Class

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘The reason for this,’ explained a peer ‘is that few blue-blooded aristocrats have inhibitions about what their neighbours think.’ Presumably if you live at the end of a long drive the neighbours don’t get a chance to see anything.

  Only three per cent of life peers get divorced—too busy getting to the top to have anything on the side, and too hopeless in bed for anyone to want them.

  One of the saddest victims of the class war is the wife of the ambitious spiralist. While he’s been living it up in foreign hotels, eating expense-account lunches and playing golf with the boss, she’s been stuck at home with the children. He has a whole new life-style, and he wants a new wife to complement it, someone more glamorous and more socially adept. Husbands justify abandoning the first wife by saying:

  ‘Anita didn’t travel with me’ or ‘I married a local girl [euphemism for ‘common’] first time round’.

  People who’ve been married several times tend only to mention the grandest ex they’ve been married to. Woodrow Wyatt has had several wives, but in Who’s Who only lists the one who was an earl’s daughter.

  8 HOMOSEXUALITY

  ‘The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.’

  Virginia Woolf.

  Heterosexuals, as we have seen tend to marry and go out with people of their own class. But, as Harry Stow-Crat might drop class if he had something on the side, because there would be less likelihood of his own set finding out, homosexual relationships (because until recently they were against the law) tend to be between people of different classes simply for safety reasons. Harry Stow-Crat pursuing rough trade in Brixton is not likely to bump into any of Caroline’s friends, any more than Dive Definitely-Disgusting bouncing around in the four-poster of some stately homo is likely to meet any of his mates.

  Because there are fewer homosexuals (about one in ten) around than heterosexuals, it’s more difficult for them to find someone of their own class. Nor could you find a class of people more insecure socially than most homosexuals and, as we’ve already pointed out, the insecure tend to drop class. The upper-class man having an affair with Dive Definitely-Disgusting is given a nice feeling of social superiority.

  Perhaps most important of all there is the psychological motive: if you’re going to descend into the pit of Sodom, you might as well degrade yourself further by dropping class. Hence the often tragic addiction of upper- and upper-middle-class queens to the criminal classes, laying themselves open to goodness knows what blackmail, beatings-up, and being left trussed up naked like a chicken for the char to discover in the morning.

  Sometimes there are happier outcomes. A famous painter surprised a burglar rifling his house and invited the burglar to stay, which he did—for the next twenty years. Another friend has a running affair going with a wonderfully handsome married burglar. He was particularly enchanted the last time the burglar came out of the nick, ‘because he lied to his wife about the release date and spent the first night out with me.’

  There’s no doubt there is something very attractive about a butch, muscular, working-class boy. ‘I’m simply not turned on by people who don’t have accents,’ said one aristocrat. A middle-class man said his father ‘warned me never to look below for a friend—how wrong he was.’

  ‘If I want to attract a toff,’ said an East-Ender, ‘I always thicken my accent and talk about “fevvers”. They think it’s marvellous.’

  On the other hand the queen, whatever his class, always tries to be more upper-class, ironing out his accent like mad, and putting on what my East-End mates call a ‘posh telephone voice’. Because the middle classes tend to articulate their words very carefully, the homosexual voice is often very difficult to distinguish from Jen Teale refained. This is why the working classes roar with laughter at people like Larry Grayson, Frankie Howerd, Dick Emery and the two Ronnies when they do drag acts, because they think they are putting on lower-middle airs.

  The upper classes are drawn to the working classes not only because they like the butch image, but also because, like women, they are drawn to people who give them a hard time. E.M. Forster, after years of falling in love with unreliables, said he was convinced that the working classes were incapable of passionate love—’All they have is lust and goodwill’. Ironically Forster at last found happiness with a married policeman, who after he died said, with typical lower-middle-class caution, that he’d never realized Forster was a homosexual.

  Yet earlier Forster had advised the writer J.M. Ackerley, who suffered from a string of unreliable boxers, burglars, guardsmen and deserters, to bear in mind that the lower-class lover can be quite deeply attached to you, but may suddenly find the journey up the social scale too much.

