by Cooper Jilly
Living from hand to mouth, they can’t manage their money like the lower-middles. When the army started paying guardsmen by cheque recently, my bank manager said they got into the most frightful muddles. If he wrote and told one of them he was overdrawn by £30, he promptly received a cheque for that amount.
Traditionally working-class virtues are friendliness, co-operation, warmth, spontaneity, a ready sense of humour and neighbourliness. ‘We’re all in the same boat’ is the attitude. That ‘love’, still the most common form of address, really means something. They have been defined as people who belong to the same Christmas Club, characteristically saving up not for something solid, like the deposit on a house, but for a good blow-out. They have a great capacity for enjoyment.
Because they didn’t have cars or telephones and couldn’t afford train fares, and the men tended to walk to work nearby, life centred around the street and neighbourhood. ‘Everyone knew your business,’ said one working-class man, so it was no good putting on airs because you earned more. The neighbours remembered you as a boy, knew your Aunt Lil, who was no better than she should be, and took you down a peg. The network acts as a constant check!
Girls seldom moved away from their mothers when they married; sons often came home for lunch every day, or lived at home, even after marriage. The working-class family is much closer and more possessive. They seldom invite friends into the house.
‘I’ve never had a stranger (meaning non-family) in here since the day I moved in,’ said one woman. ‘I don’t hold with that sort of thing.’
Being so dependent on the locality, the working classes are lost and desperately lonely, if the council moves them to housing estates, or shuts them up in little boxes in some high-rise block. The men have also lost much of the satisfacton that came from the old skills and crafts. Many of these have been taken away from them and their traditional occupations replaced by machines. In the old days the husband gained respect as a working man in the community.
Women’s Lib hasn’t helped his self-respect much either. The working classes are the most reactionary of all the classes. (You only have to look at those Brylcreemed short back and sides, and wide trousers flapping like sails in the breeze at the T.U.C. Conference.) But despite this, the working-class housewife now reads about Women’s Lib in the paper and soon she’s fretting to go back to work and make some extra cash, rather than act as a servant to the family and have her husband’s dinner on the table at mid-day when he gets home. She starts questioning his authority and, having less autonomy at home, and never having had any at work, he feels even more insecure. Battering often starts if the woman is brighter than the man and the poorly educated husband sees his security threatened.
Leaving school at sixteen, he feels inadequate because he is inarticulate. He is thought of as being bloody-minded and rude by the middle classes because he can’t express himself and to snort ‘Definitely, disgusting’, in answer to any question put to him, is the only way he can show his disapproval.
The Definitely-Disgustings
The Nouveau-Richards
The working classes divide themselves firmly into the Rough and the Respectable. The Rough get drunk fairly often, make a lot of noise at night, often engage in prostitution, have public fights, sometimes neglect their children, swear in front of women and children, and don’t give a stuff about anything—just like the upper classes, in fact. The Respectables chunter over such behaviour, and in Wales sing in Male Voice Choirs; they are pretty near the Teales. They also look down on people on the dole, the criminal classes and the blacks, who they refer to as ‘soap dodgers’.
MR AND MRS DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING
Our archetypal working-class couple are Mr and Mrs DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING. They have two children, SHARON and DIVE, and live in a council house with walls so thin you can hear the budgie pecking its seed next door. Mr Definitely-Disgusting is your manual worker. He might be a miner in the North, a car worker in the Midlands, or a casual labourer in the South. He married young and lived for a while with his wife’s parents. After a year or two he went back to going to the pub, football and the dogs with the blokes. He detests his mother-in-law. But, despite his propensity to foul language, he is extremely modest, often undressing with his back to Mrs D-D and even peeing in a different way than the other classes, splaying out his fingers in a fan, so they conceal his member. He might do something mildly illegal, receiving a car or knocking-off a telly. He is terrified of the police, who, being lower-middle and the class just above, reserve their special venom for him. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting wears her curlers and pinny to the local shop and spends a lot of the day with a cigarette hanging from her bottom lip gossiping and grumbling.
