by Jilly Cooper
Hair is also a class indicator. Upper-class little boys have their curls brushed flat and cut in the shape of a pudding basin. The middle classes have their hair tapered like Cliff Richard. Upper-class little girls either wear their fringe on the eyebrows like Shetland ponies or drawn off their foreheads (pronounced ‘for-rids’) with a small velvet bow at the side or the crown of the head. They sometimes wear Alice bands, but sewn and with proper velvet, not made out of stretch material. Jen Teale cuts Christine’s fringe half-way down the forehead, so there is no danger she won’t be able to see out. She cuts Wayne’s hair short at the back so that half an inch or two of neck shows. The working classes no longer Brylcreem their kiddies’ hair into tight curls—too much like the ‘darkies’—but they do brush Baby’s hair upwards like a Sioux Indian’s.
Until recently it was much easier to tell a child’s background from its clothes than its mother’s. But since the entire nation’s youth is now clad in spin-offs from whatever film is fashionable and since Mary Quant (who staged the great ‘sixties revolution, making duchesses interchangeable with shop girls) has gone into children’s clothes, all children will soon look alike.
THE RÉGIME
Upper-class mothers believe in fresh air and walks to feed the ducks in the afternoon. They’re very park conscious. Ducks in Kensington Gardens ought to be members of Weight Watchers, so stuffed are they with bread (but never sliced, because the upper classes think its common.) Ducks that live near the Round Pond in Hampstead get whole-wheat crusts. As soon as Georgie Stow-Crat can walk he is put on a pony. From Monday to Friday upper-class London children have to make do with the rocking horse at Harrods.
Conventional upper-class children have cake, sandwiches and perhaps as a treat an ice at four o’clock, what the working classes describe as ‘afternoon tea’. Middle-class children have high tea at about six consisting of baked beans, beef-burgers or fish fingers and yoghurt. The working classes tend to have the same, but if any of the food is cooked the meal is called ‘a dinner’: ‘Karen has a dinner at lunchtime and a dinner in the evening’. The working classes might also say, ‘I gave Baby juice and cereal at three’. The upper classes would specify ‘orange juice’, and ‘cornflakes’ or ‘Weetabix’. The lower you get down the social scale the more likely people are to use convenience words, like ‘teacher’ for ‘schoolmaster’ or ‘mistress’. The lower-working classes eat chip butties and sweets all day—they don’t have meals.
Upper-class children tend to have other children over to tea at four as a social occasion. Middle-class children come over to play at any time. When the middle classes send their children to state schools the children ask their working-class schoolmates to tea, then feel hurt because they never get asked back. It never occurs to Zacharias Upward that Dive Definitely-Disgusting might feel ashamed of the smallness of his house and the fact that he doesn’t have a bedroom to himself.
The working classes tend to cram their children with sweets, cheap placebos like ‘Molteasers’, ‘Croonchy’ and ‘Cadbury’s Fruit and Not’. Samantha Upward, having read about nutrition, tends to restrict Zacharias’s sweet-eating, although career mums, conscious of being away too much, bombard their children with guilt presents every time they’re late home. Little Zacharias, who is only allowed two sweets after lunch and is fed up with museums, wishes Samantha would get a part-time job, so he could get guilt presents too.
Upper-class children are taught nursery rhymes by their nannies and know them all by the time they’re eighteen months, giving them a vocabulary of about 500 words. Traditionally a lot of nursery rhymes chronicle the activities of their forbears anyway. Little Jack Horner pulling out a plum, for instance, refers to the fat pickings culled by the Horner family during the dissolution of the monasteries.
Sharon Definitely-Disgusting only knows television jingles. In a recent quiz at a state school none of the eleven-year-olds could say what Little Miss Muffet sat on.
