by Jilly Cooper
Even so Sharon Definitely Disgusting will probably end up in an office or a shop, which she always refers to as a ‘booteek’, unless it’s Woolworth, where she will call herself a trainee buyer. Mrs D-D would rather she worked in an office. If ‘they learn her to type’ she’ll become a ‘sekkertry’, go straight into Class III Nonmanual, and cross the great manual divide. She’d quite like Sharon to become a hairdresser—‘skilled’ again—and then she could do Gran’s hair on the weekend. But Sharon doesn’t like the idea: On your feet all day, and you have to work Sa-ur-days. She’d enjoy doing something with kiddies. (For 80 places last year Wandsworth Borough Council has 900 applicants.) She’d do anything not to have to work in a factory, or for some reason in a laundry, nor would she touch nursing—far too many soap-dodgers. But nursing is still very popular with West Indian young who regard it as a step up from Mum who used to clean wards when she first arrived from Jamaica.
Ten years ago, Sharon’s ambition would have been to become an air hostess, but as it would take her away from her steady boyfriend for such long stretches, she’d prefer to be a ground hostess. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting likes her at home, anyway. She’d like Dive to get on but she doesn’t have any real ambitions for Sharon. One working-class school-leaver in a very depressed area of the North managed very creditably against a lot of competition to get herself a job as a hotel receptionist. Her parents refused to let her take the job because they thought it would make her ‘too posh’ and they didn’t want her carrying on like they do in Crossroads.
WOMEN
The greatest occupational change in the last twenty-five years has been women going out to work, the telling statistic being that three-fifths of all working women now take non-manual jobs, while three-fifths of all working men do manual work. This is reflected in the vast shift to and swelling of Class III. With increased technology, the top Class I and II jobs have gone to men, and with women filling the increasing array of lower white-collar jobs. Consequently schools, for the first time, are taking seriously the fact that most women will work before and after they’re married.
One of the great job phenomena of the ’seventies was the way the upper classes took up cooking. All the debs take cordon bleu courses automatically now, instead of learning to type and undo the flowers. All their mothers cook like mad because they’ve got upper-class husbands with picky appetities, and have to organize grand house parties and dinner parties without servants. So it’s like falling off a house for them to cook for other people. The result is Caroline Stow-Crat organizing directors’ lunches and working wives’ buffet parties, starting take-away food shops and running Mrs Nouveau-Richards’ dinner parties.
Fiona Stow-Crat goes and cooks in chalets in Switzerland for free skiing, or in villas in Spain or Majorca in the summer, and is known as a jolly good sort. She was fumbled on the last night by one of the husbands in the kitchen, but turned her head away because her mouth was full of left-over Coq au Vin.
Like the upper-class man who can’t cope with the six-year training for a lawyer, the upper-class girl is incapable of long-term sustained effort. If she works in an office she’s always on the telephone, or sloping off on Friday morning and not coming back till Tuesday, or far far worse, not recognizing any difference socially between Sharon Definitely-Disgusting in the typing pool, whom she describes as ‘absolute heaven’, and Thalia Upward who’s doing significant research in the art department. As the Principal of a smart London secretarial college can be heard saying on the telephone: ‘Saturday morning? Oh, that wouldn’t suit my girls. They go to the country on Friday.’
My husband once had a secretary who used to ring up her mother when she was going home for the weekend and arrange to have the train stopped, because the railway ran across their land.
The upper classes sometimes impose their tastes on others as interior decorators. ‘I let Caro Stow-Crat have Carte Blank’, says Mrs Nouveau-Richards. The Marchioness of Tavistock advises Aston Martin on their colour schemes. Sometimes they run dress shops from which the hoi polloi think they can buy upper-class taste, but in which they get ripped off just as much as Oxford Street. Nude modelling used to be O.K. for the wilder element at the beginning of the ’seventies. By the middle ’seventies women’s lib had arrived and any kind of modelling was dismissed as pandering to sexism. But now Antonia Fraser’s daughter and the Earl of Dudley’s niece are modelling, people have got bored with women’s lib and it’s quite smart to be a sex object again.
