Class

by Jilly Cooper

  Mrs Definitely-Disgusting only started wearing trousers a few years ago when she was cleaning Samantha’s house. Normally she does housework in a skirt, tights and bedroom slippers. Like Caroline Stow-Crat she always wears a scarf outside, but hers is in shiny rayon and made in Hong Kong. Like Jen Teale she buys by mail order—it’s the only post she gets—filling in coupons in the T.V. Times while Mr D-D watches Match of the Day. When she tried it on in the privacy of her own home, she finds ‘the princess-line dress in dusky pink/African violet two-tone floral, in uncrushable polyester 100% washable with figure-flattering panels’ doesn’t look nearly as good as it did in the Daily Mirror. The stretch waist band for comfort seems to be stretched to its utmost. Like Harry Stow-Crat, Mrs D-D has a change coat, in new French navy with a nylon fur collar. She needed it to cheer her up: her old burgundy barathea clashed with her ’ot flushes.

  HAIR

  How men wear their hair is an invaluable social litmus—less so with women. Although there are exceptions (Lord Weymouth may wear his hair long and in a million pigtails; Lord Lichfield, at least in his photographs, looks like a hairdresser). Most of the aristocracy if they’re over thirty-five brush their hair backwards, with the parting directly north of the outer corner of the eye, two wings above the ears and cut just above the collar. Harry Stow-Crat wears his hair very shiny, probably as a result of Nanny’s hundred brushes a night, and because he doesn’t have much stress worrying about himself like the middle classes, or tend to work so hard, he seldom goes bald. If he did, however, he would never brush his hair forward to cover a receding hairline, or in strands over a bald patch, or part the hair above the ears and brush all the remaining hair over his bald cranium like anchovies over a hard-boiled egg.

  Aristocrats seldom wear their hair over their ears. Mr Heath dropped a class or two visually when, instead of brushing his wings back, he trained them forward in two tendrils over his ears. Nor would Harry Stow-Crat cut his hair short in front so it fell in a cow’s lick like Dr Owen, or in a serpentine ripple like Lord Mancroft, or in a just-breaking fall-over wave like Peter Jay and David Steel. His sideboards would stop level with the entrance to the eardrum. Neither he nor Georgie ever comb their hair in public.

  Georgie Stow-Crat might well have a fringe, not to hide a receding hair line but because it was trendy, but he would start off brushing his hair back, and letting it fall forward, and it would be so well cut, and his features so lean and finely drawn, that the effect would never be like the lacquered thatched roof on top of a cottage-loaf of the spiralist. At the moment there seems to be a trend towards the Edward Fox short-back-and-sides look, so soon, no doubt, Georgie will be looking just like Harry again.

  Harry has his hair cut at least once a month at Trumpers, which shows how often he stays in his Chelsea flat. He refers to the man who cuts his hair as his ‘hairdresser’ and asks him to ‘wash’, never to ‘shampoo’, his hair. He occasionally buys a bottle of Bay Rum which has a nozzle on it like Angostura bitters in cocktail bars. His hairdresser clips the hair out of his nostrils, but not his ears.

  Gideon Upward’s hair is still longer and more straggly than Zacharias’s, because that used to be trendy in the late ‘sixties; but it’s getting shorter. He goes to the barber when he finds that his shirt collars are getting dirty on both sides. The barber is Cypriot and near the office. After the perfunctory snipping and primping Gideon is asked if he wants anything else, which means French letters, always prominently displayed alongside metal combs, razor blades and various cheap male toiletries. Gideon secretly admires Michael Heseltine who claims only to have his golden mane cut on quarter days. Occasionally in the privacy of his own bathroom Gideon brushes his hair forward like Melvyn Bragg, screws up his eyes, and wonders when he’ll ever get an opportunity to use one of those French letters.