STAYING WITH GRANNY
Working-class children, as has been said before, often live with or near their grandmother, so the working-class Nan is much the best with children because she’s had the most practice. Georgie Stow-Crat’s grandparents live in the country, have lots of room and servants to take the children off their hands. Zacharias Upward’s grandparents live on their nerves and an ever-dwindling fixed income. They move into smaller and smaller houses but hang on to all the ornaments, which are double-parked on every piece of furniture, so that the place looks like an antique shop. All the china is moved up a shelf when the grandchildren come to stay, but eventually they break the place up because they’re fed up with not being allowed to touch anything and with playing the same old brought-out game of bagatelle. A terrible family row develops because one ball-bearing disappears. Both daughters and daughters-in-law feel on trial all the time and the tension is transmitted to the children. If they’re let out into the garden, footballs snap the regalia lilies. Mealtimes are a nightmare because the middle classes are obsessively hot on table manners.
‘Why do all my grandchildren eat as though they’re gardening?’ is a typical upper-middle-class granny remark.
Children invariably let the side down by saying, ‘Why can’t we have baked beans in front of the telly like we do at home?’
Upper-middle-class grannies invariably had nannies to bring up their own children and cannot understand why their grandchildren should be so exhausting, or so much more badly behaved than their own children were. They forget that they only saw them when they were presented, newly washed, for an hour after tea.
Samantha Upward drives her mother-in-law crackers. Every time Zacharias interrupts, she stops whatever adult conversation she is having to answer his question.
The middle classes tend to reason.
The working classes tend to clout.
The working classes have dummies. Middle-class children are more likely to suck their thumbs.
GROWING UP
Sexual modesty is also a good index of social class. The majority of the working classes never see their parents naked, which must be quite an achievement as they often sleep in the same room—rather like undressing on the beach.
Social class 1 (which according to the Census, includes scientists, doctors and structural engineers) are much more likely to let their children see them with no clothes on. Pretty horrifying really, and enough to put one off sex for life, having a hairy scientist streaking round the house.
The upper-middle classes are less likely to worry about masturbation and more likely to tell their children the facts of life. They are aided in this by Althea, of Dinosaur Books fame, who has written a very explicit children’s book about having a baby. Known locally as the ‘rude’ book, it is a great favourite to read aloud when Granny comes to stay.
To Jen Teale the word ‘rude’ means ‘slightly smutty’, to the upper class it means ‘impertinent’. Similarly the uppers use ‘cheeky’ to mean impertinent whereas to Jen Teale it means a bit risque or near the knuckle.
The working classes have difficulty explaining things so you get their children coming into the public library and saying,
‘I want a book about life.’
‘Whose life?’ asks the librarian. ‘Biographies are over there.’
‘Facts of life, Miss.’
Georgie Stow-Crat doesn’t need to be told about sex because he’s seen plenty of farm animals copulating. As a result upper-class men often take their wives from behind.
My husband heard about sex for the first time when he was walking in a prep-school crocodile along the beach.
‘I say, chaps,’ said a boy called the Hon. James Stewart, ‘I know how babies are made.’
Whereupon they all gathered round saying, ‘Go on, Stewart, tell us.’
‘The man lies on top of the woman,’ said Stewart portentously, ‘and is excused into her.’
The middle classes will start taking their children to the dentist almost before they’ve got teeth; the working cla
sses tend only to go when their teeth ache. ‘You can tell what class a person is the moment he opens his mouth,’ said John Braine, ‘by the state of his teeth.’ That’s why Sharon Definitely-Disgusting claps her hands over her mouth whenever she laughs.
The upper classes give their children 10p from the fairies when a tooth comes out. Inflation and indulgence have pushed the middle classes up to 50p. Among the upper-middle merrytocracy the fairies often get drunk and forget to put the money under the pillow and have to compensate with twice as much the next day. When the fair arrives each year, children have been known to tug teeth out with forceps for more money to spend on the fruit machines.
People are gradually realising that illiteracy in schools today is nothing to do with the teaching, but simply because children have been turned into a race of zombies by watching television. Soon the middle classes will start banning television altogether, and illicit watch-easys will be set up in darkened dives round the country.