Mayfair Mercs are the glamorous social climbers invented by Harper’s and are the female equivalents of spiralists. They go into advertising, pop music, commercial radio or television, or they shop for Arabs. They also become stylists in advertising, which means they impose their frightful lower-middle-class taste on all the sets in television commercials and press ads.
It seems insane, too, that all lower-middle and lower-class girls who come from Loughton and Romford and the East End, work in the city, with upper- and upper-middle-class men who wouldn’t dream of marrying them. While all the upper- and upper-middle-class girls who live in Knightsbridge, Fulham and Chelsea can’t face going any farther than Mayfair on the tube and therefore work with all the middle- and lower-middle-class spiralists in advertising, whom they wouldn’t dream of marrying either.
Upper-class and working-class husbands don’t like their wives going out to work. They want them waiting when they get home, always with a clean house, regular meals and children under control.
Only in the middle classes is a job regarded as a sign of status. Samantha Upward hates saying she’s just a housewife, although taking an interesting job is less of an economic necessity than it is for Mrs Definitely-Disgusting.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards has absolutely no desire to work. She saw her own mother working her fingers to the bone and considers herself very lucky to be a ‘lady’ (she emphasizes the word) of leisure.
Upper-class wives again tend to play at jobs. They counter depression when the children leave home by doing charity work, sitting on committees, visiting the old, or spending one day a week in a smart boutique or a bookshop.
‘I wouldn’t possibly have time to do a job,’ said one upper-class woman. ‘If you have a private income you have far too many letters to write.’
IN THE OFFICE
The middle classes tend to take work home from the office and not take nearly so many days off. The working classes, feeling socially out of their depth in offices, do best in backroom jobs—one remembers the spiralist who felt he had to switch over to admin’ in order to get on. The lower-middles do best in sales and P.R. because they’re so pushy. Gideon Upward is too laid back to sell, but he has polish and self-confidence which makes him good as an account executive, liaising with the client.
According to a fascinating book by J.M. and R.E. Pahl called Managers and Their Wives the working-class woman like Mrs Definitely-Disgusting would loathe the firm’s dance. But Jen Teale would adore it. The atmosphere is lower-middle anyway, and she likes to practise socializing in a formal atmosphere. Often she’s been a typist before she was married and feels very much at home.
Samantha Upward would hate any of Gideon’s office parties. She would feel under-rated and neglected. She doesn’t like being defined by who she is, rather than what she is. She can’t bear being treated just as Gideon’s wife.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards has a ball and kisses all the directors on the mouth.
Eileen Weybridge, because she is house-and kitchen-proud, enjoys entertaining Howard’s colleagues at home. She has read magazines and seen commercials emphasizing the wifely role when the boss comes to dinner, and knows about cooking food that is delicious but not so obviously expensive that Howard would not be thought to need a ‘raise’.
Samantha Upward doesn’t mind entertaining, but she finds it more of a bore than an ordeal. She regards Gideon’s boss as such a tedious little man.
Jen Teale, who would love Bryan to get on, gives him more practical help than Sa
mantha gives Gideon. Because they don’t often entertain she discusses work with Bryan in the evening and, being an ex-typist, helps him out typing reports when his secretary is off with the curse.
The most terrible story is told of the very shy wife of a spiralist, who was bogged down at home by several little children, but who was invited to her husband’s annual dinner dance. As he was doing well, she made a tremendous effort, buying a new dress, going to the hairdresser, arranging for her mother to baby-sit, and scouring the headlines for conversational fodder. The great day dawned and, on arriving at the dance, she discovered she was sitting next to her husband’s boss. Despite her trepidation, they got on terribly well and it was only during the main course, when suddenly everything went quiet, that she realized she had cut up all his meat for him.
