by Jilly Cooper
About once a week a note about forthcoming events with a perforated slip at the bottom is sent round; full of lower-middle-class words like ‘nearly new’, ‘refreshments’, ‘pleasant’ and ‘enjoyable’, it ends, rather wildly, ‘If you can be of service as a helper please tear off your slip and send it to one of the committee.’
At Christmas there’s a nativity play, which, at state schools, is often held in the morning. This means lots of working-class fathers on shift work and Gideon Upward looking at his watch and wondering how late he dare be at the office. The Virgin Mary’s parents are invariably divorced and acrimonious; they turn up and sit glaring from opposite ends of a school bench, but in the end are forced to sit next to one another through lack of space. No one can hear the kiddies tunelessly chanting ‘’Ark and ’erald’ or ‘Once in Royal Divid’ because of all the baby brothers and sisters squawking their heads off.
At fee-paying schools there are no babies because the parents pay someone to look after them for the afternoon. The following announcement was once sent out by my son’s old day prep school:
‘We hope you will all come to our informal Carol Service on December 15. This year we shall be having kindergarten boys for the first time. I’m sure we shall all enjoy them.’
SCHOOL MEALS
When my son first went to a primary school five years ago, faced with the utter impossibility of having the right dinner money every day, I asked if I could pay by cheque for the whole term. The school was extremely shocked. It was good for discipline, they said, for the children to bring the right money each day; and was I too insensitive to realize that it was beyond most working-class budgets to fork out all at once for a whole term? Now I notice that most state schools allow parents to pay by cheque. Private schools call it ‘lunch’ and put it on the bill. State school dinners are supervised by someone grandiosely called a ‘dinner lady’.
The working classes, being picky eaters, often take their own.
‘My Mum packs me sandwiches,’ says Sharon Definitely-Disgusting, ‘and I buy a sweet off the ice-cream van.’
THE MILK RUN
The routine of parents taking children to school by car on a rota basis, often known as the ‘milk run’, causes more aggravation than any other part of the school day, particularly when mothers are trying to collect children from three different schools all coming out at the same time. Where the children are concerned it’s one of the last bastions of snobbery—the bigger and shinier the car you’re picked up in the better. On the whole, mothers dress more scruffily the higher-class they are. Caroline Stow-Crat turns up in jeans in a filthy Range Rover and is admonished by George who thinks she ought to wear smarter trousers and clean the car more often. Why can’t she be more like Mrs Nouveau-Richards who is always dressed up to the nines and takes the ‘show-fur’ and the Rolls?
‘Why can’t we get a motorbike Dad?’
Jen Teale, who is terrified her children may miss a second of school that’s being paid for, gets quite hysterical when Samantha’s French au pair oversleeps and picks up the Teale children ten minutes late.
Caroline Stow-Crat is always getting stuck in the country at weekends and ringing up at midnight saying she’s snowed up and can Samantha do the milk run. Samantha is furious, but doesn’t say so. ‘A lady never lets herself go.’ Nor can she get any sympathy out of Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who is only too glad to put her show-fur at Caroline’s disposal at any time. Jen Teale, who cleans the Volkswagen herself, thinks Caroline’s Range Rover is much too draughty, and she’s fed up with having Snipe’s hairs all over little Wayne’s newly brushed blazer.
On Wednesday the milk run to the doctored state primary, where the music’s so good, is like the bus of the L.S.O. with all the children’s instruments sticking out of the window.
Georgie Stow-Crat complicates matters on Samantha’s milk run by telling everyone that he’s being allowed to stay up till midnight tonight because his mother is giving a party for eighty people, to which none of the milk run mothers have been asked.
A friend’s child went to a pre-school open day at one of the most fashionable London High Schools. All the little new girls were told:
‘At the end of the afternoon you stand in the hall, and the moment you see your Mummy’s car coming up the drive you tell your form mistress and go and meet Mummy.’ It was automatically assumed that all the parents had cars. In state schools many of the children walk or go by bus. When Samantha suggested Zacharias might go by bus, so she could take a part-time job, Zacharias refused. He didn’t want his cap knocked off by ‘comprehensile’ boys.