Samantha Upward doesn’t let Zacharias read comics or watch more than an hours’ television a day. Upper-class children go into the kitchen and read the housekeeper’s children’s comics. Samantha reads out loud to Zacharias in a clear voice altering words she thinks are common and remembering to say ‘orf’.
The Queen evidently read very early because in the evenings her mother used to read her books ‘about animals and horses and they would recite gay poetry.’ (Marlowe and Oscar Wilde perhaps.) Before he reads, the working class child can write C.F.C. and SHED and SOD and FUK on bus shelters.
By the age of two little George Stow-Crat will be looking out on life with a clear blue gaze, frightened of no one, totally self-confident. He will also have a frightful accent from playing in the stable but no one is in the least bit worried. Working-class children always hold their noses in the country.
The middle-class child will already be shell-shocked with instructions. Don’t tread in Doggie’s duty; put your hand over your mouth when you cough; don’t turn your fork over to eat peas; it’s rude to whisper; it’s rude to shout; talk in a low clear voice like Anna Ford or Mrs Thatcher. Class is beginning to creep in. Middle-class children twig that they can bully the char’s children, but the char’s children can’t beat them up in return. They also know that there are certain children in the road their mother prefers them playing with to others. Samantha has great difficulty explaining to little Zacharias why he may sprinkle his pepper but not his salt.
I once heard my son regaling his friends:
‘Mummy says “pardon” is a much worse word than “fuck”.’
Jen Teale’s child will be constantly pulled up for some real or imagined coarseness of speech or enunciation. It’s so important to be ‘well-spoken’.
Middle-class children put cherry stones on the side of their plate with their spoon and chant, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief’. Upper-class children conceal the journey from mouth to plate with curled fist and say ‘Army, Navy, Law, Divinity, Independent, Medicine, Trade’. The working classes only eat cherries out of tins of fruit salad with the stones already removed.
Children’s parties are a sophisticated form of torture. The upper classes tend to give parties just for nannies and children, mid-week, and ending at six so as not to involve the husbands. No drink is offered to collecting parents.
Nanny Stow-Crat couldn’t stop Fiona inviting Tracey Nouveau-Richards as they sit next to each other at nursery school, but Caroline says she’s not having those ghastly parents in the house: ‘They never know when to leave and once through the door, they might make a habit of dropping in.’
Samantha Upward, being very democratic, encourages Zacharias to invite all his little state school friends who run absolutely wild all over the newly planted perennials that were once going to make an herbaceous border. They refuse to play party games and drive the conjuror into hysterics by explaining in loud voices how every trick is done.
Mr Nouveau-Richards, who feels that only the best is good enough for my Tracey-Diane, employs Searcy’s to do the catering, Dick Emery for the cabaret, gives each child a Tiger Tiger doll’s house as a going-away present, and shows the premiere of Star Wars II after the interval. All the surrounding middle-class mums would like to refuse, but daren’t because they’d get such flak from their children.
The upper-middle merrytocracy mix drink, nannies and mothers, thereby making the children’s party a much more jolly occasion. Parties in Putney are rather like singles bars with separated fathers turning up to collect children and meeting pretty divorced mothers and getting nose to nose over the Soave and the hassle of bringing up children on one’s own.
3 THE NANNY
‘The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be the inmates of our dwellings or guardians of our children’s minds, and persons.’
Charlotte Brontë.
Anyone studying the English class system will have noticed certain similarities between the extreme upper and lower classes; toughness, xenophobia, indifference to public opinion, passion for racing and gambling, fondness for plain speaking and plain untampered food. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, says the reason is that the ruling classes for the last two hundred years have been brought up almost entirely by working-class nannies, their parents abdicating all responsibility.
‘With monthly nurses, nannies, prep school and public school,’ admitted one mother, ‘it’s almost as though we put them in care.’
Certainly one of the reasons why the aristocracy has always notched up so many marriages has been because thay never had any boring middle-class worries about how it might affect the children. Nanny would always be there to look after them and provide continuity.
