Class

by Jilly Cooper

  The pattern is always the same. Harassed working mothers talking about au pairs, and non-working mothers having grisly heartburn that Simpkins minor might not make Oxbridge. There’s always a sprinkling of bra-less earth mothers, with John Innes and wholemeal flour under their finger nails, wearing long skirts because they’ve been caught on a hot day with unshaven legs. Their tits always wobble in the mother’s race—perhaps that’s why all the fathers go.

  VOCABULARY

  Both the upper and upper-middle classes consider it very vulgar to use the word ‘teacher’. In ordinary adult conversation the upper classes say ‘schoolmaster’ or ‘schoolmistress’. Jen Teale resists the word ‘mistress’ because it has sexual overtones, so she says ‘schoolteacher’. It is all right to describe someone as a good teacher if you mean that he is good at teaching, but very common if you mean that he is a morally irreproachable schoolmaster. ‘Teacher’ without an article (e.g. teacher says . . .) is even worse.

  ‘Youngster’ is another very lower-class word, employed by Shirley Williams and Mr Wedgwood Benn when they’re trying to be democratic. So are ‘lad’ and ‘lass’: ‘I’ve got two fine lads at college’. Harry Stow-Crat would say ‘Georgie is up at Oxford’. ‘Youth’ and ‘teenager’ (perhaps because they are American) are somehow more acceptable. Other taboo expressions include ‘plimsolls’ for ‘gym shoes’, ‘P.E.’ for ‘gym’, and ‘bathing costume’ or ‘swimsuit’ for ‘bathing suit’. ‘Scholar’ should not be used as a synonym for ‘pupil’. It means a child who has won a scholarship.

  Here is an example of lower-middle-class journalism. It is a report on Prince Andrew’s girlfriend.

  ‘A scholar at exclusive Gordonstoun School, Scotland, she penned an excited note to her Gran on Palace notepaper. Among the Xmas cards gathered on the mantelpiece above a coal fire was a card from Prince Andrew.

  ‘“We are not particularly wealthy,” enthused her Gran. “At the moment she is studying for an examination. She’s very keen on sports.”’

  There are at least nineteen socially suspect words here. Journalists invariably use the words ‘exclusive’ and ‘select’ as euphemisms for ‘rich’ or ‘upper class’.

  It is very bad form to ask someone where they went to school. The expression ‘public school’ is also very lower-middle-class in the sentence, ‘Wayne is going to public school next term’. Among the upper classes it would be assumed the child was going to Eton anyway.

  LES VICES ANGLAISES

  You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.

  Saki

  If, when you’re looking round for a suitable boy’s boarding school, you tell someone you’ve decided on X, they promptly say ‘Oh, they’re just a bunch of queers there,’ so you say, ‘Well, Y’s my second choice,’ to which they reply, ‘Oh, they’re a bunch of queers there too.’ So you say, ‘Well, what about Z? All the masters are married, and they’ve just introduced girls.’ ‘Oh,’ comes the reply, ‘that’s just a blind. They’re still just a bunch of queers.’ Perhaps that’s why the Labour Party never bothered to abolish the public schools. If they’re only producing queers, they’re less likely to marry and produce lots of upper- and middle-class children. Certainly in no other country do boys spend the years from eight to eighteen away from home locked up in single-sex schools.

  Not long ago, in the debating society of one of the most famous public schools, a master rashly asked one of the more glamorously decadent of the senior boys how widespread homosexuality was.

  ‘Well,’ drawled the boy, echoing Mrs Patrick Campbell, ‘at least we don’t do it in the passages.’

  The deliberate segregation and mutual dependence of English public school life, has, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy suggests, led not only to the Old Boy Network but also to a strong strain of homosexuality (and I would add mysogyny) in upper- and upper-middle-class men. It is interesting, too, that only in England—home of le vice anglais—does the word ‘stroke’ mean both a caress and the lash of the cane. The fact, too, that tarts say that a high proportion of their clients who want to be beaten, or to watch beatings, come from the upper- and upper-middle classes must be something to do with older boys being allowed to cane younger boys, or to watch their compeers inflict the punishment.

