Class

by Jilly Cooper

  Having also cottoned onto the fact that they can get £25,000 tax relief for an extension, and with the price of houses being so prohibitive, my dear, and the traffic being so frightful we never get down to the cottage till midnight, the upper-middles are beginning to sell up their ‘shacks’ in the Isle of Wight or Gloucestershire and build onto their houses instead. Gideon and Zacharias are working at home so much now, they both need a study. And as Samantha so often wants to watch opera and Gideon late night sport, it avoids so many rows if they have two televisions in different rooms, and now that Thalia’s getting a bust it’s not quite right for her to entertain boys in her bedroom which calls for a second sitting room where they can all play pop music as loudly as possible. As a result £300 worth of clematis and hydrangeas are crushed under foot as an extension is slapped on to the patio.

  Another trick of the middle classes is to buy old houses, then form a pressure group to have their street declared a Conservation Area in order to stop the compulsory purchasers touching it or building flats nearby. They then get absolutely livid when the Council rather understandably drags its heels over planning permission for an extra music room or a new bathroom.

  DON’T SAY ‘PARDON’, SAY ‘SURREY’.

  ‘Merridale is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants rage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, cajoled and fertilized into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky ‘character dwellings’ which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of the houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Land do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting it to be a suburban vice, nor for the same reason, do they varnish the owls, but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams in the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.’

  John le Carré, Call for the Dead.

  ‘Oh look,’ said a friend as we drove through a rich part of Surrey, ‘all those houses have been Weybridged.’ This is a practice of the socially aspiring who’ve made a bit of money and want to shake off the stigma of suburbia by living in Sunningdale, Virginia Water, or any rich dormitory town.

  First you buy a modern house, which you refer to as a ‘lovely property’, then you age it up to look like a Great West Road pub. Rustic brick with half-timbering and leaded windows are very popular, with a lantern or carriage lamp outside the front door and a name like ‘Kenilworth’ or ‘Decameron’ carved on a rustic board. A burglar alarm is discreetly covered by creepers.

  An alternative is white pebbledash with a green pantile roof and matching green shutters with cut-out hearts, and the name in wrought-iron treble-clef writing on the front of the house. Wrought iron, in fact, is everywhere.

  A few years ago a Weybridged house would have had a chiming doorbell, but, suspecting this to be a bit suburban, the owner has responded to an ad in Homes and Gardens:

  ‘No more electric bionic ping pongs . . . every lover of style can now capture the elegance and tranquillity of less hurried days with a real brass doorbell, complete with mechanism and most attractive pull arm to enhance your doorway.’

  The hall, as Anthony Powell once said, looks like the inside of a cigar box, with a parquet floor, panelled walls and a very thin strip of carpet running up the polished stairs. At the top is a round window with a stained glass inset. The Weybridged house smells of self-congratulation and Pears soap.

  In the living-room (they’ve heard ‘lounge’ is suburban but can’t quite bring themselves to say drawing-room) you find wall-to-wall glossies and coffee-table books. On the walls are imitation candle brackets, with fake drips and little red hats, bumpy white and gold mirrors and pictures by real artists from Harrods and Selfridges. The carpet is tufted two-tone, the curtains pinch-pleated, the ‘settee’ and ‘easy chairs’ are covered in terracotta velvet Dralon. Repro furniture is inevitable to give a nice ‘Ollde Worlde’ look: ‘period doors’, a Queen Anne ‘bureau’ and Regency Chippendale cabinets to hide the TV, (the upper-middles call it ‘the box’, the upper class ‘the television’) and the ‘stereo’. Every piece of furniture has mahogany or teak veneer. The Weybridged house suffers from veneerial disease. A Magi-Log fire flames in the repro Adam fireplace—‘the ultimate in realism’—with incombustible oak logs knobbly with knotholes and twigs. The alternative might be a ‘feature fireplace’ in stone. The Radio Times is wrapped in a sacking cover with a thatched cottage embroidered on the front. If you came for drinks, you would be offered goblets.