Working for the great, nannies took on their own snobbisms, not unlike suburban crones working in Knightsbridge dress shops for £50 a week who make you feel bitterly ashamed of your scuffed heels and the fact that you can’t afford £500 for a little black dress.
There was a group of nannies who ruled Hyde Park.
‘Are you a titled mummy’s nanny?’ said one gorgon, when a newly employed nanny sat down beside her.
The new nanny shook her head.
‘Well I’m afraid,’ said the gorgon, ‘that this bench is reserved for titled mummies’ nannies.’
Until a few years ago nanny was a fixture in the upper-class house, taking on the surname of the family and often staying with them until she died, when an announcement would appear in The Times expressing the family’s gratitude and giving her length of service. When her charges grew up, there were always grandchildren. Sometimes she regained her ascendancy when the master became senile and needed looking after, or when Miss Caroline became an alcoholic. One friend of mine spends £6000 a year keeping a large house in Sussex going simply as a base for his old nanny and her dog. Another nanny, when her children grew up, took over the care of the three family dogs, keeping them in baskets upstairs and giving them the same nursery routine of brushing, walks, mealtimes and early beds. While another old nanny keeps an eye on visiting dogs. When a friend’s golden retriever had been cavorting in the loch for an hour, she sidled up and said, ‘I think Porridge has been in for long enough.’
Today, alas, the old-fashioned nanny whose life was her children, who welcomed the role of surrogate mother, imposed on her by her employers, delighting in the challenge of coping with everything, never taking a holiday, is virtually an extinct breed.
‘You’ll be lucky if you get a girl to stay six months,’ said Nannies of Kensington. ‘They just don’t want to get involved for too long.’ A few years ago Mrs Walters of Knightsbridge Nannies, who provided ‘treasures’ for half the crowned heads of Europe, said her telephone was permanently jammed with cries of ‘Help me, Help me’ from harassed society women left in the lurch by their nannies and faced with the appalling prospect of having to forego a game of bridge or a trip to Fortnums. It al
so suits the agencies to foster this myth of unavailability. The more often a nanny moves around, the more often they get their rake off.
By the end of the ’seventies, however, the position had changed slightly. The rocketing cost of living has made the nanny’s job much more attractive. If she lives in, she gets all her bills paid: rent, telephone, rates, electricity, gas and food, and £25 – 35 tax-free pocket money on top of that, which makes her far better off than a secretary on £5,500 a year. The only way you distinguish the nannies from the mothers picking children up from school is that the nannies are younger and better dressed.
‘Well I make it that you’ll have to get a rise of £15,000 just to pay for Nanny.’
On the other hand the more women go out to work, the more they are dependent on others to look after their children. If the nanny is working for a divorced or separated woman, or even in a household where the woman is the chief breadwinner, her power is absolute. If she walks out, her employer will have to jeopardize her job staying at home and looking after the children, or fork out for a temporary at £50 a week.
Before the war, the upper and middle classes tended to be undomesticated (my grandmother once went into the kitchen, saw a dishcloth and fled, never to return) and were therefore neurotically dependent on servants. Today any career woman or working mother who has to rely on a recalcitrant daily woman (someone once said they were called ‘dailys’ because they leave after one day) or a capricious nanny in order to go out to work will understand this neurosis.
One sees this absolute power developing so often. A plump little lower-middle-class girl arrives from the country with rosy cheeks and a Yorkshire accent. She starts off doing absolutely everything for £10 a week, but gradually she makes herself indispensable. She also starts aping the mannerisms of her employers and goes to a West End hairdresser, her accent disappears as do the inches off her hips. Next she meets a boyfriend and, terrified of losing her because she’s become such a treasure, her employers let the boyfriend move in. Soon there’s a broad-shouldered denim-jacketed back watching television every time the parents come in from an evening out, which is soon followed by additional aggro because he’s having fry-ups in the morning, drinking the house Carafino and using the bath.