Class

by Jilly Cooper

  Even today, a critic grumbled, the thing wrong with English writers is that they’d rather dine with a duke than with other writers, a sentiment echoed by Nancy Mitford’s comment on Evelyn Waugh:

  ‘I feel he is all right with duchesses. It is the middle-class intellectuals who come in for the full bloodyness of his invective.’

  It is significant that the only poet to achieve bestseller status in the last twenty-five years (apart from the Pam Ayres/Mary Wilson Tea-Cosy school) is Sir John Betjeman, who is totally obsessed with class and whose genius is that he can be tender and wickedly funny at the same time about every rung on the social ladder.

  ‘If you stay with the Queen at Sandringham,’ according to Robert Lacey, ‘you will find an electric fire with three bars in your room, a fitted carpet, naval paintings on the wall and huge bookcases filled with regimental histories and army lists. But there are also more contemporary books put out for guests—Hornblower yarns and Nancy Mitford—all with the same simple book plate inside, “The Queen’s Book” in flowing white script which stands out of a black background.’ If an author goes to Windsor, he is likely after dinner to see his latest book laid out on a table in the library on a blue satin cushion. The Queen Mother is a Dick Francis addict, and is always presented with a copy on publication day.

  Harry Stow-Crat reads The Times, the Sporting Life and the Daily Express: he has a soft spot for that Rook Woman. Caroline reads The Tatler, whose book reviews epitomize upper-class taste: a recent issue included a Standard Guide to Pure Breed Dogs, a book on heraldry, a history of the Isle of Orkney and a biography of the pekinese.

  Samantha Upward is a great reader; she also feels it her duty to buy books. She is very guilty about reading popular novels and thinks biographies are somehow more worthwhile. Virginia Woolf’s letters (in fact anything about the Bloomsbury group) are ideal because they combine sex and culture. Samantha knows that literature is all about disadvantaged people struggling to make ends meet, so she would never admit to anyone that she finds Bertold Brecht a king-sized yawn. She always refers to ‘Maupassant’ because she knows saying ‘De Maupassant’ is considered common in France, and she always talks about Willy Maugham rather than Somerset, and Jay Reid rather than Piers Paul, to show she’s in the ‘know’. She always asks ‘creative writers’, as she calls them, what they are ‘working on’, but she’d never make the mistake of telling them she’d love to write a book if only she had the time. The Weybridge set buy ‘real coffee’-table books.

  Jen Teale prefers to read home-improvement books, which she always wraps in brown paper, so the cover won’t get ‘soiled’. Bryan’s home-library of do-it-yourself manuals and Reader’s Digest condensed books are practically pushing the carved wise-owl bookends off the colour telly. Samantha thinks Mrs Definitely-Disgusting’s habit of licking her finger to turn the page more easily is absolutely ‘rev-ollting’. Sharon Definitely-Disgusting reads Jackie and True Romances which she calls books.

  Mrs Nouveau-Richards is struggling with the first volume of ‘Prowst’. Copying upper-class French mothers, she has stopped going upstairs every evening to kiss Tracey-Diane goodnight.

  A Mr Nouveau-Richards rang me the other day.

  ‘Darling’, he said, ‘I’ve just bid a fortune for two first editions’.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll just go and look,’ he said.

  They were Shelley and Keats.

  MUSIC

  There was one peer who only employed butlers who could play the piano in the key of C. He didn’t give a damn if they could buttle; he merely wanted someone to accompany him when he played on the mouth-organ. He, however, was the exception. Although Harry Stow-Crat sets a good example by singing loudly in church on Sundays, he is actually tone-deaf. His children sometimes learn an instrument at school, which is called extras, and grumbled about when it appears on the bill.