  In the old days the only glimpses schoolboys got of naked women were in carefully secreted copies of Health and Efficiency, or of black ladies in The National Geographic. Now, instead of sporting prints on the study walls, they have posters of near-nude Bardots and Jacqueline Bissetts. The latter, with her small-breasted, androgynous figure, is a significant choice, because, as John Mortimer, an Old Harrovian, points out in My Oxford: ‘When emerging from the chrysalis of schoolboy homosexuality, the girls we preferred were notably boyish. Veronica Lake rather than Betty Grable, and Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, described by Frank Hauser as the natural bridge into the heterosexual world.

  ‘The only women we saw at school,’ he goes on, ‘were elderly and fierce matrons. We were waited on at table by footmen in blue tailed coats, and settled down for the night by a butler called George. Our homosexuality was therefore dictated by necessity rather than choice. We were like a generation of diners condemned to cold cuts of beef because the steak and kidney was off.’

  One of the great panics of upper- and middle-class mothers is that their sons may turn out homosexual. Samantha Upward feels a Becher’s Brook has been cleared when Zacharias surreptitiously buys the Daily Star, tears out the coloured page with the nude and pins it over the poster of John Travolta above his bed. Mrs Nouveau-Richards, however, who is too working-class to be looking out for homosexuality, is enchanted that Jison has a photograph of his schoolfriend, little Lord X, by his bed in the holidays. The latest generation of public school children, reacting presumably against their parents idiocies during the permissive age, are much calmer and straighter than their predecessors. The drug problem, which haunted the ’sixties, is supposed to have been cured by inflation and fashion, although a Harrovian was recently caught buying cocaine by mail order. Drink has now taken its place. Every public schoolboy worth his salt has a bottle of Southern Comfort hidden under the floorboards, and gout has become the fashionable disease among teenagers. The punishment does not necessarily fit the crime, however. Thirteen-year-old Viscount Linley was recently caught drinking whisky at Bedales with a couple of mates, and made to weed the garden for a couple of hours, but thirty less august children were suspended for holding a midnight party—perhaps it’s a question of the Royal Weed. No one gets sacked for homosexuality any more—they wouldn’t have any boys left.

  GIRLS’ SCHOOLS

  Be good, sweet Maid, and let who can be clever.

  Animosity against the public schools is aimed far more at boys’ schools than girls’, because it is still the men, rather than the girls, who are bagging the top jobs, because girls’ schools are far less snobbish, and because among the upper echelons it matters far less where girls went to school, a lot of people still believing it’s nice for a girl to stay at home.

  The upper and middle classes traditionally spend far less on their daughters’ education than their sons’. A feeling still persists that it doesn’t matter so much for girls, as long as they learn French, and nice manners, and get a few O levels and make some jolly nice ‘gairl’ friends.

  A classic example of this was the diplomat quoted in Harper’s who sent his secretary to find a boarding school for his daughter, adding that if she had been a boy, ‘I’d have had to do it myself’.

  Girls at boarding schools are seldom taught any domestic science beyond making cod in cheese sauce and rhubarb crumble, nor do they ever learn how to clean a room. This is a hangover from the old days when it was assumed they would always have servants when they grew up.

  Comprehensive schools have home economics sections, often grander than those of any finishing school, but the girls get so good at housework that this often leads to conflict at home.

 
Some girls’ schools pretend the class barriers are breaking down, but the old prejudices remain. Gathorne-Hardy quotes one headmistress as saying she would love her girls to go to dances with neighbouring boys’ schools, but alas there were none in the area. Actually there were several comprehensives: what she meant was no public schools.

  5 UNIVERSITY

  I’m afraid the fellows in Putney rather wish they had

  The social ease and manners of a ’varsity undergrad,

  For tho’ they’re awf’lly decent and up to a lark as a rule

  You want to have the ’varsity touch after a public school.