  Certainly if Dive Definitely-Disgusting gets taken up by the upper-class fag mafia he can lead an amazingly grand and glamorous life. A friend says his plumber spends his weekends moving from one stately home to another, the sort of life Mrs Nouveau-Richards would give her capped teeth for. Evidently a famous Oxford queen once took him to stay with Harold Nicolson, which he didn’t like because Harold had made him go and put on a tie for breakfast.

  ‘Well Doctor—it’s like this—I feel queer.’

  One of the problems of staying in very grand houses is that the moment you arrive the servants remove your clothes, wash and press them, and you never have anything to wear. My husband woke up once and, finding no trousers, rang what he thought was a bell for a valet and set off the fire alarm. One homosexual friend who’d packed rather haphazardly and only put in one pair of shoes found they had vanished without trace at breakfast, so he went down with bare feet to find a Royal Duke eating kedgeree.

  ‘I should have thought he’d have seen enough bare feet on deck when he was in the navy,’ he said afterwards.

  According to Geoffrey Gorer, the higher the social class, or rather the more educated people are, the more likely they are to be tolerant of homosexuality. As he was basing his finding on the census classifications, by the highest classes he would mean Gideon and Samantha Upward rather than Harry Stow-Crat. Certainly Jen Teale and the lower-middles who don’t enjoy sex and disapprove passionately of promiscuity would be the most intolerant, not being able to comprehend how anyone could do anything so ‘revollting’ for pleasure. The top rungs of the working classes are also very intolerant. One thinks of the poor electrician who wrote to Coal News saying he was a homosexual and pleading for tolerance, who was promptly sent to Coventry by his workmates. There is even less tolerance in the Midlands and North-East.

  In Newcastle working-class homosexuals are so terrified of being rumbled that they always take girlfriends with them to the gay pubs.

  ‘I was chased by fifteen youths in Newcastle,’ said a Cockney boy. ‘They wanted to beat me up because I was carrying a handbag.’

  Some policemen investigating a drug case went up to Wales incognito and tried to ingratiate themselves with the locals. But the locals automatically assumed they were homosexuals and resisted every approach, until the police imported some sexy police women. London, of course, is much more tolerant. When I went to a CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) meeting in Streatham, I was told that one lorry-driver came up from Wales regularly to meetings, because ‘you can’t come out in Cardiff’. And a boy who worked in a London betting shop said that when he told his mates at work that he was queer they were very understanding about it. ‘What they simply couldn’t understand—and I think this is a working-class attitude—was how I could sleep with a man and not get paid for it.’

  Whereas in the old days the great fear was that one’s daughter would become a prostitute now it’s the young lads, referred to as ‘rent boys’, who run away from home, go up to what is known as the ‘Meat Rack’ in Piccadilly and hawk their bodies for £15 a throw.

  One interesting point is that the working classes seem to get less flak than other classes when they tell their parents they’re homosexual.

  ‘My parents found out when I was about 18
,’ said an East-Ender. ‘This boy kept writing to me. We don’t get many letters in our house, and I told Mum I was going to spend Easter with him. She said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I said, “No.” Well, I had a lousy Easter worrying about her, and the moment I got home I said, “I have got something to tell you, I’m homosexual.” Her reaction was, “Oh, thank God. I thought it was drugs.” I went to a shrink and he wasn’t any help, so now everyone’s accepted it. A lot of my gay mates are frightened of shrinks. The moment you tell them you’re gay, they leap on you. There’s a change in my Dad too. Before, he was always very undemonstrative, but now we get on very well, and he often puts a hand on my arm and says, “Are you all right, son?” My mum and dad don’t mind what friends say, because they haven’t got many friends; they’re too much into the family.’