  Occasionally The Tatler cover a concert, but it’s invariably for charity, some flaring-nostrilled Peruvian playing Chopin in aid of Father Mantua’s mission in the East End, and all the audience surreptitiously looking at their watches, and wishing the still fat wad of pages the pianist still has to strum through would suddenly get thinner. Audiences, however, are much better mannered than they used to be. In the past musicians or minstrels just provided wallpaper music, a kind of musak against which the audience laughed and talked. A good minstrel, of course, was part of an aristocratic household. Frank Muir suggests that William the Conqueror was so fond of his bard Taillefeau that he allowed him to strike the first blow at the Battle of Hastings. According to legend Taillefeau advanced up the beach singing ballads about Charlemagne, and was promptly struck dead by an enemy arrow. One suspects that if William had been that keen on his carolling, he wouldn’t have exposed him to such danger.

  Later of course there were fashionable musicians like Paganini who were very well paid and fawned on by aristocratic groupies. Liszt, in fact, was the first Beatle: society women brought special tweezers so they could pluck out his hair, and after a concert would fight for a fragment of the cushion he’d sat on. Kreisler was once asked to play by a fashionable but nouveau-riche American hostess. She would pay him 750 dollars she said but after the concert she didn’t want him to mingle with her guests, in case he lowered the tone.

  ‘In that case,’ replied Kreisler gravely, ‘the bill will only be 500 dollars.’

  In England music was only respected if it was imported, and Italian castrati charged a fortune in the eighteenth century to give concerts to the rich and noble. The middle classes, it seems, had to make do with a lady from the local opera house.

  ‘I detest these scented rooms,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘where to a gaudy throng, the proud harlot heaves her distended breasts in intricacies of laborious song.’

  Opera, it appears, was something to be endured. The audience played draughts during the recitatives, and merely looked in for one act to be seen, to show off their jewels, and gossip. When a very grand but garrulous hostess asked Charles Haas, Proust’s model for Swann, to sit in her box, he replied:

  ‘I’d love to. I’ve never heard you in Faust.’

  Today the upper-middle classes, liking their opera sugar-coated, regard Glyndebourne as the smart thing to go to. They particularly enjoy picnicking with other middle-class people and writing down the names of the more attractive herbaceous plants in the garden on their programme. Today the only people who can afford Covent Garden are foreign diplomats, homosexuals and Samantha Upward’s maiden aunts with plaits round their heads, referring to the singers by their surnames like prep school boys: ‘Isn’t Sutherland too marvellously in voice?’ There is a mile-long queue for the loo in the interval, while all those who pretend to know the opera backwards mug up on the synopsis for the next act.

  Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and Purcell are upper-class composers. Brahms, Mahler, Schubert and Beethoven are upper-middle. Tschaikovsky, Grieg and Mendelssohn are lower-middle.

  Samantha would simply love to sing in the Bach Choir. Her mother adores Gilbert and Sullivan. Howard Weybridge has a few classical records: Peer Gynt, the Moonlight Sonata and ‘Cav-and-Pack-them-in’. He is also ‘very active’ in amateur operatics. Jen Teale enjoys Down Your Way and Your Hundred Best Tunes.

  Mr Nouveau-Richards likes the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony and claps between movements. Tracey-Diane sways from side to side when she plays ‘The Lost Chord’ on the pianola. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting likes Mantovani and Ron Goodwin, and thinks Verdi’s Requiem is a ‘resteront’.

  In a recent survey it was discovered that people who own their houses prefer classical music, but people in council houses prefer pop. One suspects that the house-owners claimed to prefer classical music because they felt they ought to, because it seems more upper-classical than pop. After all the announcers do talk in ‘posh’ voices on Radio Three while the disk jockeys on Radio One and Capital all sounds like yobbos.

  The Radio Three voice is not in fact upper-clas
s at all, it is Marghanita Laski/Patricia Hughes sens-it-ive, which involves speaking very slowly and deliberately to eradicate any trace of a regional accent, with all the vowel sounds, particularly the ‘o’s, emphasized: ‘vi-oh-lins’, ‘pee-ar-noes’, ‘Vivald-ee’, ‘ball-ay’. The pronunciation of foreign composers and musical terms is also far too good. The upper classes have frightful accents when they talk in a foreign language. As Harry Stow-Crat’s mother once admonished him: ‘Speak French fluently, darling, but not like them.’

  17 TELEVISION

  Why did you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?

  If you’d come today, you’d have reached a whole nation.

  Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.