When Jen Teale worked in an office, she was a flurry of daintiness—fingerettes so she didn’t have to lick her finger to turn a page over, plastic soap dishes, a shoe bag for her outdoor shoes, a mauve office cardigan to stop her good clothes getting dirty, a floral plastic sponge bag, and a blue plastic container for her Tampax, in case anyone should see anything. In the Ladies she rustles lavatory paper very noisily from the moment she shuts the door and sometimes coughs, too, so no one will hear anything. Afterwards she washes both hands with soap and water, unlike Samantha who only bothers if there’s someone there.
7 SEX AND MARRIAGE
‘My period has come upon me’ cried the Lady of Shallot
As was pointed out at the beginning of the last chapter, the chief factors affecting social mobility are career and marriage. If Sharon Definitely-Disgusting blossoms into a beauty and lands Georgie Stow-Crat, her future will be completely different from that of her brother Dive who marries a factory girl. If you marry beneath you, and have plenty of money, it is possible to yank your partner up to your own level. By the time King Cophetua had given the beggar maid a few elocution lessons and smothered her in diamonds and sables, she was probably indistinguishable, save for a few ‘tas’ and ‘pardons’, from the other ladies of the court. But take a plunge both in class and financial status, and it’s a different matter. If Queen Cophetua had fallen for a beggar, however handsome, and been cut off with 10p and forced to live on his lack of income, they would both have vanished into obscurity.
Although kings have married beggar maids, and peers’ daughters eloped with garage mechanics, the fact that gossip columnists get so excited when this happens stresses both the news value and the rarity of such an event. Most of us commit endogamy, which is not a sophisticated form of bestiality, but merely marrying someone of the same class. In fact, Sir Anthony Wagner, the Clarenceux King at Arms, has gone so far as to say that a social class for him means ‘an endogamous class, one that is whose members normally marry within it’. The main reason why the classes have tended to pick partners in the same stratum is to exclude the classes below. The upper classes, for example, married each other to keep their land to themselves. The bourgeoisie did the same because they didn’t want to share their capital with the working classes.
Much has been written about the social mobility triggered off by the sexual revolution of the ’sixties, with working-class lovers surging up from the East End, public school boys melting down their accents, and upper-class girls, in a glow of egalitarianism, taking on a string of down-market lovers—lorry drivers one year, negroes the next and beards the year after. But as Harper’s has pointed out, ‘Her final choice remains strangely unaffected. Somewhere there is a chartered accountant with her name on him.’ Or, in Fiona Stowe-Crat’s case, it’s back to Squire One.
COURTING
The working classes get off the mark very early. Dive Definitely-Disgusting, having gone to school locally, meets the same members of the opposite sex all the year round, like. He goes about in mixed gangs at first; then one day on the way home from school he offers to pay the bus fare of one of the girls and has the mickey taken out of him by all his mates. From then on he and the girl go round entwined like a three-legged race. As neither has a telephone at home they spend hours on the doorstep necking, or gazing into each other’s eyes like cats. If they ever do talk on the telephone, the conversation is punctuated by long, long pauses. Embarrassed by tenderness or compliments, they indulge in permanent badinage and back chat. This behaviour in extreme form was ritualized by the punk rockers:
‘When you fancy a girl, you spit in each other’s glasses. Then the boy punk says, “Do you?” The girl answers, “Yes,” and you go to the toilets.’
Jen Teale is very strict with Christine and hangs around at teenage parties, finally falling asleep at two o’clock in the morning under a pile of crisp packets like a babe in the wood. Naturally Christine reacts against Jen and she and her friends escape to London, live in hostels, go in pairs to wine bars and pick up men with eye-meets. They are very keen on what they call ‘Chinese Nosh’ or a ‘meal e-out’, and use expressions like ‘a curry’ or ‘a wine’. Having been told since childhood to behave like little ladies, they are the most overtly flirtatious of all the classes, fluttering their eyelashes, pulling faces and rolling their eyes like Esther Rantzen, which they call being ‘unimated’. When she goes into a party or a restaurant Christine always looks round to see what effect she is having on men. The upper classes never bother—and they never fidget either.