MR AND MRS NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
The other couple you will meet are the NOUVEAU-RICHARDS, of working-class origin but have made a colossal amount of money. Boasting and ostentation are their salient characteristics. At coffee mornings Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who lives in lurex, asks anyone if they’ve got any idea ‘whether gold plate will spoil in the dishwasher’. She has a huge house and lots of servants, who she bullies unmercifully. She is very rude to waiters and very pushy with her children, TRACEY-DIANE and JISON, who have several hours after-school coaching every day. Mr Nouveau-Richards gets on the committee of every charity ball in London. The upper classes call him by his Christian name and appreciate his salty humour, but don’t invite him to their houses. Jison goes to Stowe and Oxford and ends up a member of the Telly-stocracy, who are the real powers in the land—the people in communication who appear on television. They always talk about ‘my show’.
2 CHILDREN
The kiddy is the dad of the guy
At the beginning of the ’seventies the small-is-beautiful brigade mounted a campaign to bring down the birthrate. Family Planning Association supporters brandished condoms outside the House of Commons and at parties sidled up bossily to women who’d just had babies saying, ‘Two’s yer ration’. Middle-class lefties were rumoured to be concealing third babies in attics rather than display evidence of such social irresponsibility. Disapproving ads appeared in the cinemas showing defeated slatterns in curlers trailing herds of whining children along the street. ‘Superdad or Scrounger?’ demanded the Daily Mirror when a man on Social Security proudly produced his twenty-first child.
In the face of economic gloom, a rocketing dole queue and mothers wanting to get back to work, people probably thought twice about bringing more children into the world. Whatever the cause, the campaign worked. The birthrate in the United Kingdom dropped by 30 per cent. The working classes in particular, having discovered the pill, curbed production dramatically and at the last count were only producing 2.16 children per family, while the upper-middles were down to 1.7. Indeed, the higher you go up the social scale, the smaller the family, although the aristocracy tend to run unpatriotically riot, probably because, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out,
‘Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K., but birth control is flagrantly middle-class.’ One can’t imagine an aristocrat having a vasectomy.
With the working classes on the pill, the middle classes, particularly the wholemeal-bread brigade, started panicking about long term effects and switched to the coil or sterilization. The respectable working class still favour the sheath, described by Mrs Definitely-Disgusting as ‘my hubby always using something’.
THE BIRTH
If she has a job, which is unlikely, Caroline Stow-Crat gives it up the moment she discovers she’s having a baby. The office is relieved too; they’re fed up with the endless telephone calls, the Thursday to Tuesday weekends, and falling over the labrador every time they go to the filing cabinet. Samantha Upward tends to work until the last possible minute, ticking away like a time bomb and terrifying all the men in the office.
Our Queen was born by Caesarian, feet first. When Prince Charles was born the Duke of Edinburgh was playing squash. Today he would probably have been squashed into the maternity ward of St Mary’s Paddington.
The higher socio-economic classes now tend to favour epidural injections which make the whole thing less harrowing and allow the husband, albeit reluctantly, to be present at the birth. ‘They do rather get in the way,’ said my G.P. ‘It’s best if they stand at the head of the bed to give their wife moral support, but they keep creeping down the bed to have a look’.
Despite working-class prudishness this trend will no doubt also creep down the social scale, since that sacred cow Esther Rantzen recently calved with husband Desmond Wilcox in attendance, beaming with besotted middle-aged joy afterwards. The labour wards will soon be as crowded out with nail-biting males as Twickenham during an England-Wales International.
When the wife of Super-dad-or-Scrounger produced their twenty-first child, four of the children were allowed to watch. Perhaps the television had broken down. ‘It was very exciting,’ said the eight year-old afterwards.
The upper classes are not wild about new-born babies. Nancy Mitford once described one as a ‘howling orange in a black wig’. But they are delighted to have their double-barrelled names carried on by male issue.