  Jesus Christ Superstar

  Light years above everyone else are the telly-stocracy. The man in the street is far more impressed by Esther Rantzen than by Princess Anne. ‘When I go to the country,’ said Reginald Bosanquet a year or two ago, ‘I am more revered than the Queen.’ Our own local telly-stocrat, David Dimbleby, is particularly impressive. With a famous television father, he is second-generation telly and looks like founding a dynasty:

  ‘Once in Royal David’s Putney,’ sing the children in the street.

  To show the influence these people have, a couple I know were watching Angela Rippon read the news one evening when the wife admired her dress.

  ‘Why not see if they’ve got one like it in Bentalls?’ said her husband.

  So off she went next day and found something very similar.

  ‘Every time Angela appears on television,’ confided the sales girl, ‘we get people pouring in here trying to buy what she was wearing.’

  It’s not just the telly-stocracy. Everyone who appears on television is somehow sanctified, albiet temporarily, with a square halo. It doesn’t matter how inept one is, credit improves dramatically in the High Street. If ever I appear, my enemies in a nearby council estate, who usually shake their fists at me because of my cat chasing dogs, start waving and saying, ‘Saw you last night. What’s Eamonn really like?’

  A member of the telly-stocracy

  Our particular part of Putney is known locally as Media Gulch because so many television stars, actors and journalists live here. One can only keep one’s end up if one has the television vans outside one’s house at least once every two months, plus a gutted bus where all the crew break every couple of hours for something to eat and hordes of men with prematurely grey hair and he-tan are draping plastic virginia creeper over the porch to give an illusion of spring.

  But apart from creating a telly-stocracy, the looming presence of television has done more to change our social habits than anyone realizes. When commercial television appeared in the ‘sixties, it was hailed by Lord Thomson as the great leveller. As a new and thrilling medium, it seemed to epitomize the change from a rigid class system. In fact it has reinforced it. Every day 23 million eyes stay glued to the commercial television screen. Advertising in particular makes people dissatisfied with life. The initial effect is to encourage them to go out and buy consumer goods, formerly enjoyed only by their social superiors. As they acquire these, and feel themselves to be going up in the world, television becomes their social adviser. It tells them where to go on their hols, what car they should own, which wines to order, what fuel to burn, what furniture to buy. ‘Win Ernie Wise’s living room,’ screams the T.V. Times, ‘Win Ian Ogilvy’s bedroom’—nearer, my God, to thee! In fact, it is most unlikely that Ernie Wise or Ian Ogilvy has anything to do with those rooms; they took their cheques and left the furnishing to some lower-middle-class advertising stylist with a penchant for repro tat. (Someone once unkindly described Bruce Forsyth’s house as being filled with the sort of things people couldn’t remember on the conveyor belt of The Generation Game.)

  Even more pernicious, television gives lots of advice on attitude and behaviour. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting doesn’t hit the roof any more every time Dive and Sharon come charging in with mud all over their newly washed jeans. She gives a crooked smile and reaches for the Daz. She feels guilty if her kitchen isn’t spotless, and discontented if it isn’t a modern one. If a horde of children drop in she doesn’t tell them to bugger off, she fills them up with beefburgers. Mr D-D knows now not to talk about ‘Cock-burn’s port’ and to pronounce Rosé as Ros-ay.

  Television, too, has created a new type of plastic family: smiling, squeezy mums, woolly-hatted Dads playing football and crumbling Oxo cubes, plastic dogs leaping in the air, plastic children stuffing baked beans, lovable plastic grans who are befriended by pretty air-hostesses but are never sick. ‘Why aren’t we as happy as they are?’ asks Mrs Definitely-Disgusting. ‘It isn’t fair.’

  Television increases aspiration but underlines the differences, and has thereby produced strong ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ polarization. Mr D-D can pile up goods till he’s blue in the face, but it’s still difficult for him to improve his status, cross the great manual/non-manual divide and join the Martini set.

  Television has created a battered victim, rendered insensible by a ceaseless bombardment of mindless hypocrisy. It is hardly surprising that so many children can’t read or write, that few people can be seen in the streets of towns or villages after dark. The nation is plugged in. They are watching Big Brother.

