty if you slack. Shame is a bourgeois notion.
The Upwards
Although there is a world of difference between the top of the middle classes and the bottom, between the great merchant banker and the small shopkeeper, they are united in their desire to get on, not just to survive. Unlike the upper classes and the working classes they think careers are important. They start little businesses, they work to pass exams after they leave school, they believe in the law of the jungle and not the Welfare State. If you get on in life good luck to you.
For this reason they believed in the importance of education long before the other classes. They believed in deferred satisfaction. They saved in order to send their children to private schools, or to buy their own houses. If the upper classes handed on estates to their children, the middle classes handed on small businesses. To the working classes the most important criterion of middle-class membership after money or income is owning a small business or being self-employed.
At the moment they are under increasing pressure, as the working classes get richer and more powerful. One of the great divides between the middle and lower classes used to be that the former used his brain and the latter his hands. Today, however, the miner and the car worker with their free housing and free education have far more spending money than a newly qualified doctor or barrister, and certainly than a policeman or a major in the army. According to my ex-bank manager, the middle classes are having increasing difficulty making ends meet. In 1976, they rather than the working classes became the chief candidates for the pawnbroker, bringing in watches, wedding rings, golf clubs, and binoculars.
Although they don’t ‘know everyone’ like the upper classes, the upper-middles and many of the middles, having been to boarding school, and have a much wider circle of friends than the working classes. They are able to keep in touch with them by telephone, or by their ability to write letters. Many of them also have a spare room where friends can come and stay.
They therefore tend to entertain ‘outsiders’ much more than the working classes, and don’t need to depend on their immediate neighbours for help or for their identity. They can afford to keep themselves to themselves. Aloofness, reserve and a certain self-righteousness are also middle-class qualities.
To illustrate the three main strands of the middle classes we again fall into archetypes, with GIDEON and SAMANTHA UPWARD as the upper-middle-class couple, HOWARD and EILEEN WEYBRIDGE as the middle-middles and BRYAN and JEN TEALE as the lower-middles.
GIDEON AND SAMANTHA UPWARD—
THE MERRYTOCRACY
The upper-middle classes are the most intelligent and highly educated of all the classes, and therefore the silliest and the most receptive to every new trend: radical chic, health foods, ethnic clothes, bra-lessness, gifted children, cuisine minceur. Gideon Upward gave his mother-in-law a garlic crusher for Christmas. The upper-middles tend to read The Guardian and are proud of their liberal and enlightened attitudes. They are also the most role-reversed of the classes: Gideon does a great deal of cooking and housework: Samantha longs to be a good mother and have an ‘int’risting job’ at the same time. To save petrol she rides round on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle, with wholemeal bread in the front basket and a bawling child in the back. Sometimes her long dirndl skirt catches in the pedals. She has a second in history and a fourth in life.
Gideon and Samantha both went to ‘good’ schools, Gideon probably to Winchester or to Sherborne. He might be an architect or work in the City. He wears a signet ring with a crest on the little finger of his left hand, in an attempt to proclaim near aristocratic status, just as the middle-middles wear an old school tie to show they’ve been to boarding school, the lower-middles give their house a name instead of a number to prove it isn’t council and the working classes bring back plastic bulls from Majorca to show they’ve travelled.
Gideon and Samantha have two children called Zacharias and Thalia, who they might start off sendin
g to a state school, and trying not to wince at the first ‘pardon’, but would be more likely to send to a private school. They love their English setter, Blucher, and feel frightfully guilty about loving it almost more than their children. Harry Stow-Crat would have no such scruples. Gideon plays tennis and rugger at a club, but he wouldn’t use the club to make friends, and he and Samantha wouldn’t go near the Country Club which, to them, reeks of surburbia. They prefer to entertain in their own house, which is large and Victorian, and being restored to its original state rather faster than they’d like. Samantha is into good works with a slightly self-interested motive: pollution, conservation, the P.T.A.
As they can’t be the most upper class in the land, Samantha is determined that they shall be the most ‘cultured’. She and Gideon go to the theatre, the ballet and the movies, as they rather self-consciously call the cinema, and try and read at least two books a week.
In the last fifteen years, the upper-middles have aimed at a standard of living they can’t afford, taking on many of the pastimes of the upper classes. Gideon goes shooting quite often; they have two cars, which are falling to pieces, and for which they have to pay a fortune every time they take their M.O.T.; they used to have a country cottage, holidays abroad, and a boat. Now they have two children at boarding school. Since the advent of the permissive society Gideon is playing at adultery like Harry Stow-Crat. As a result he spends a fortune on lunches, and another fortune on guilt presents for Samantha afterwards. They are both so worried about trying to make ends meet, they’re drinking themselves absolutely silly—hence the sub-title ‘The Merrytocracy’.
Virginia Woolf once wrote an unfinished novel about an upper-middle-class family called the Pargeters. ‘Parget’ is an English dialect word meaning to smooth over cracks in plastered surfaces: the Pargeters gloss over the deep sexual and emotional fissures of life. In the same way Samantha doesn’t particularly like her mother-in-law, or several of her neighbours; but she tries to get on with them because she feels guilty about her dislike. In the same way she feels guilty about telling someone she employs that they are not doing the job properly. Caroline Stow-Crat would never have that problem. If she hired a gardener even for two hours, she wouldn’t flaunt him as a status symbol, she’d keep quiet about him, because she feels it’s more creative to do the garden herself.
She and Gideon call each other ‘darling’ rather than ‘dear’, and try to remember to say ‘orf’. Gideon’s parents, Colonel and Mrs Upward, living on a rapidly dwindling fixed income, are much more thrifty than Samantha and Gideon. As they’re not drinking themselves silly, they don’t smash everything and still have the same glasses and china as they did when they were married.