A few years ago Harper’s published a brilliant piece on the ‘Sloane Ranger’, the girl who has a flat in Kensington and parents in the country, who lives in headscarves and went to a ‘good’ girls’ boarding school. She epitomizes the level at which the traditional upper-middles merge into the lower ranks of the upper classes. The Sloane Ranger husband is very chuffed whatever sex child he has. If it is a boy he goes to his club and writes two letters, one to ‘my housemaster at Eton, and one to Mrs Ingham at Easton House’. Then he opens a bottle of champagne.
Harry Stow-Crat, who certainly wasn’t present at the birth of any of his children, might ring up his mother or his old nanny, have a large whisky and soda, then go off and see his mistress.
Poor Gideon Upward is having a horrid time. He now knows exactly why it’s called a ‘confinement’, that he’s being conned rotten forking out for a private room, and it’s not very fine the way Samantha who, disapproving of epidurals, insisted on natural childbirth and is now yelling her head off. Still he’s delighted when little Zacharias appears. (Samantha went right through the Bible to find a name no one else had used.) It’s so nice to have a boy first, so he can take little 0.7 to dances when they grow up.
While Samantha is in hospital Gideon plans to have a crack at his secretary, but ever-thoughtful Samantha arranges for married friends to ask him out every night. Gideon gets drunk, partly out of frustration and partly at the prospect of his mother-in-law coming to stay next week, and makes sodden passes at the wives while their role-reversed husbands are doing the washing up. The passes are tactfully forgotten about afterwards.
Mr Definitely-Disgusting finds it difficult to visit his wife in hospital because of shift work and National Health visiting hours. When he does, the conversations are usually monosyllabic and inhibited by groans from the labour ward next door.
Aristocrats often get married just before the birth to legitimize the child in case it’s a boy. I attended one such wedding where the bride was actually in the last stages of labour. The hospital had thoughtfully provided an altar with a brass cross and two plastic orchids in a mauve vase. The bridegroom hadn’t bothered to brush his hair but looked so impossibly handsome that the screaming queen of a hospital chaplain got thoroughly over-excited and spent so long holding his hand he almost forgot to join it to the bride’s, who was manfully carrying on with:
‘To have . . . (groan) . . . and to hold, from this . . . (groan).’
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
If you are very grand The Times reports the birth on the social pages free of charge. The rest of the upper classes put it in the birth column as briefly as possible:
‘To Caroline, wife of Harry Stow-Crat—a son.’
Harry wouldn’t have bothered, but Caroline thinks Mummy’s friends would like to know. The Upwards’ announcement would include the name of the baby (Zacharias Daniel) and a ‘née Garland-Watson’ to remind people of Samantha’s up-market connections. Jen and Bryan Teale might include the name of the hospital and mention earlier children: ‘a brother for Christine and Wayne.’ Less smart but more reactionary members of the middle classes use the Daily Telegraph. The left-wing middles, conveniently combining parsimony with a flouting of convention, don’t bother, which explains why the Guardian seldom has any birth announcements.
Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, who gets her children’s names from the TV Times, tends to put the announcement of Sharon Esther, a sister for Dive Darren, in the local paper, with special thanks to the midwifery department at the hospital. It is a working-class characteristic to be touchingly grateful for any kind of hospital treatment, enjoying the rare treat of a rest and three free meals a day cooked by someone else.
Sometimes the Teales, who like a dainty word for everything, and the Definitely-Disgustings, who have difficulty in expressing themselves, will send out cards to friends and relations entitled ‘Baby’s Announcement’ with a picture of a stork on the front. Inside they fill in:
‘My name is Sharon Esther. I weigh 10 lbs. My happy Mum and Dad are . . .’
Receiving one of these cards, Auntie might send off a nylon, quilted pram-set in canary yellow with the words ‘A gift for baby from . . .’ printed on the box. Other alternatives might be a fluffy, brushed-nylon stuffed rabbit or a teddy bear, referred to by the lower-middle classes and below as a cŭddly (to rhyme with goodly) toy.