  Television forms the basis of nearly all conversations in offices and pubs. (A friend spent a week at Butlins on advertising research and said people talked permanently in television jingles, one person beginning one, the next ending it.) Worse still is the effect on debate and argument, because of the law that requires television to be politically fair, all arguments end in compromises not in conclusions.

  ‘You have the highest quality television in the world,’ said an American to Professor Halsey who wrote the recent Reith lectures on class, ‘but I Claudius would be impossible in midstream America. Nowhere else in the Western World does the élite have the confidence both to indulge its own cultural tastes and also believe these should be imposed on the masses.’

  Not surprising too that the Annan Committee on Broadcasting expressed concern, after months of research, that people were being brainwashed by middle-class values. Too many characters talk in non-working-class accents. There are not enough working-class heroes on the screen.

  The report also complained that various kinds of upper-class characters—royalty, aristocracy, jet set, etc—occurred in 22 per cent of all programmes, almost always in significant roles. Middle-class characters occurred in 56 per cent of the programmes and 76 per cent of them were significant to the plot. But the working-classes only occurred in 41 per cent of the programmes and in only 71 per cent were significant. In terms of their occurrence, in relation to the population at large, middle-class, and even more, upper-class individuals are over-represented on television drama, and when they appear, they are likely to appear in important and attractive roles. This creates envy.

  T.V. Times and The Radio Times (to a lesser extent) are also obsessed with class. In every interview a person’s character is analysed in relation to his background. In one issue of the T.V. Times alone we are told that Tessa Wyatt loathes publicity and doesn’t want to strip in films because of her inhibited, middle-class background, that John Conteh ‘the fourth born of a family of ten from a yellow painted council house’ has risen by working-class guts, and is now a rich man with ‘a waterfall in the garden of his luxury Bushey (Hertfordshire) home’. And when Katie Stewart visited Emmerdale Farm, she found them ‘gathered for dinner—that’s what most people who live in the north of England call the midday meal’.

  The Queen, Robert Lacey tells us, watches television to find out about her subjects. One suspects she’s an addict like the rest of us.

  Princess Margaret also watches it the whole time. A friend went to dinner when she was married to Lord Snowdon and the television stayed on the whole time before dinner, was carried into the dining-room and placed on the table on which they were eating, then carried back i
nto the drawing-room immediately they’d finished.

  Evidently the whole Royal family was livid about the spate of royal sagas, particularly Edward and Mrs Simpson, not because the events portrayed were so near the knuckle but because the actors playing them or their relations were, they considered, so common. The Queen Mother was evidently most upset by the girl who played her.

  ‘Oh that reminds me, Bryan. Christine’s just had her first understain.’

  But half the fun of television is looking for the slip-ups. The supposedly upper-middle-class mother in the House of Caradus talking about ‘when your father was in active service’ or Christina in Flambards saying ‘Pardon’ and ‘Ever so’. Recently when Thames serialized one of my novels they got the classes quite cockeyed. It was supposed to be about the Scottish upper classes, but almost the first shot was of a wedding cake with a plastic bride and groom on top. The hero kept calling the heroine ‘woman’; the heroine returned from her honeymoon landing on a Western Isle wearing a hat and high heels, and everyone waved their arms frantically in the air during reels at a ball.

  Rebecca, on B.B.C. 2 recently, almost got it right. The only time they appeared to slip was when Maxim talked about ‘Cook’, and when some very unpatrician extras appeared in the ball.

  ‘It’s impossible to make extras behave with any authority,’ said one of the cast. ‘They always look as though they’d got their costumes from Moss Bros.’

  The young in particular have been so brain-washed by the egalitarian revolution that, according to one casting director, it’s impossible to find an actor in his thirties who can convincingly play upper-middle to upper-class Englishmen of half a century ago. They lack the assurance, the bearing, the tone of voice. Recently a duke’s daughter auditioned for a part in Thames Television’s dramatization of a Nancy Mitford novel. Not having a clue who she was, the director passed her over. ‘What was wrong with her?’ asked the producer afterwards. ‘She was too middle-class,’ replied the director.