Class

by Jilly Cooper

  The Nouveau-Richards will be absolutely furious if Tracey-Diane doesn’t marry up. In the same way that the middle-class Princess Grace was livid, having hooked a prince herself, that her daughter settled for a middle-class industrialist.

  Parents are very seldom cross about upward mobility. Even when engagements are broken off, they can make social capital out of it, like the mother who went round telling her friends:

  ‘It’s such a bore having to pick the coronets off all the linen.’

  Dive Definitely-Disgusting marries the earliest. This is probably due to frustration. He’s likely to have no flat or car to make love in. If he goes home Mrs D and the children are watching the telly—and it’s too cold outside, except in summer. They also started dating earlier anyway, and if they do screw they don’t bother to ‘take precautions’, get pregnant and can’t afford abortions.

  ‘I didn’t have to get married, I married for love,’ a working-class minicab driver told me the other day, as if it were the exception to the rule.

  Engaged at seventeen Sharon Definitely-Disgusting gets ‘eternized’ at eighteen, which means she receives an eternity ring from her betrothed. At Christmas and birthdays she will send him a four-foot-square card padded with red satin, saying ‘To my Darling Fiance’ (without the accent).

  The word ‘fiancé’, perhaps because so many people live together now, has become distinctly vulgar, particularly when it is pronounced ‘fee-on-cay’ with the weight on the last syllable. Debs get round sometimes by saying ‘my fiasco’ or ‘my intended’ in inverted commas.

  THE WEDDING

  The wedding is another occasion when the classes meet head on. People who marry up choose tiny churches, or have registry office weddings so they don’t have to invite less grand relations. It doesn’t matter having common friends; everyone thinks one’s frightfully democratic. But common relations are quite a different matter. Wedding presents aren’t displayed either, because they might cause derisive mirth at the reception. Embarrassing relations also show up less at a stand-up reception with food you can eat with your fingers (which Jen Teale calls a ‘finger buffet’), so people’s table manners don’t show up—and with any luck working-class relations will push off early because they hate not being able to sit down.

  There will invariably be a panic about protocol. One girl said her mother poured over The Tatler for months, studying every detail of the weddings, muttering ‘we’re going to get this right if it kills me’. ‘We even put a sleeping pill in Grandad’s cocoa the night before, because he refused to wear morning dress.’

  When John Betjeman married a very upper-class girl, he drove his future mother-in-law insane at the pre-wedding party by wearing a made-up bow tie on elastic and flicking it all the way through dinner.

  But, however critical he or she may be of the behaviour of others, the true aristocrat is a law unto himself. The men had just finished dinner at a stag party in a private room at a London club when the bridegroom’s father, an aged Earl, suddenly beckoned to a waiter and said, ‘Pot’.

  ‘We’re not allowed to supply it, Sir,’ said the waiter, nervously.

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ roared the Earl. ‘I mean pisspot.’ Whereupon a huge chamber pot was brought down from one of the bedrooms and the Earl proceeded to use it in full view of the other guests.

  The upper classes get married in the country in their own churches. As they are accustomed to giving and going to balls and big parties, the wedding is not such an event as it would be in a middle-class family. Quite often the bride wears her mother’s wedding dress, and a 200-year-old veil of Brussels lace held in place by the family tiara. (One upper-class bride was so relaxed she spent her wedding morning washing her horse’s tail.) She doesn’t usually have a long engagement or any of the hassle of finding a house, because her parents or her in-laws have already given them a ‘place’ with lots of ‘pieces’ in it.

  The wedding invitations are engraved in black; the service cards have the bride and bridegroom’s (pronounced ‘gr’m’ not ‘grume’) Christian names printed at the bottom. Flowers in the church are usually something unostentatious like lilies of the valley, with the bride’s bouquet (pronounced ‘book-kay’ not ‘buke-ay’) of white roses or spring flowers.