  The only men left clinging to long straggly hair are middle-class left-wing trendies. As a reaction the right-wing Howard Weybridge has his hair cut short. So does Mr Nouveau-Richards, but, having spent so much of his youth working hard to get to the top, he tries to stay young with Grecian 2000. Jison Richards, now he’s a member of the telly-stocracy, brushes his blond, tinted locks firmly forward to hide any incipient wrinkles across his ‘fawhead’ and round the eyes. He has it cut at Smiles, and washes and blow-dries it himself before television appearances. He keeps it in place with all sorts of toiletries. If he is not pulling a bird, he might even sleep in a hair net. He ages ten years in a high wind.

  Mr Definitely-Disgusting’s hair is seldom cut and seldom washed. It falls out early and what remains is coiled in oily strands inside some sort of headdress. He wears it very short.

  Dive Definitely-Disgusting has a perm like a footballer. When it’s just been done he looks like a Tory lady. He always combs his hair in public.

  Mrs D-D is coiffure mad. Not only does she help in Mario’s salon next to the chip shop on the weekend, but most Fridays goes spangled peroxide blonde and bouffant so that she and Mr D-D can be seen in all their glory at the pub music night on Friday evening. This bouffant remains till the end of the week, when it looks like a haystack ravaged by gales. I once heard a hairdresser claim that she has on occasions demolished such edifices to find them full of maggots which feed on the lacquer. If Mrs D-D is not bouffant she wears curlers around the house and in the street, because it’s cheaper than drying it by the gas fire and because Mr D-D’s on night shift and sleeps during the day. This, however, is going out with affluence.

  Jen Teale cuts Bryan’s hair to save money—likewise the kiddies, who are all drenched in Vosene to ward off the dreaded dandruff (Caroline Stow-Crat calls it ‘scurf’). Bryan has a shower every day which flattens and brushes his hair forward automatically. If he is a rep and goes to conferences he has a razor cut. Jen wears her hair short because it’s more hygienic and so much cooler in summer. She has a curly fringe halfway down her ‘fawhead’ and the side bits swept behind her ears, a style Caroline Stow-Crat would think very common. Once a year when she’s feeling skittish she scrapes her hair into two bunches above her ears.

  Eileen Weybridge has hair exactly like the Queen, so does her mother, with an additional blue rinse on her grey hair. Samantha’s mother has hair like the Queen but slightly looser, more like Mrs Thatcher, and she thinks blue rinses are very vulgar.

  ‘Well if you ’aven’t got time for the wash, bleach and perm we can just give it a spray of this.’

  Samantha has a fringe on the eyebrows and wears her hair long, straight and mousy to match her dirndl skirt. She doesn’t wash it more than once a week because it would destroy the natural oils. Occasionally she puts on a henna rinse, which Gideon is supposed to admire when she stands under the light. Now she’s got bored with the women’s movement she shaves her legs with Gideon’s razor, which she leaves clogged in the bathroom. She shaves under the arms too, but smells like a polecat when excited, because she wants to be natural and not use those horrible deodorants.

  Caroline Stow-Crat’s hair is worn with flick-ups and sometimes an Alice band. Like Harry she has the sort of bone structure that can take hair worn orf the face—she doesn’t need to have a forelock to pull to anyone. Recently she has taken to wearing a quarter fringe on either side, and Harry hasn’t grumbled about it. She has her hair done quite often, partly for something to do and partly to catch up on back numbers of The Tatler and Harper’s. Her hair is never in very good condition, as it spends too much time under a headscarf or a hat. A few years ago she would never have dreamt of dyeing her hair, but streaking looks so natural and it does mean at least seven hours at the hairdressers looking at The Tatler and Harper’s. Her hair often smells of cigarette smoke from going to too many yocktail parties given by the Deputy-Lieutenant. She will go grey suddenly.

  Fiona Stow-Crat washes her collar-bone-length hair every day, so it always looks slightly untidy, and brushes it back in two wings like Harry. She has been known to dye it extraordinary colours.