  John Betjeman

  The expression an ‘Oxford accent’ was once used synonymously for an upper-class accent. And certainly among the lower and lower-middle classes, going to a university gives one social cachet. I remember a Jen Teale in one office in which I worked, who fell for one of the more degenerate copywriters, saying she knew that her mother would approve of him because he was ‘a graduate and nicely spoken’. Mr Definitely-Disgusting thinks his sons have ‘gone up in the world, because they’ve got letters after their names’. Howard Weybridge and the more entrenched right wing of the middle classes, however, might disapprove of undergraduates. To them ‘intellectual’ means wishy-washy lefty, and why should young layabouts looking like trainee Old Testament prophets spend three years at some fun palace at the taxpayers’ expense? The words ‘hotbed of communism’ are often on their lips. Like the Leicester businessman who said that most of the people he knew were Conservative—’But I’ve got a brother who’s a Socialist, one of the things he picked up at Oxford.’

  Mrs Nouveau-Richards gets frightfully excited about Oxford and everything wrong. She tells all her friends Jison is going to New. Harry Stow-Crat didn’t go to university; he’d acquired quite enough character at Eton by the time he was 18, but his great-great-grandfather, being a nobleman, was allowed to graduate after two years, and Georgie Stow-Crat—now that the upper classes are beginning to take education seriously—worked hard at Eton and managed to scrape a place in geography at the House (Christ Church, Oxford).

  ‘Christ Church undergraduates,’ wrote Sir John Betjeman, ‘gave the impression of dropping in at Oxford on the way to a seat in the House of Lords, that they were coming in for a term or two but mostly staying away from college in country houses. They hunted, fished and shot, but I never heard of any of them playing football or hockey or even cricket, although cricket was played on the grounds of country houses within motoring distance of Oxford, and men from the House might have been called in to swell a village team.’

  The House was still the mecca of the socially ambitious in the ’fifties when I was camp-following at an Oxford typing school. I had one or two boyfriends at Christ Church and went to several parties there. I’d never encountered people so noisy, wild and totally self-assured. Freed from the restrictions of National Service, they were like a lot of oated-up thoroughbreds suddenly let loose in the paddock. They always seemed to be drinking champagne, whizzing up to London in fast cars to go to nightclubs, or breaking up the rooms of luckless grammar school boys. One of them was sent down for shooting a don through the foot with a 12 bore. All of them ran up the most frightful debts. Fortunately for them, they were surrounded by a galaxy of Nouveau-Richards who were always ready to pick up the bill. None of them appeared to do any work or go to any lectures. I was totally intoxicated by their sophistication and their ancient names: Mowbray, Bathurst, Gage, Stormonth Darling. But for me it was a time of great insecurity. Not only did I feel intellectually inferior because I wasn’t an undergraduate, but also socially inferior because I was middle-class. It was the first time I’d met the upper classes en masse. If school, with its private and state sectors, is the great divider, university should be the great bringer-together. For many undergraduates it’s the first time they meet people of different classes.

  My thrill at Oxford was that I met the aristocracy, but for Angus Wilson, it was rubbing shoulders, and goodness knows what else, with the working classes:

  ‘There had of course, been my London sexual encounters, many of them with cockney working-class young men, but the glory of Merton was I found myself meeting for the first time working-class men who came from the Midlands and the North.’

  This, and the earlier quotation from John Betjeman, comes from My Oxford. Recently published together with My Cambridge, this is a book in which well known people each wrote a chapter describing their experiences as undergraduates. What is remarkable—apart from the high standard of writing—is what incredibly class-conscious documents they are. One feels that the authors wrote with an honesty about their origins they would never have displayed if they hadn’t been so successful.

  Eleanor Bron, for example, found herself mixing with an upper-middle-class intellectual élite, which made her unable to communicate with her own family (working-class Jewish) when she went home:

  ‘I was too clever; like Alice I had grown and couldn’t fit in the door anymore.’

  Alan Coren arrived at Oxford at the beginning of the ‘Flat-“a”-working-class-is-beautiful era’ and capitalized on his own self-admittedly humble origins:

  ‘I had a great success with Isis on the strength of a donkey jacket from a second-hand shop, an accent that went with it, cracking knuckles, narrowing eyes to slits and spitting out pips with no concern for target. This was how I became an authentic working-class voice, and sold many stories to a succession of gentlemanly editors.