  The men wear their own morning coats. There are usually hordes of little bridesmaids called Sophie and Henrietta, a page with patent leather hair wearing a replica of a Blues and Royals uniform, and a labrador who wriggles ingratiatingly into the wedding photographs. No one minds about the music—’Here Comes the Bride’ up, Mendelssohn down. The bride agrees to honour and obey. It used to be unsmart to get married at the weekend, particularly in London, as everyone had gone away. But now that most of the upper classes and their show business friends have jobs it is considered perfectly all right. Saturday police have to be deployed from the local football match to deal with the traffic. Several of the guests arrive by helicopter.

  After the service the line-up to shake hands with the couple takes hours and hours. We queued interminably at a royal wedding a few years ago—it was rather like mountaineering. You crawled along for ten minutes, then turned into the next room to find another queue, and then another up a staircase and then another. People kept giving up, and doing U-turns to go out to dinner. One felt they ought to provide something to sustain one during the waiting: champagne at the foothills, or brandy at the South Col, or at least lay on buskers.

  At another very grand wedding, having been nervously practising my curtsey all the way, I found, when we finally reached the bride and bridegroom, that everyone was shaking hands with them.

  ‘I thought we were supposed to bob,’ I muttered to a friend once I was safely inside.

  ‘I was damned if I was going to bob to that jumped-up trollop,’ she said, ‘and after that everyone followed suit.’

  The reception at an upper-class wedding is a very cheerful occasion, once again because everyone knows each other, and it doesn’t matter that there’s no introducing. None of the women look the least self-concious in hats. The cake is decorated with white flowers, and often cut with the bridegroom’s sword, the nearest it ever gets to active service. Really grand weddings include busloads of tenants from both families. Usually they sit around with red faces, shiny blue suits and tumbrilcreemed hair. But at Earl Grosvenor’s wedding recently morning coats were hired for all the tenants, so that they wouldn’t feel out of place, and they were all flown down by aeroplane.

  Georgie Stow-Crat hates his honeymoon because he misses Snipe. Upper-class girls often take Teddy on honeymoon.

  When Georgie marries Tracey Nouveau-Richards no expense is spared. Tracey’s tiara is so heavy her head droops like a snowdrop. The ‘floral decorations’ composed of ‘Football Mum’ chrysanthemums, nurtured in Mr Nouveau-Richards’ conservatory, are described by Mrs N-R’s friends as ‘tasteful’. Mrs N-R hires a hundred out-of-work actors to pose as relations, and two hundred more as tenants. They rather overdo the Somerset accents and rust-coloured country suits. The wedding takes place in Guildford Cathedral, with a reception at the bridal home in Sunningdale. The marquee extends beyond the garden and covers much of the golf course. Guests keep falling down the holes. Three tons of Joy are squirted into the swimming pool on which float the words ‘George’ and ‘Tracey-Diane’, written in salmon-pink carnations.

  Mrs Nouveau-Richards has had orchids and maidenhair corsages in little test tubes of preservative liquid made up for herself and Caroline Stow-Crat, who surreptitiously tries to rip off the maidenhair during the service and only succeeds in burning a hole in her new coat and skirt with the preservative. Signing the register takes longer than usual as Mrs N-R’s hat gets stuck in the doorway.

  Harry Stow-Crat has a wonderful time. There’s plenty of champagne—Tracey-Diane’s endowment of worldly goods means he needn’t worry about death duties anymore. All Mrs Nouveau-Richards’ hired relations turn out to be his show business cronies, which persuades him the N-R’s do know
some quite amusing people after all.

  The Upwards are simply furious they haven’t been invited.

  ‘You can’t ask everyone,’ says Samantha bravely, although Mrs Nouveau-Richards seems to have done just that.

  The upper-middle wedding is far more depressing. Samantha, wanting to be different and stress how ‘cultured’ and musical she is, chooses hymns the congregation don’t know. Lists are placed at Peter Jones or the General Trading Company, so everyone knows what they’re getting. Waiters keep the napkin over the champagne to hide the lack of vintage. No one wears maidenhair behind their carnations except a few déclassé cousins in lounge suits.