The most relentless upstaging goes on between children on the school runs.
‘My mother went to Princess Anne’s wedding,’ said one child.
After a long pause, the second child replied,
‘My parents were asked, but they didn’t want to go.’
The attitude towards chauffeurs is interesting, too. One working-class boy, whose father had made good, made the chauffeur drop him a quarter of a mile from his primary school and walked the rest of the way, so the other boys wouldn’t mob him up. Two teenagers at a day public school had a different problem. The younger sister hated the chauffeur wearing his cap because the other girls would think it snobbish. The older girl, on the other hand, hated him not wearing his cap:
‘It would be so awful, if anyone thought he was Daddy.’
ACCENT
Primary Mary, teacher wary,
How does your accent grow?
With cockney vowels, and Mummy’s scowls
And glottal stops all in a row.
An English upper-class accent is often called a ‘public school accent’. But, as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has pointed out in The Public School Phenomenon, accent became a socially distinguishable characteristic long before the founding of the public schools. The dialect of London, Cambridge and Oxford was originally South-East Midland but by the sixteenth century London English (hence the King’s English) was regarded as the only language for a literary man or a gentleman, and remained so throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The public schools only intensified this.
In the nineteen-sixties, during the hippy revolution against materialism and never-having-had-it-so-good, the upper and middle classes identified profoundly with the new culture and became devotees of long hair and pop music. Working class became beautiful and everyone from Princess Unne downwards spat the plums out of their mouths, embraced the flat ‘a’ and talked with a working-class accent. Even today you can invariably tell the age of twenty-two to thirty-year-olds by their voices. Prince Charles preceded the revolution and speaks his mother’s English; Prince Andrew came after it. Nicholas Monson, who is one of the more enlightened and intelligent of the new wave of right-wing writers, said that during that period he got very embarrassed about being at Eton and having a smart background, but, by listening carefully to the housemaid and watching ‘Rossel Harty’, he learned to talk with a modulated regional accent.
‘After Eton,’ he said, ‘I put off trekking to Katmandu and discovering Zen. Instead I went to Kingston Polytechnic. As I was mixing with ‘real’ people, I put on sweaty T-shirts and dirty jeans, let my hair collapse in rat-tails over my shoulders and affected an accent that owed its origins to Cilla Black, California and the East End of London. I was uncomfortable with this voice, so I said little, but nodded vigorously and tried to look tough. We also sneered at a certain lecturer who wore a pinstriped suit and talked posh. It was at such an airing of bigotry that I realized to my acute embarrassment that I was guilty of the same crime as before. I was a snob.’
It must have been about this time in the ’seventies that many other people were undergoing the same realization. The prosperity ran out and the working classes, the simple life and dropping out became less attractive, because there were no jobs to drop back into when you’d had enough. Upper- and middle-class schoolchildren became more conventional again and shed most of their working-class ac
cent. As my niece said:
‘It simply isn’t cool to talk like a yobbo any more.’
The result is a different kind of speech, much more clipped: ‘awf’ly’ and ‘frightf’ly’, ‘ya’ or “y’p’ instead of ‘yer’ or ‘yeah’. Georgie Stow-Crat might say ‘funtustic’ and ‘whole’ to rhyme with ‘doll’, but he wouldn’t say ‘amizing’ like the cockney child. He is often bi-lingual and will lapse into mid-atlantic or disc-jockey when he’s with his friends. And when he wants to irritate Caroline in the holidays he cultivates a glottal stop and asks her to pass the ‘bu-er’. To the middle classes, although they won’t admit it, a fee-paying school means ‘no more ghastly accent’. Or, as a headmaster said euphemistically, ‘We try to get rid of accents. They’re a lazy way of speaking.’
Alas for the Nouveau-Richards, the effect often isn’t lasting. When I lived in Yorkshire the rich manufacturers all sent their sons to Oopingham and Roogby to iron out their accents, but a few years after they left they were speaking broad Yorkshire again.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ said a don at Radley, ‘how bucolic some of the old boys sound when they come back after a few years.’