  On the whole the aristocracy�
��s hair is a sort of light brown, upper-class mouse. If Harry said one of his friends had brought a ‘blonde’ to a party, the expression would be slightly dismissive because if she was anyone Harry would know her anyway. He would talk about ‘a pretty girl with dark hair’; the expression ‘an attractive brunette’ is very common. And if a girl had red hair, he’d call it red; he wouldn’t have any truck with expressions like ‘auburn’ or ‘copper’.

  FACES

  The upper classes, as has already been pointed out, are tall and thin and have narrow stoats’ heads with very few bumps on them. Their faces therefore tend to be narrow, with the skin more finely drawn over the nose and jawbone. Their eyes turn down rather than up at the corners, and although not very large, tend to be bigger than their mouths which look not unlike the private parts of a female ferret. Often these hang open because they’re not ashamed of their teeth. Big rubbertyre mouths and large rolling eyes give a face a very plebeian look. Used to very cold houses, and an outdoor life, Harry Stow-Crat has the kind of delicate pink and white skin, which flushes up at parties and in hot restaurants. From lack of stress, he tends to age more slowly than the other classes. Because he has a poker face you are less aware of his wrinkles. At fifty, he may look thirty-five, but when he laughs or gets angry his face suddenly breaks into hundreds of lines like a dried-up river bed. Harry and Caroline both have very long thin feet.

  As you go down the classes people tend to be bulkier in the face, particularly round the jaw and chin. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting’s mouth disappears altogether once she’s lost her teeth.

  15 VOICES

  ‘The men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephramite? If he said Nay, then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him’.

  Judges, Ch 12, vv 5,6.

  When people talk about class barriers they often mean sound barriers. The story of the poor Ephramite is one of the saddest in the Bible, but such a universal one that the word shibboleth has passed into the English language and has come to mean, among other things, the criterion or catchword of a social group. Thus Jen Teale would have a little eye-meet with Bryan if they heard Mr D-D talking about an ‘’orse’, and Samantha and Gideon Upward would immediately identify a lower caste if they heard Eileen Weybridge talking about ‘zebras’ with a short ‘e’ or asking for ‘a portion of gâteau’. Your pronunciation and the words you use are so crucial in determining your class that the subject has been already touched on on numerous occasions. For despite the egalitarian revolution and the embracing of crypto-working-class accents by a few of the upper and middle classes, a person is still mocked because of the way he speaks. The other day, shouting across the road to an old colonel, I reduced two youths in anoraks to fits of laughter. I could hear them mimicking me all the way up the street. As Bernard Shaw said in the preface to Pygmalion, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him’.

  Things have certainly improved, however. Thirty years ago the announcers at the B.B.C. solemnly put on dinner jackets every night to read the nine o’clock news and spoke with an accent called ‘B.B.C. English’, which was actually upper-middle—they enunciated far too well for the upper classes—and every young actor who wanted to get on ironed out his accent and tried to talk just the same. Pitmans agreed with them, so every secretary learning shorthand discovered that ‘bath’ and ‘class’ were pronounced with a long ‘a’, because the squiggles depicting them went on the line rather than above it as they would have done if the ‘a’ had been short.

  Then came the revolution of the ‘sixties as a result of which English as spoken by the B.B.C. has dropped to somewhere between middle and lower middle, with dozens of Regional Bosanquets being matey and calling everyone ‘luv’, and female interviewers with flat voices talking about ‘Ufrica’ and ‘bunk bulunces’.

  What has also happened in the last twenty-five years is that people no longer despise you if you have an accent as long as you’re successful and amusing. Everyone adores Twiggy and the Campari girl. Zandra Rhodes and Janet Street Porter are asked everywhere. As Geoffrey Gorer says:

  ‘The young now like to call themselves upper-working-class. Twenty years ago the bright young of working-class origin with intellectual gifts or talents would have been likely to acquire a B.B.C. accent and pass as upper-middle-class. Today they feel no need to hide their accent. They are the new trendsetters.’