  As the upper-middle classes don’t all know each other, and prefer three hours’ drinking to a sit-down meal, their weddings are rather heavy going. The women’s heels sink into the lawn so they can’t circulate. Merriment is not aided by a long speech from the bride’s parents’ most upper-class friend. No one can clap properly at the end because they’re holding empty glasses. Thalia’s husband hates his honeymoon and thinks they’re so called because they’re so sticky.

  Howard and Eileen Weybridge’s wedding is held in the function room of the Olde White Hart (circa 1937) with French windows opening on to the patio. The women look very self-conscious in floppy hats, and show too much hair at the front. The bride makes her own wedding dress, or buys it off the peg. According to one manufacturer, royalty influences far more wedding dresses than show business, and the less virginal a girl is the more covered-up she wants to look. Howard Weybridge and his ushers are photographed outside the church in hired morning coats with maidenhair rampant behind every foiled carnation, and their top hats on the sides of their heads. The reception starts off with sweet and dry sherry followed by Asti Spumante (‘bubbly’ is too expensive). Everyone sits down to lunch of a nice smoked trout, chicken and bombe surprise, after frightful rows over the seating arrangements. The speakers, likely to be local councillors or secretaries of the tennis club, who adore the sound of their own voices, go on for ever, and every dismally unfunny telegram is read out.

  The bride’s mother finds the ‘holl’ occasion very ‘meuving’. ‘It’s such a nice opportunity to meet and converse with relatives,’ and Eileen’s had ‘some wonderful wedding gifts’. The father says, ‘Look after yerself,’ as Eileen goes away in the Austin Princess and a navy costume with beige accessories. The honeymoon is spent in the bridal suite of a hotel in Devonshire.

  The lower-middles are the tiredest when they get married, because they’ve just ‘decorated and renovated their new property’ themselves. (Georgie Stow-Crat would say ‘done up the house’) all ready to move in.

  Bryan Teale has his stag party two nights before the wedding because Auntie Jean has to be met off the train from Scotland on Friday, and the car has to be put through the car-wash before they go away. No one wears a morning coat; the men are in three-piece waisted suits; the best man goes off to buy shoes with built-up heels on the morning of the wedding so his trousers hang better. The ‘bridal gown’ is based on the latest royal soap opera with Mrs Fitzherbert sleeves. The photographer snaps away throughout the service at all the most solemn moments. People are shown to their seats by ‘groomsmen’ rather than ‘ushers’, and the results are put in a white album with spider tissue paper. The service cards are printed in silver gothic script and decorated with silver bells and the bride and groom’s initials. The bridegroom has to remove his initialled signet ring to his right hand to make way for his wedding ring, and the happy couple, smothered in confetti and rice, leave the church in a white Rolls-Royce.

  The reception is held at the Dainty Maiden Tea Rooms, and thirsty cyclists who’ve ridden over from Godalming are told to go to the Hand in the Bush Tea Rooms down the road, as the place has been taken over for a ‘function’. Sherry is followed by vin rosé or sparkling hock. Everyone eats ham, chicken and salad. The wedding cake is topped by a papier mâché replica of the bride and groom both wearing lipstick, and decorated with silver shoes, horseshoes and plastic flowers.

  The bride, wearing a tangerine ‘skirt suit’, and the bridegroom, in an even lighter coloured and more waisted suit, go off to Majorca for the honeymoon where the new Mrs Teale loses her virginity on the third night.

  The working-class wedding is the jolliest. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting has even forgiven Stan for putting Sharon in the club—at least he’s white. The hall is hired at the Goat and Boots; the bar is open all day; everyone sits down or dances—the working classes never stand because of their corns. Dad soon gets down to the piano, and starts playing ‘golden oldies’ like ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’. Auntie Eileen leads the singing. Even Mrs Definitely-Disgusting is persuaded to do a knees up. Sharon wears an empire-line dress to hide the bulge and feels sick all the time. The honeymoon is spent in Jersey. Having never been away from home before, Stan and Sharon are very homesick.