  In the dining-room lacquered silver candlesticks sit on the Elizabethan repro table even at lunchtime, and an Ecko hostess trolley keeps the rack of lamb, creamed potatoes and garden peas piping hot. There will be an overhead light, or more bracket lights with fancy lots, and six chairs with oxblood and silver regency stripes.

  Howard has a ‘den’ where he’s supposed to work at weekends, but in fact does nothing but read Penthouse behind Saturday’s Financial Times and long to be asked to a wife-swapping party. Poor Howard feels he is not ‘ollde’ enough for the house; if he plays with himself a lot it might age him too.

  The kitchen is usually very pretty and quite indistinguishable from the upper-middle, or even modernized upper-class kitchen. Next door a ‘utility’ room is filled with expensive machinery—the word ‘dishwasher’ as opposed to ‘washing-up machine’ is very Weybridge, so is ‘freezer’ instead of ‘deep freeze’ and ‘tumble’ instead of ‘spin dryer’.

  In the ‘master bedroom’ tufted carpeted steps lead up to a dais on which a huge brass four-poster bed swathed in white Norfolk lace sits like a wedding cake. The lampshades match the duvet cover and the wallpaper.

  Next month Mrs Weybridge will receive her eighth German porcelain coffee cup and saucer from the ‘Collector of the Month Club’ special offer and be able to hold her first coffee morning.

  BETTER NOUVEAU THAN LATE-VICTORIAN

  The Weybridged house is very ‘ollde’ and tasteful, as opposed to the Nouveau-Richards’ mansion which is very plush, ostentatious, and modern—another great monument to showing off.

  Reacting against the working-class over-the-wall familiarity, Mr Nouveau-Richards has high walls built round his house and the whole place is burglar-alarmed to the teeth. Ten-foot-high electric gates protect him from the road. As he arrives in the Rolls he presses a button and the gates open. The drive is lined with toadstools which light up at night. The garage for five cars opens by remote control and, so you don’t get wet, a lift takes you up to the hall.

  Every room in Mrs Nouveau-Richards’ house has a rake for the shag pile. The daily woman’s visit is a sort of rake’s progress, nor does she much like having to climb into the onyx and sepia marble double bath to clean it, and having to polish up the 22-carat gold mixer taps with headworks of solid onyx. She nearly got her hand chopped off when she was shaking her duster out of one of the electric windows the other day. When she answers the telephone she has to say, ‘Mrs Nouveau-Richards’ residence’.

  In the lounge acrylic pile tiger skins with diamante collars lie on the ebony shag pile. Mrs Nouveau-Richards reclines on the leather chesterfield in front of the heated coffee table, while Mr N-R revolves in his captain’s club chair in deep-buttoned hide. The walls are covered with black and silver flocked wallpaper. When the maid in uniform hacks her way through the ‘house plants’ to bring in ‘afternoon tea’ she is sent back because the sugar bowl doesn’t match the tea cups. A ship’s bell summons people to dinner, and the nautical motif is maintained by a bar in the corner with a straw ceiling covered in lobsters. After a few drinks they crawl by themselves. In the bar every drink known to man hangs upside down with right-way-up labels. Mr Nouveau-Richards doesn’t drink very much because it makes his face red and his accent slip. Off the lounge are the solarium, the gym and the swimming pool, kept at a constant temperature of eighty degrees by the pool at
tendant. The stables are built under the lawn, so the horses can look out of their boxes into the pool like Neptune’s mares. In Mr N-R’s library, all the books in which were bought by the yard, he has eighteenth-century repro library steps. When he presses a button the entire works of Sir Walter Scott slide back to reveal yet another bar. Even the goldfish tank is double-glazed.

  Everywhere there are executive games played with clashing chrome balls, and orbs with revolving coloured oils. Mr N-R is very proud of his dimmer switches; in a mellow mood he’ll give his guests a son et lumière display. In every room musak pours out of speakers, even in the loos, which have musical lavatory paper, fur carpets and chandeliers. The lavatory has a wooden seat. Mr N-R responded to an ad in House and Garden:

  ‘After years of mass-produced plastic, feel the warmth of solid mahogany. Each seat is individually sanded and french-polished. Hinges and fittings are made of brass, and we offer as an option at no extra cost a brass plaque recessed into the lid for your personal inscription.’ Mr N-R has ‘Piss Off wittily inscribed on his.