The upper classes, particularly the slightly retarded Sloane Ranger belt, have a tendency to add ‘y’ onto everything. In the ‘twenties they did it with names: Bertie, Diney, Jakey, Piggy. Today they have ‘choccy cake’, ‘pressies’, ‘cheesey things’ which children like so much better, don’t you agree, ‘araby’ which the private wards are getting awfully, and their ‘gyny’, whom they always fall in love with. The Queen’s gynæcologist is called Mr Pinker, perhaps the colour he goes when he examines the royal person.
The upper classes don’t mix socially with their doctors, but Caroline Stow-Crat makes an exception by asking her ‘gyny’ to her first dinner party after the birth. (Esther Rantzen did the same, so no doubt the entire working classes will start giving dinner parties in order to follow suit.) Fantasizing about one’s ‘gyny’ is the only thing that makes those agonising post-natal screwings possible. (Samantha Upward knows Gideon must not be denied sex longer than six weeks after the birth.) The crush on the ‘gyny’ usually lasts about six months.
On return from hospital the upper classes often get their old nanny out of mothballs to come and help with the baby. She usually leaves after a few days in high dudgeon because things are being done the wrong way. With the middle classes, Granny often forks out for a monthly nurse, or else the wife’s mother comes to stay and husbands have to remember to put on a dressing gown when they go to the loo in the middle of the night. The working classes are often living with, or near, their parents anyway, or haven’t got a spare room for anyone to stay in. The middle-class career mother, avid to get back to work, is praying that the new au pair, who isn’t being very good about waking up in the night, is going to work out all right.
CLOTHES
The wages of synthetic fibres is social death.
The upper classes, who traditionally have servants to run things, think Baby-Gros are common. Thus, Caroline Stow-Crat prefers to dress babies of both sexes in long white dresses of wool or cotton. Which probably explains little Lord Fondle-Roy and the strong strain of sexual ambiguity about the aristocracy. ‘Leggings and cardigans nubbly from being knitted by old Nannies,’ say Harper’s, are also all right; so is the matinee jacket, which always sounds like some moulting musquash cape worn by old ladies to afternoon performances of The Mousetrap. Anything nylon, polyester or made from any kind of synthetic fibre is definitely out.
Convenience, however, is a great leveller. Ironing long smocked dresses and washing eight Harrington squares and nappy liners a day was fine in the old days when there was Nan
ny to do it. Today, when there aren’t any servants and upper-class mothers often have to cook dinner for returning husbands, they may resort to Baby-Gros and disposable nappies when no one is looking, their babies only going into regulation white dresses for tea parties or when grandparents come to stay.
Zacharias Upward lives in Baby-Gros, in whatever colour Vogue is promoting for grown-ups. He only goes into pink and yellow nubbly cardigans knitted by Samantha’s mother when the family go and stay with her.
‘Oh do stop being so neurotic—you look like a guttersnipe’
The Nouveau-Richards, having denuded the Toddler’s Layette at Harrods, have also acquired the biggest, shiniest Silver Cross Pram for Tracey-Diane. They have furnished it like their cars, with nodding Snoopies, hanging dolls, parasols and frilled canopies to keep off the sun. Tracey-Diane rises from a foam of nylon frills and lace like Venus from the waves. Mrs Nouveau-Richards and the Daily Mirror think the word ‘pram’ is common and refer to it as a ‘baby carriage’.
Samantha Upward, conscious of how important it is for children to be brought up with animals, nevertheless invests in a cat net. She also knows how jealous husbands get with new babies around and is paying particular attention to Gideon. In many Stow-Crat houses the only member of the family who suffers from post-natal depression is Snipe the labrador. One monthly nurse said half her day in upper-class houses was spent boosting the morale of the dogs.
Breast-feeding is also coming back into fashion. In the old days the upper classes had their babies suckled by wet nurses, or fed from bottles at once. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, quotes one nanny as saying her mistress was ‘remarkable, in fact as far as breast-feeding goes was well nigh incredible’. It turned out she’d fed the baby for one month. Today, as a backlash against working mothers abandoning their babies to the bottle and rushing back to the office, Caroline Stow-Crat and certainly Samantha Upward are tending to breast-feed for several months.