  OH COME OH COME NON-MANUEL

  It is difficult to generalize about sex and class. Hunter Davies, a working-class writer so successful that he has certainly become middle-class in life style, expressed his bewilderment in a recent Sunday Times article at his thirteen-year-old daughter going out with boys and demanding parties with drink: ‘Brought up on a council estate in the ’sixties, I married the school swot. It took me three weeks even to hold her hand. My dad knew what it was like for me when I was courting, but things have changed so much in the last ten years that I haven’t a clue what it’s like to be Caitlin. She’s a different age, a different class, a different society.’

  With the advent of the permissive society, one hopes that the young of all classes are getting better at sex and more aware of ‘the great discovery of the age’, as Hugh MacDiarmid calls it, ‘that women like it too.’

  But there are still vast pockets of male chauvinism among the upper and lower classes, particularly in the north. It is possible that young Georgie Stow-Crat and Dive Definitely-Disgusting are fairly competent operators, having picked up a few tips from the cinema and Anna Raeburn, but their fathers are probably still floundering around in the dark ages.

  Harry Stow-Crat’s attitude to sex, for example, is the same as that of our late lamented English setter, who was spoilt, goofy, terrifyingly tenacious and with a totally unbridled sex drive. If he got on the trail of a bitch, he would charge across three main roads, race twenty miles until he caught up with her, and then mount her from the wrong end. His libido was only equalled by his sexual ineptitude—rather like one peer who discovered after three years during which no heir appeared that he’d been buggering his wife all the time.

  Another married aristocrat I know was so wild to pull a girl he’d had lunch with that he smuggled her into the Great Western Hotel by a side door, broke into an unoccupied bedroom and was just settling down to work when the management rumbled him. Only a lot of fast talking and a fistful of fivers stopped him being arrested and the most frightful scandal ensuing.

  If Harry fancies a girl, particularly a lower-class one, he will pester her until he gets her, and then it’s wham, bam, thank you ma’m. He’s far too used to poor Caroline shutting her eyes and thinking of England to believe a woman should derive any pleasure from the act.

  The telly-stocrat and the pop singer have the same exalted approach. ‘It’s so easy,’ sighed one rock star. ‘You have all these groupies; there’s no time to romance (lower-middle for to court) on the road, so you just say, “Get your gear off”.’ A sort of droit de Singer.

  My favourite mini-cab driver has a theory that tall people are good in bed because only they can reach the sex books that librarians insist on putting on the top shelves. But this doesn’t explain why aristocrats, who are generally tall, tend to be hopeless. Maybe they never go into public libraries, or don’t read anything except the Sporting Life and Dick Francis. Harry’s sole aim is vaginal penetration; he can’t even count up to foreplay. When a girl kisses him, she can feel his narrow stoat’s head under his straight mousy hair, totally devoid of any B
eethoven bumps. As he thinks aftershave and deodorant are vulgar, and he doesn’t have any middle-class hangups about being nice to be near, he might even smell rather sweaty.

  Aristocrats often break their toes on stone hot-water bottles climbing into other people’s beds at house parties. One wonders what the procedure is. Does the hostess sleep with the man in the right-hand bedroom for the first half of the night, and the man in the left-hand bedroom for the second half? Presumably anything goes as long as you’re back in your own room by dawn so as not to upset the servants. Most of the upper classes share beds with their dogs for warmth. When a lover leaps into bed and thinks he has encountered something interesting and furry, he may easily get bitten.

  As they have all the freedom and restlessness of inherited wealth, there is a wild decadent fringe of the aristocracy, whose sexual appetites are so jaded that they’re into every perversion under the eldest son. Having enjoyed beatings at Eton, both Harry and Georgie Stow-Crat adore being whipped. You can recognize an old school bottom—striped with red, white and blue weals—anywhere.

  Most life peers, who have been far too busy making it to the top to get any practice, are absolutely hopeless in bed.

  ONCE YOU HAVE FOUND HER NEVER LET HER COME

  The upper-middles used to be even worse than the aristocracy. Too inhibited even to have Harry’s joie de vivre, their upper-middle lips were far too stiff for them to be any good at oral sex. Gideon’s parents must have had terrible sex lives because of overhead lights in the bedroom. Once they’d switched the lights off by the door, the room was plunged in darkness, so it is a miracle that they even found each other and managed to produce Gideon.