  In the guest bedroom, as Mrs N-R calls it, everything is upholstered in peach satin, with a peach fur carpet. The master bedroom, however, has a vast suède oval bed, so humming with dials for quadrophonic stereo, radio, dimmer switches, telephones, razors and vibrator (which Mrs N-R uses for massaging her neck) you don’t know whether to lie on the thing or hi-jack it.

  Such houses are always blissfully comfortable to stay in: ‘Chandeliers in the loo and a bidet on every bed,’ as my mother put it.

  A WORD ABOUT NETS

  The world is divided into ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nets’. The upper classes never had net curtains because, if you live at the end of a long drive, there is no likelihood of being overlooked and, not being worried about other people’s opinions, you don’t give a damn if anyone sees what’s going on anyway.

  The upper-middles, aping the upper classes, don’t have net curtains either. They traditionally had servants to keep their houses tidy, so it didn’t matter anyone seeing in and, as they only had sex at night (unlike the shift worker coming home for lunch), they drew the curtains if they wanted privacy. Samantha Upward wouldn’t dream of having net curtains; she wants the whole street to look at the gay primary colours and extra bright drawings and posters in Zacharias’s playroom.

  The middle classes sometimes have net upstairs. If Eileen Weybridge is changing out of her tennis shorts in the middle of the day, she doesn’t want the workman mending the road looking in. If they have nets downstairs, they might explain it by saying they’ve got an American mother.

  The rough and friendly element of the working classes never bother with net at all and have an expression for someone putting on airs: ‘Net curtains in the window, nothing on the table.’

  It is where the more thin-lipped element of the working classes blends into the lower-middles that net reigns supreme. You can see out and chunter over everyone else’s behaviour, and twitch the curtains to indicate extreme disapproval, but they can’t see you. Suburban privet hedges and Weybridged latticed windows fulfil the same function.

  Jen Teale, however, wanting to priss everything up and shake off the stigma of upper-working class—which is a bit too close for comfort—hangs pink jardinière festoon cross-over drapes which leaves three-quarters of the window clear. This allows space for ‘floral decorations’ on the window ledge, makes the windows look ‘so feminine’ and enables the neighbours to see how ‘spotless’ (a favourite lower-middle word) her house is. Other examples of the lower-middles trying to go one better are ruched nets, putting a row of package-tour curios on the window ledge outside one’s nets, or hanging one’s curtains so the pattern shows on the outside. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting tried yellow nets once, but they made the whole family look as though they’d got jaundice.

  BEHIND THE MAUVE FRONT DOOR

  Jen Teale, liking to have everything dainty, wages a constant battle against dust and untidiness. Bryan sits in the lounge with his feet permanently eighteen inches off the ground in case Jen wants to ‘vacuum’ underneath. In a bedroom, a Dralon button-back headboard joins two single divans with drawers underneath for extra storage, into which Jen might one day tidy Bryan away for ever. Gradually all their furniture—wardrobes, sideboards, cupboards—is replaced by fitted ‘units’ which slot snugly between ceiling and floor, rather like Lego, and leaves no inch for dust to settle.

  As soon as the Teales move into a house the upper-middle process is reversed: all the doors are flattened so the mouldings don’t pick up dust any more; the brass fittings are replaced by aluminium, which doesn’t need polishing; all the windows and old ‘French doors’ (as Jen calls French windows) are replaced by double-glazed aluminium picture windows. Being hot on insulation, because they loathe wasting money, the Teales even have sliding double-glazed doors round the porch. Bryan does all this with his Black-and-Decker.

  The mauve front door has a rising sun in the bottom left-hand corner of the glass. The doorbell chimes. The house smells of lavender Pledge and Freshaire. In the lounge the fire has a huge gnome’s canopy to concentrate the heat and keep smuts at bay. Beside it stands the inevitable Statue-of-Liberty combination of poker, brush and shovel in a thistle motif. On the walls Bryan and his Black-and-Decker have put up storage grids, like vast cat’s climbing frames with compartments for the hi-fi, records, scrabble, the odd spotlit bit of Wedge-wood or ‘vawse’ of plastic flowers. (‘Fresh’ flowers, as Jen would call them, drop petals and paper ones gather dust.) A few years ago the Teales wouldn’t have had any books—too much dusting—but as culture seeps downwards, there might be a few book club choices tastefully arranged at an angle to fill up a compartment.