Zacharias Upward starts courting much the latest. The upper-middles haven’t the self-assurance of the upper classes and, locked into a single sex school, Zacharias makes do with Thalia’s friends who’ve been asked to stay in the holidays. Howard Weybridge and his friends are much better off. Too inhibited to pick each other up, and considering it common anyway, they have evolved an elaborate system of legitimate pick-up places: tennis clubs, rugger, golf and hockey clubs, where sporting events take place to heat the blood, followed by drinking to release the inhibitions before anyone can get going. Jim Callaghan, who was working-class, had to join the tennis club in order to court Audrey, who, by his definition, was middle-class because her parents had a car, a char and went on holiday.
‘We’re goin’ steady!’
Later the upper-middle classes also escape to London where they share flats with other girls and boys of ‘roughly the same sort of background’ (their euphemism for ‘the same class’). They tend to meet the opposite sex through work, nurses going out with doctors, secretaries with bosses.
The upper classes have far more confidence. They all know each other anyway, and their parents, who they call ‘wrinklies’ or ‘jarryatrics’, have full enough social lives not to bother themselves too much about their children’s morals. They worry far more about drugs and car smashes after drinking than loss of virginity.
Georgie Stow-Crat meets girls at dances in the holidays, at the Fourth of June, in Scotland in August or at the Feathers Ball, once described by The Observer in very unsmart terms, as the ‘do of the year for those of first-class stock’.
Unlike Thalia Upward, if Fiona Stow-Crat sees a boy she likes:
‘I dance over and hope he notices me. If that doesn’t work I find someone who knows him and get that person to introduce me. If he still isn’t interested I give up.’
When they’re older, the upper classes meet skiing, shooting and at various up-market occasions like Ascot and Henley. At parties they go in for lots of horse play and shrieking. Linda in Love in a Cold Climate was far more attractive to the opposite sex than the more beautiful Polly because she was a ‘romper’—almost a sort of chap. The upper classes are inclined to lean out of windows and pour champagne on tramps and parked cars, or to charge around at dead of night changing road signs. The sexes also meet each other at drinks parties in the girls’ flats in Knightsbridge and Belgravia. Even if the party isn’t being given in her flat, the hostess sends out ‘At Home’ cards, and the recipient automatically runs her thumb over the words ‘At Home’ to see if they’re engraved.
THE SEASON
Up to the late ’fifties most upper-class girls �
��came out’. One’s mother, who’d been presented herself, presented one to the Queen, and the Nouveau-Richards bribed some impoverished upper-class woman to do the same for Tracey-Diane. In 1958, however, the Queen abolished the whole presentation ceremony, which meant that anyone could become a deb. The season was swamped by social climbers and lost any kind of cachet.
Despite this setback, a few hundred girls still come out every year. The process is to write to Peter Townend, the social editor of The Tatler for a list of ‘gairls’ doing the season. Then follows a string of luncheons where the mothers get together, see that party dates don’t clash and make sure that their daughters get asked to as many things as possible. Clued-up mothers have stickers printed with their own and their daughter’s addresses on. The minute the first luncheon reaches the coffee stage out come the diaries and everyone charges round seeing how many stickers they can get into other people’s diaries.
Many of the upper classes sell farms or woods to pay for dances. It is also necessary to suck up to Peter Townend in order to get your daughter’s picture in The Tatler. He can also produce young men out of a hat whose background, education, regiment or sheer cash-flow make them eligible. Most of the young men live in the country or a precious stone’s throw from Harrods.
One of the great dangers is that one’s daughter may fall in love with one of them at the beginning of the season and wreck her chances with other men. ‘Don’t you dare go steady,’ I heard one mum say recently. ‘Just like the lower classes.’
One has the feeling that the mothers enjoy the season almost more than the daughters. Many of them, still youngish and pretty, have the chance to meet up with old gairlfriends and flirt with old flames.
At the end of the season I asked a deb’s mum, did she feel all the expense had been worth it?
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘The gairls have all had such fun, and at the worst, they’ll have built up a network of jolly nice gairlfriends.’