  ‘This was in the post-Angry days, when people referred to themselves as “one”, blushed and started referring to themselves as “you”, and tall willowy lads with inbred conks and hyphens stood before mirrors abbreviating their drawl, dropping aitches, and justifying a family that went back to the fourteenth century by saying they were all solidly behind Wat Tyler.’

  Piers Paul Reid, upper-middle-class and second generation intellectual, arrived a few years later at Cambridge when the egalitarian movement had reached its height and the middle classes actually sought out working-class company. One of his friends recounted with a frisson of delight that there was actually a miner’s son with rooms in the same building. Alas, in Piers Paul Reid’s college ‘There was only one boy who lived in a council flat. But he could grasp logic and metaphysics, and at the same time amass a variety of scholarships and grants by the judicious exploitation of his background. He avoided paying bills and was treated leniently because colleges were as eager to cultivate those proletarian seedlings as were American colleagues to cultivate black students.’

  Having ferociously despised Etonians at the Pitt Club, Piers Paul Reid then reluctantly discovered that they were rather nice. Finally he went to a May Ball at St Johns, ‘where there were girls in long dresses, and men in hired white tie and tails, not Etonians, instead bright guys from the grammar schools, and minor public schools, intoxicated by the mirage of success’—Jen Teales, in fact, trying to maintain some standard of gracious living in the face of rampant egalitarianism.

  By 1968 the ‘working-class-is-beautiful’ movement was coming to a head with student power joining forces with militant workers (a far cry from the undergraduates who rallied in 1926 to break the General Strike). But from then on things began to change. The austerity years arrived and, instead of power, undergraduates started worrying about survival, about fast-diminishing grants and getting a job when one went down. The possibility of actually joining the working classes in the dole queue suddenly made them seem less attractive. People no longer wanted to get a job helping people or burned to do something in the Third World. Instead, they wanted to amass a fortune in the Middle East.

  ‘Apart from medics and Indians,’ said one Oxford undergraduate, ‘all anyone wants to do when they leave here is to make a fast buck.’

  According to The Sunday Telegraph, in recent years the main scramble has been into those twin middle-class havens of indispensability—law and accountancy. The proportion has doubled in the last two yea
rs. Soon, no doubt, the market will be flooded and there’ll be hundreds of out-of-work accountants working as waiters. (At least they’ll be better at adding up the bill than out-of-work actresses.)

  ‘A few years ago,’ confirmed a don, ‘I spent my time convincing people that Marx hadn’t said the last word on everything. Now I spend the same amount of time persuading them everything he said wasn’t complete rubbish.’

  The universities, in fact, have become bourgeois. How then have the classes re-aligned?

  ‘One does generally mix with people of one’s own type (i.e. class),’ said an upper-middle-class undergraduate from Oriel, ‘though this is by no means a conscious or rigid principle—but it does seem that many comprehensive and grammar school types are not very interesting people, or at least seem to have less in common with one because of their background.’

  ‘At teacher training college,’ said a working-class boy, ‘we found our own level and stuck together. Particularly in evidence was a stuck-up group we called “the semis” (lower-middle, Jen Teale again) who got engaged in the first year. All they talked about was houses and cars. The only aggro I got was at Christmas dinner when the principal told me to leave the table for not wearing a tie.’

  ‘You don’t notice people’s backgrounds,’ said an old Harrovian now at Reading, ‘until someone almost beats you up for asking his name. Yobbos are less tolerant of having the piss taken out of them, and tend to overreact, which public school boys don’t understand. When they get a bit of confidence, yobbos who’ve been up for three or four years take a delight in mimicking one’s accent, which can get very offensive.

  ‘I went out with a grammar school girl,’ he went on ‘and I shared a flat with a boy from a comprehensive school. Apart from his talking about “lounge”, “settee” and “toilet”, we got on very well, although communal eating was a problem. He wanted to eat early, I wanted to eat late. Dinner in hall was a sore point—between 5.30 and 6.30, but I expect that’s for economic reasons. You get so hungry you have to buy something from the bar to eat later.