Quite often you get marked class discrepancies in a family because a father has made his pile while his children were growing up and has only been able to send the younger children to boarding school, or equally gone bankrupt in the middle and been forced to send the youngest child to a comprehensive.
The left-wing trendies send their children off to the local state school and go into ecstasies over the first flat ‘a’. She has not failed us, she has not failed us. Accent makes the heart grow fonder.
The socially ambitious Jen Teales often regard moving from place to place as an advantage, not only does Bry-an up his salary, but there is more likelihood of Wayne and Charlene being well spoken and not picking up a regional accent.
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
A gentleman has good table manners and should not make wild gestures when speaking at banquets, so that he sweeps a bowl of semolina into his neighbour’s lap.
King’s House School, Richmond, magazine
There is no worse snob than the prep-school boy, but he is usually a possession snob, status being dependent on the size of his parents’ car, how many rooms his house has, whether they have a swimming pool, where he went on holiday, and the intricacies of his digital watch.
The dawnings of true class consciousness vary. A duke’s daughter said she was aware of her position for the first time when she was four; she was playing in the garden and a particularly oily butler said, ‘Would my lady like some luncheon?’ She was very clever, however, and said that at school her intellect was much more of an embarrassment than her title. Rather like my niece the other day asking my nephew what subjects he was planning to take for A levels.
‘Maths I and II, and Physics,’ came the reply.
My niece gave a gasp of horror:
“Oh Henry, what will you talk about at dinner parties?’
My daughter, at seven, is unaware of class, except in so far as she’ll suddenly lapse into a Liverpool accent to make her friends laugh. My son, at ten, is beginning to come out with remarks like, ‘How many Lords do we know?’ And when my husband told him to undo the top button of his shirt he said,
‘Well Ken doesn’t.’
‘Ken,’ snapped my husband, ‘is not a gentleman.’
‘Of course he is,’ said my son. ‘He’s a millionaire.’
When he spent the day with one of his old state-school friends, however, he came back and said in passing that he didn’t like their house—the colours were too bright and shiny and you couldn’t see through it. After pondering for a long time, I realized he meant there were net curtains on the windows.
‘My family used to own most of Bath,’ announced one of his school friends, ‘but unfortunately they lost it in a game of cards.’
Most snobbery, in fact, is instilled by the parents. For a brief period an earl’s son was sent to my son’s day school, and it was horrifying the way the mothers urged their sons to ask him to tea and birthday parties. He must have seen Star Wars about fifteen times.
There is beautiful story of a very aristocratic child going away to prep school for the first time, who got hauled up before the headmaster because he insisted on calling his form master ‘Mr Brown’ instead of ‘Sir’.
‘I suppose,’ said the headmaster with infinite sarcasm, ‘you expected Mr Brown to call you Sir.’
‘Yes,’ said the boy simply.
At boarding school, as has already been pointed out, where a child is divorced from its origins and everyone wears uniform, it is often difficult to tell what class someone is.
‘The twins are awfully grand,’ I remember a friend telling me in awe.
‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. They were much younger than us.
‘Oh, they flip through The Tatler and know absolutely everyone.’
One becomes suddenly aware that people are different, like the reporter on the Daily Mail who said how jealous she felt of the one girl in the class whose parents had a telephone. A girl at Oakham was teased for being the only girl in the class who didn’t say lounge.
You find the same upstaging in George Orwell:
‘My father’s got three miles of river.’
‘My Pater’s giving me a new gun for the 12th. They’re jolly good blackcock where we go. Get out, Smith, what are you listening for? You’ve never been to Scotland. I bet you don’t know what a blackcock looks like.’
Today, in most boarding schools, considering the number of Africans and Indians, he certainly would.
I also talked to a girl who had just left a London fee-paying school in the City.