HOWARD AND EILEEN WEYBRIDGE—
THE MIDDLE-MIDDLES
Howard Weybridge lives in Surrey or some smart dormitory town. He works as an accountant, stockbroker, surveyor or higher technician. He probably went to a minor public school or a grammar school. He never misses the nine o’clock news and says ‘Cheerio’. He wears paisley scarves with scarf rings and has no bottoms to his spectacles. He calls his wife, Eileen, ‘dear’ and when you ask him how he is says, ‘Very fit, thank you’. He is very straight and very patriotic, his haw-haw voice is a synthetic approximation to the uppers; he talks about ‘Ham-shar’. His children join the young Con-servatives and the tennis club to meet people. He buys a modern house and ages it up. It has a big garden with a perfect lawn and lots of shrubs. He despises anyone who hasn’t been to ‘public school’, and often goes into local government or politics for social advancement. He is a first-generation pony buyer, and would also use the Pony Club to meet the right sort of people. Eileen shops at Bentalls and thinks the upper-middles are terribly scruffy. They are both keen golfers, and pull strings to get their road made private. Their favourite radio programmes are Any Answers, These You Have Loved and Disgusted Tunbridge Wells. They are much smugger than the upper-middles.
Bryan and Jen Teale
Howard Weybridge’s father hasn’t a bill in the world and is on the golf club committee. He found bridge to be one of the most wonderful things in life; it’s a very easy way of entertaining. He has a sneaking liking for Enoch Powell: ‘We should have stopped the sambos coming here in the first place.’
BRYAN AND JEN TEALE—
THE LOWER-MIDDLES
The Teales are probably the most pushy, the most frugal and the most respectable of all the classes, because they are so anxious to escape from the working class. The successful ones iron out their accents and become middle like Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher. The rest stay put as bank and insurance clerks, door-to-door salesmen, toast-masters, lower management, police sergeants and sergeant-majors. In the old days the lower-middles rose with the small business or the little shop, but the rise in rates, social security benefits and postage has scuppered all that.
The Weybridges
The lower-middles never had any servants, but as they are obsessed with cleanliness, and like everything nice, they buy a small modern house and fill it with modern units which are easy to keep clean. Jen and Bryan have two children, Wayne and Christine, and a very clean car.
As Jen and Bryan didn’t go to boarding school, didn’t make friends outside the district, and don’t mix with the street, they have very few friends and keep themselves to themselves. They tend to be very inner-directed, doing everything together, decorating the house, furnishing the car, and coaching and playing football with the children. Jen reads knitting patterns, Woman’s Own and Reader’s Digest condensed books. To avoid any working-class stigma she puts up defensive barriers— privet hedges, net curtains—talks in a ‘refained’ accent, raising her little finger when she drinks. Her aim is to be dainty and wear six pairs of knickers. She admires Mary Whitehouse enormously, disapproves of long hair and puts money in the Woolwich every week. She sees herself as the ‘Woolwich girl’. The Teales don’t entertain much, only Bryan’s colleagues who might be useful, and occasionally Bryan’s boss.
THE WORKING CLASSES
One of the great class divides has always been ‘them’ and ‘us’ which, as a result of the egalitarian, working-class-is-beautiful revolution of the ’sixties, and early ’seventies, has polarized into the Guilty and the Cross. On the one side are the middle and upper classes, feeling guilty and riddled with social concern, although they often earn far less money than the workers, and on the other are the working classes who, having been totally brain-washed by television and images of the good life, feel cross because they aren’t getting a big enough slice of the cake.
In a time of economic prosperity everyone tends to do well. Wages rise; the middle classes can afford a new car, or central heating; the working-class man buys a fridge for the missus. Man’s envy and rivalry is turned towards his neighbour—keeping up with the Joneses—rather than towards the classes above and below. But in times of economic stress, when people suddenly can’t get the things they want and prices and the cost of living outstrip wages, they start turning their envy against other classes. Antagonism against a neighbour feathering his nest tends to be replaced by an awareness of class inequalities.
In a time of economic security, society therefore tends to look fairly cohesive, which is probably why in the early ’seventies a lot of people genuinely believed that class barriers had finally broken down; but, as the decade advanced, the working-class people who’d bought their own houses and were up to their necks in mortgage and hire-purchase payments suddenly found they couldn’t keep up. Their expectations had been raised, and now their security was being threatened by the additional possibility of mass unemployment. This discontent, fanned by the militants, resulted in the rash of strikes in the winter of 1978/79.
Although the middle classes often think of the working-class man as earning huge sums on overtime, the rewards of his job in fact are much less. The manual worker seldom has job satisfaction or a proper pension; he doesn’t have any fringe benefits such as a car, trips abroad, expense acco
unt lunches and longer holidays; he has to clock in and out and his earning span is much shorter. Once his physical strength goes, he can look forward to an old age of comparative poverty and deprivation. This all results in workers avoiding any kind of moral commitment to the management. ‘We cheat the foreman,’ is the attitude, ‘he cheats the manager, and the manager cheats the customer.’
Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy brilliantly summed up the workers’ attitude to them:
‘They are the people at the top, the highers up, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to work, fine you, make you split up the family in the ’thirties (to avoid a reduction in the means test allowance) get yer in the end, aren’t really to be trusted, talk posh, are all twisters really, never tell yer owt (e.g. about a relative in hospital) clap yer in the clink, will do y’down if they can, summons yer, are all in a click together, treat y’like muck.’
Because they dislike the management, the working classes don’t like people saving their money or getting on through hard work. They put a premium on enjoying pleasure now, drinking their wages, for example, or blowing the whole lot on a new colour telly. The only legitimate way to make money is to win it. Hence the addiction to football pools, racing, bingo and the dogs.