  One gets the impression that because the mother-son link is so strong in the working classes, a lot of them are subconsciously not displeased if their sons turn out queer: there won’t be any daughter-in-law problems and there won’t be the macho rivalry between father and son, when the son gets married to some lovely girl and starts jackbooting around the house. Since the working classes have large families, there’ll be other children to provide the grandchildren, and anyway there isn’t this middle- and upper-class obsession with carrying on the line. Nor, like Jen Teale, do they care much what the neighbours think. In fact they enjoy their sons bringing home all these nice young men.

  Further up the social scale parents put appalling pressure on middle-class only sons who turn out to be gay, and don’t produce grandchildren to boast about at bridge parties.

  ‘All hell broke loose,’ said one middle-class girl, ‘when my parents discovered I was a lesbian. They read some of my girlfriend’s letters, and immediately started turning it all on themselves: “What have we done to deserve this? Where did we go wrong?” They packed me straight off to a psychiatrist, but as they’re both doctors, they made me use a false name. My girlfriend and I are still together after 6 years, but my parents won’t accept her, or stop harping on it.’

  Rather like the lower-middle-class lesbian who fell in love with a married woman. When the married woman’s daughter got married:

  ‘I was allowed to act as chauffeur, fetching the cake and the bouquet, ferrying the bride’s mother to the Registry office, where I had to stay outside so no one would associate me with Pauline, then ferrying her to the reception. I wasn’t allowed to that either. They were ashamed I looked too masculine and might shock the bridegroom’s parents.’

  The upper-class attitude to homosexuality is the same as it used to be towards heterosexuality. Marry well and produce an heir at all costs; then do what you like.

  Samantha Upward, being terribly ‘aware’, would be particularly nice to homosexual men, trapping them at parties, because she wants to show them that she feels no animosity towards men she knows can never find her sexually attractive.

  Howard Weybridge ‘comes out’ on the golf course at 45, and suddenly appears at dinner parties in white suits with brushed forward hair. His son, similarily inclined, works in a prep school.

  Bryan Teale would have an absolutely miserable time at the office party, avoiding all the secretaries and longing to dance with one of the packers. He also has problems when his boss gives him two tickets for a function. He can’t take a man and if he takes a girl she’s bound to get ideas and expect him to kiss her goodnight. If the office gets too much he might become a male nurse or a purser, or work in the men’s department in a big store.

  Some of the happiest marriages, in fact, are when homosexuals marry upper-class ladies, a kind of ‘with my buddy I thee worship’. The sex side works, because the upper-class woman doesn’t expect much, and the man just shuts his eyes and thinks of Benjamin Britten. Being a raging snob, the homosexual adores all the grand side of it, organizing smart parties and inviting all his prettiest menfriends. The wife, used to the male chauvinism of the aristocracy, is entranced to have a husband who can help her decorate her house, run her social life, advise her on clothes, cook delicious meals, and provide hordes of personable young men to chat away amusingly and quite safely for hours to all the gairlfriends. The two classic examples of such liasons in modern literature are Lady Montdore and Cedric in The Pursuit of Love and Norman Chandler and Mrs Foxe in A Dance to the Music of Time.

  Homosexuals, because they are insecure and sometimes effeminate feel that socially they have to try harder. They worry terribly about accents, vocabulary, and laying the table properly. They always write letters after dinner parties, and send you change of address cards saying ‘Crispin and Terence are moving to . . .’ Because they have such good taste, their houses are often more upper class than they are.

  I think because it’s euphemistic, Harry Stow-Crat would not use the word ‘gay’, nor would he say ‘homo’ or ‘lezzie’. Harry Stow-Crat’s mother would say ‘roaring pansy’; Harry would probably say ‘homosexual’ with a long ‘o’. Samantha, to show off her knowledge of Greek, would shorten the ‘o’. Gideon would say ‘queer’. Jen Teale would say ‘one of them’. Mr Definitely-Disgusting, luxuriating in alliteration, would talk about ‘effing fairies, like’. An old-fashioned expression used to be ‘T.B.H.’ (which Samantha muddles up with G.B.H.) meaning ‘To Be Had’. Also, in the old days, one used to say, ‘Is he So?’