‘No one ever talked about class,’ she said, ‘but one day a friend whispered, “You and I are upper-middle, but the rest of the class are incredibly lower-middle.” Most of them come from Romford and Loughton. Their parents have scraped the money together to send them. One girl’s father is a chartered accountant from a grammar school. Another girl’s father is the head of a local primary school. He won’t let her out in the evening. She has to work. If you ask her where she lives, she always says “the back of beyond”. Actually it’s somewhere like East Ham. One girl lives in a council house. Her father’s a postman, but she wants to be an accountant and go to the L.S.E. Because they tend to be alderman class, they’re very job-conscious and materialistic. They have no desire to do good for other people, only themselves. They’re very impressed by the professions, probably because they regard it as a step up. We went round the class; 17 out of 25 wanted to do law, solicitors rather than barristers, because it’s more secure, and probably in local government. I was the only one who wanted to do English.
‘The rest all dress very neatly—white shirts that stay tucked in, and clean shoes and skirts. They think I’m incredibly scruffy. They buy a lot of cheap shoes, but never any books.
‘Their idea of social success is to be asked to a tennis club or cricket club dance. They talk a lot about losing their virginity but are more interested in whether it will ruin the relationship than the moral aspect. And they endlessly discuss the pill, but there again, because they might put on weight. They’re all terribly competitive, but the main battleground, apart from the academic, is the rush to drive. They’re obsessed with provisional licenses and three-point turns. One girl’s father gave her a car when she passed her A levels.’
These girls, as can be seen, are the same class as Bryan and Jen Teale.
WARFARE—OR THE ETON/JARROW MATCH
I am conscious, moreover, of a marked distaste for those who have not benefited from a public school education. This distaste is based on no superficial prejudice, it is founded on experience. People who have not endured the restrictive shaping of an English public school are apt in after life to be egocentric, formless and inconsiderate. These are irritating faults. They are inclined also to show off. This objectionable form of vanity is in its turn destructive
of the more creative forms of intelligence.’
Harold Nicolson.
Whenever people attack the English class system they start slinging mud at the public schools. I say ‘English’ deliberately because there aren’t any famous public schools in Wales and because education in Scotland is far more democratic. Anyone wanting to explore the splendours and miseries of the public school system should read Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s excellent book on the subject, The Public School Phenomenon. One interesting point he makes is that the expression ‘working class’ was only used pejoratively for the first time in the 1830s, when the industrial revolution was spewing forth Nouveau-Richards in unprecedented droves. ‘There is a natural tendency,’ he writes, ‘for those who have just made money to join the company, and ape the manners of those who have always had it, and despise those they have left behind. In the nineteenth century this was hugely reinforced by the fact that the newly rich appeared at a time when the land-owning upper classes still held political power.’
The easiest way for the Nouveau-Richards to join the upper classes was via a public school. Obviously you could never become a gentleman if you remained jammed up against a lot of common tradesmen. The upper classes, as Gathorne-Hardy goes on, had evolved distinct ways of speaking, dressing, holding their knives and forks, writing letters and so on. And boarding schools, where everyone was in view of everyone else, and away from the coarsening influences of home, were a particularly good way of elaborating and enforcing these aspects of behaviour.
In the nineteenth century the difference between the old landed gentry and the manufacturing classes was that the first had inherited his money, the second had earned it. And paradoxically, although the ambitious merchant or industrialist exalted work, once his son went to a public school and then on to Oxford or Cambridge, and mixed with the upper classes and espoused country house life (probably the most seductive of all life styles), he had then to value idleness as the supreme mark of status. The point of the aristocrat was that he did not need to work for his living. This is crucial to an understanding of English class attitudes. It underpins the idealization of the amateur, it explains why money went on houses and horses and beautiful things, rather than back into the business; it explains the horror of trade, and why the English, unlike the French, Americans or Germans, have always regarded intellectual as a dirty word. The public schools were not required to educate, they taught strength of character, leadership and self-reliance. This, in turn, explains why, until a few years ago, the upper and upper-middle classes took little interest in education. The English gentleman, wrote Douglas Sutherland as recently as the middle ’seventies, regards any child who comes more than half way up the class with extreme suspicion.