  The lounge suite has easy-fit nylon William Morris stretch covers which have interchangeable arms that can be switched from unit to unit or rotate on the same chair to give that straight-from-the-showroom look which is the antitheses of the shabby splendour—‘majestic though in ruin’—of the upper classes. Jen also rather likes the continental habit of offering lounge furniture as a group, comprising three-seater settee, two-seater settee and one armchair, called ‘Caliph’. (Down-market furniture invariably has up-market names like ‘Eton’ and ‘Cavendish’.) There is also a Parker Knoll recliner in case an ‘elderly relative comes to visit’.

  As well as her books Jen also has her Medici prints and her Tretchikoff (under a picture light, to show there’s no dust on the frame), and in the dining-room there’s a David Shepherd elephant gazing belligerently at Bryan’s vintage car etchings. There is no bar because the Teales are tight with drink; Bryan keeps any bottles in another room with measures on. Just as a guest is putting his glass down, a mat with a hunting scene is thrust underneath to stop rings on a nest of tables called ‘Henley’.

  The kitchen is like a laboratory. No ornaments alleviate the bleakness. As the lower-middles disapprove of money spent on luxuries, Jen probably wouldn’t have a washing-up machine. She doubts it would get things really clean. She calls washing up ‘doing the dishes’. She washes, Bryan ‘wipes’ with a ‘tea towel’ rather than a ‘drying-up cloth’. (Caroline Stow-Crat would call it a ‘clawth’.) Jen also does a lot of ‘handwashing’ and, as she’s very conscious of understains, she ‘boils’ a lot. Friends say her whites are spotless.

  In the bedroom a doll in frills, to show Jen’s just a little girl at heart, lies on the millpond smooth candlewick bedspread. (Caroline Stow-Crat has a worn teddy bear). ‘Robe units’ with motifs and very shiny lacquered brass handles slot into the walls. Jen tidies her make-up away in a vanity case. The only ornament on her white formica-topped vanity unit is a circular plastic magnifying mirror. When she makes up and brushes her hair, she protects her clothes from ‘dandruff with a pink plastic cape. The matching bathroom suite, in sky blue or avacodo, with a basin shaped like a champagne glass, has a matching toilet cover, toilet surround and bathmat in washable sky-blue nylon fur.

  A Spanish ‘dolly’ with Carmen skirts discreetly
conceals the toilet tissue (pronounced ‘tiss-u’ not ‘tishu’ as Samantha Upward would pronounce it). Jen, being obsessed by unpleasant odours, has Airwick, potpourri and a pomander on top of the cistern, and a deodorant block hanging like a sloth inside. In the toilet there is bright blue water. Bryan and Jen prefer showers to baths; they waste less water and are easier to clean up after. Jen calls a bathcap a ‘shower cap’.

  Although she keeps her house like a new pin, Jen always does housework in tights and a skirt rather than trousers. Her whole attitude is summed up by her feather duster, which keeps dirt at a distance.

  THE CHROME SQUAD

  There was an advertisement recently in a magazine called Home Buying offering ‘Modern houses in Wood Green, the ideal site for those who want a convenient rung on the home-ownership ladder’. Among the other attractions was ‘garage with space for work bench’.

  This was aimed at the spiralist who is continually buying houses, doing them up, selling them at a profit and moving on to a better part, which means a safer suburb, with a nicer class of child, more amusing parents at the P.T.A. and no danger of coloureds (although a black diplomat is O.K.) Usually the process is to start with a flat, then move to a terraced house, then to a large ‘period semi’, where you let off the top flat to pay the mortgage. Then, as soon as the house is done up, you buy a cheap flat for the sitting tenant, put it on the market and look for an even bigger house. The process is basically the same as that of the upper-middle-class couple, except that the spiralist moves as soon as he’s got the house together, while the upper-middles wait until they’ve run out of room.