  Maybe. But if these trendsetters were not successful I doubt if Caroline Stow-Crat or Samantha Upward (and certainly not Eileen Weybridge) would ask them to dinner, and I suspect that as the country swings back and becomes more reactionary, not only Janet Street Porter and Zandra Rhodes, but all those upper and middle classes with their flat ‘a’s, may begin to sound a bit dated.

  What people still object to, however, is people changing their voices, as poor Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher learnt to their cost. Everyone knows that politicians are dishonest but when they have ‘dishonest’ voices as well they are doubly suspect. Whenever they appear on television, all classes sit listening to the ironed-out vowel sounds and the slow, low delivery (so that every word can be enunciated carefully) and gleefully wait for the first slip. Mr Heath’s ‘e-out’ and Mrs Thatcher’s ‘invöle-ved’ must have lost them thousands of votes. But if people shrink from affected gentility, they also shrink from deliberate anti-gentility. Bringing your voice down is considered just as silly—like the girl in the ‘sixties who had elocution lessons to try and get her accent made less patrician so she would be accepted at demos or Lord Stansgate calling himself Tony Benn and ‘yer know-ing’ folksily all over the electorate like Doctor Dale.

  ‘Don’t call me sir, my good man,’ he was heard telling some unfortunate Labour supporter in a pub. One is reminded of Aldous Huxley, who once admitted that he had tried but failed to communicate with a working-class audience.

  But of course the whole subject is relative. Everyone dismisses upper-class shibboleths they don’t use themselves as out-dated, and any word they consider vulgar as barbarous. Thus I think the word ‘luncheon’ is pedantic, but the word ‘phone’ is vulgar, whereas my children probably think ‘telephone’ is pedantic.

  In a recent survey fifty per cent of the people interviewed said they didn’t have any accent, a statement with which the classes above and below would certainly have disagreed. In fact everyone has an accent, from the Queen downwards. It may not be regional, but there are certainly upper-class, upper-middle and middle-class accents, all of which are quite different.

  The trouble with the upper classes is that they’re inclined to change their vocabulary just to outsmart the middle classes. Now that the word ‘loo’ has sifted down and been taken up by Daily Mirror readers, the uppers have reverted to ‘lavatory’ again. And you could feel the horrified frisson among the upper-middles when Princess Anne said ‘ee-ther’ on television. They’d studied Noblesse Oblige; they knew the upper classes said ‘eye-ther’. It was really too bad.

  If you go abroad, of course, your accent matters far less. Ironed-out English cockney doesn’t upset the Americans at all, and no one minds Irish and Scottish accents half so much as Birmingham or South London ones. The Welsh are particularly good at acquiring upper-class accents; they have deep, liltingly attractive voices, coupled with a very good ear. Richard Burton and Roy Jenkins are two good examples.

  If the B.B.C. wants a voice to represent the people, however, they go north and use Colin Welland.

  ‘I seem,’ he said recently, ‘to have cornered the market in the Common Touch.’

  But if accent does make the heart grow fonder, there are still a lot of people trying to get rid of theirs. One thinks of all the spiralists talking mid-atlantic, and the union leaders learning all those long words (surely ‘indoostrial action’ is the greatest euphemism of them all). Men promoted from the shop floor, egged on by their wives, are often sent by the management to
elocution lessons. There was a piece in The Sunday Times recently about a cockney girl called Shelley who was trying to eradicate her cockney accent. It hadn’t mattered when she’d had a backroom job in the bank, but now she was a receptionist at a ballet school and meeting people all the time, she decided she needed a new voice. ‘It’s nice to improve,’ she said. ‘You’re stepping upwards not backwards. It’ll be useful for the rest of my life.’

  Rather like the schoolmistress who felt all her lower-middle vowels spilling out when she got angry in class, and the bank manager who felt his voice thicken when he had to talk to people about their overdrafts. We all know how our mouths seem to fill with marbles when we try to sound grander than we really are. Most people are bilingual, of course: telephonists, curates talking about carnal know-ledge with a long ‘o’, airline pilots (‘This is your Captain speaking’), demonstrators and women who tell you your train times over the tannoy all have special put-on voices.