  9 HOUSES

  I recall, I recall, the property where I was a happy event.

  It is not possible to determine what class a person is solely from the house he lives in. Some of the upper classes have execrable taste and don’t give a fig about their surroundings, while some working-class people—probably homosexual—may have an instinctive sense of what is beautiful. How people do up their house is also considerably affected by fashion. A few years ago flying ducks were only acceptable if they were outside and moving. Now they’ve become kitsch and the young and trendy, raising two fingers to convention, are putting them on their walls. Or take someone who’s just moved into a new house. The haste with which they explain away the ox-blood fleur-de-lys wallpaper in the drawing-room as the taste of a previous owner might be more an indication of social insecurity than the wallpaper itself.

  Electric logs have long been considered a Jen Teale indicator. My husband once worked for a man, whose son (an Old Etonian whom I will call Ambrose) asked us to dinner. The other guests were a very smart couple, whom Ambrose was determined to impress. We arrived first to find him switching off some electric logs in the drawing-room. He was worried the smart couple might think them common.

  ‘My mother, being Spanish, has terrible lapses of taste,’ he said apologetically.

  So the three of us sat frozen to death until the smart couple arrived an hour later. Instantly some devil overtook my husband. He crossed the room and switched on the logs.

  ‘Have you seen Ambrose’s mother’s splendid fire?’ he asked the smart couple.

  There was a ghastly pause. Ambrose’s face whitened like that of someone close to death. The merry flickering of the electric logs was nothing to the blaze of rage in his eyes. The evening was a disaster and my husband was fired within three months.

  And yet I know two peers of the most ancient lineage who have electric log fires. One even has bright blue water in his lavatory—the upper classes do what they want.

  Nevertheless, the house that you live in, like the education you receive and the accent you speak with, is one of the determining factors that indicate the class you belong to. A girl I know was terribly keen on a tall, thin, very aristocratic-looking young man until she discovered that he lived with his mother in a bungalow in East Sheen.

  In Putney, where I live, the people in the big Victorian houses on the Common look down slightly, albeit unconsciously, on the people in the large semi-detached houses in the next road who in turn look down on people in similar houses in a street with slightly heavier traffic, who in turn look down on the people in the neoGeorgian houses on the edge on the common, wh
o in turn despise the people in the terrace houses behind them who won’t have anything to do with the Council estate beside the river.

  In Voices from the Middle Classes by Jane Deverson and Katherine Lindsay, a journalist is quoted as saying:

  ‘A house is a complex thing; it represents a social position. We found living where we were (a smartish London suburb) without meaning till we had acquired several friends who see themselves as the same sort of people as we were because they live in the same sort of house. Painting and decorating is a middle-class thing,’ he went on. ‘You say you’ve been decorating and you get an immediate response.’

  Harry Stow-Crat wouldn’t dream of painting his own house or putting up shelves and would regard any such activity as distinctly working-class. Equally, Mr Definitely-Disgusting wouldn’t bother to do up his house either because he considers it the council’s responsibility. The moment he buys his own house, however, he crosses one of the great class divides from Council Tenant to Owner Occupier and starts to become bourgeois. He’ll immediately drop the word ‘mortgage’ in the public bar, and begin building a new porch or slapping paint on the front of the house to distinguish it from the houses on either side and to show he’s not Council anymore.

  The expression ‘they live in a bought house’ would be a term of admiration among the working classes, but of contempt from the upper classes who have usually lived in their own house for generations, inheriting it as they inherit their furniture and silver. (One of the upper-class definitions of the middle classes is the sort of people who buy their own silver—particularly when they call it ‘cutlery’.)

  Another crucial point to remember is that the Stow-Crats of today were the Nouveau-Richards of a few hundred years ago. ‘How often have I wondered,’ wrote Lord David Cecil, ‘at the difference between the stately beauty of a great house, so exalting and tranquillizing, and the fierce restless unscrupulous character of the men who were so often responsible for its original building. Perhaps a gentler, more contented spirit would not have felt the urge and vitality to create such buildings.’