Class Read online

  ‘And even if they do go astray’, boomed her friend, ‘one knows they’ll go astray with the right sort of chap,’ (which is back to endogamy again).

  ROUGH DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

  ‘When the mind is full of tit and bum,’ a friend of mine once said, ‘it tends to be a-critical,’ meaning that, in the first flush of love, you don’t mind what class a person is. The fact that he’s not ‘the right sort of chap’ makes him even more attractive. When they are young, the insecure of both sexes tend to drop class. Older upper-class men love going to bed with working-class girls. It reminds them of nanny. For the same reason, they adore big strapping Australian girls. One Australian journalist went to interview an earl about wealth tax and only moved out six months later.

  Equally, going out with a yobbo gives the middle- and upper-class girl a feeling of superiority. She also finds working-class men more respectful but at the same time more dominating than their public school counterparts. (Geoffrey Gorer claims that the skilled worker has the highest sexual energy—so she’s on to a good thing.)

  It should be pointed out here that the working and upper classes tend to be far more chauvenistic than the upper-middle and middle-middle classes. This is perhaps because they are more reactionary, but also because they tend to have everything done for them by their mothers or nannies; whereas the middle-class mother, struggling for the first generation without servants, is much more likely to have made her son run around fetching and carrying for her. The middle-class man will therefore be far more prepared to reverse roles. This is important because it is crucial to an understanding of the different attitudes to sex, dating and women in general.

  The first great love of my life was a miner’s son who’d become a millionaire. I was working on a newspaper in Brentford. He passed by in a vast, open, dark green car, and screeched to a halt. I bolted into my office, but when I sidled out two hours later he was still waiting. He was the most handsome man I’d ever seen, and it was all very disgraceful and wildly exciting. He took me straight back to his house, whereupon he told me to go and make him a cup of tea. I was far more shocked than if he’d tried to seduce me. None of my stuffy middle-class boyfriends had ever bossed me round like that.

  We went out for nearly three years . . . Whenever he went abroad on business, and, I suspect, pleasure, he never wrote. This broke my heart. I only discovered years later that he was ashamed of being ill-educated. He was shocked if I said ‘blast’, and would never come to any of my parties, although I was dying to show him off, because he was shy and probably bored by my friends. He went to see his mother every day.

  He was bossy, yet socially tentative, prudish yet unfaithful, and mother-fixated—all working-class qualities; yet we had three marvellous years. He was incredibly generous, showering me with presents which cost a fortune and which were returned (my middle-class background again) whenever we had one of our periodic bust-ups. And he was far more masculine, more reassuring and more fun than any of the uptight barristers, stockbrokers and account executives I’d run about with before. If he had asked me to marry him, I should certainly have said yes, but he had the good sense to realize we were far too different for it ever to work. For when the class war and the sex war are joined, hostilities always break out in the end.

  Alan Coren said that, when he was at Oxford, upper-class undergraduates screwed nurses and married upper-class girls, while working-class undergraduates married nurses and screwed upper-class girls, yelling ‘One for Jarrow’ at the moment of orgasm.

  Richard Hoggart, that champion of the lower orders, says that one of the most valuable characteristics of the working classes is the ability to take the mickey and say ‘Come off it’, which the middle classes usually translate as having a ‘bloody great chip on one’s shoulder’. This trait frequently comes out in working-class intellectuals when they have affairs with middle-class girls. One remembers Jimmy Porter constantly bitching at his gentle, long-suffering wife.

  Another example of working-class chippiness coupled with macho occurred recently with a beautiful girlfriend of mine who was running two men at once, one of them an underwriter and the first man ever to wear full eye make-up to Lloyd’s, the other a working-class pop music promoter. One day the Lloyd’s underwriter took her for a row in Hyde Park. They were just pulling into shore when the music promoter leapt out of the bushes where he’d been lurking and pushed the underwriter into the lake, where he stood spluttering and threatening to call the police.

  ‘If he’d been working-class,’ said the music promoter later, ‘he’d have slugged me back. I didn’t throw him in the water because I was jealous about you but because he was upper class.’

  If Zacharias Upward goes out with Christine Teale, Gideon and Samantha will talk scathingly about ‘Not quite P.L.U. [People Like Us] darling’ or ‘rather Pardonia’, and pray that their children will grow out of it. Middle-class parents also become particularly tolerant in the face of eligibility. If you go out with someone much grander than yourself, you tend to take on some of their mannerisms. Friends noticed that when Roddy Llewellyn was going out with Princess Margaret he assumed the patrician poker face, used the pronoun ‘one’ instead of ‘I’, and started walking around with his hands behind his back like Prince Philip.

  THE DATE

  When Dive Definitely-Disgusting takes a girl out on a date he’s likely to be much cleaner than Zacharias Upward who often goes out straight from the office. Dive has a bath and a good scrub before getting dressed for the evening. He’ll reek of Brut and over-scented deodorant and wear an open-necked shirt to reveal a hairy, muscular chest clanking with medallions. He’ll be very generous with drinks, but he’ll tend not to give the girl dinner (having already had high tea, so as not to drink on an empty stomach) because he’s frightened of ‘resteronts’ as he calls them. He can’t understand the menu if it’s in French, he doesn’t know how to order wine or how to eat asparagus, and is terrified of making a fool of himself asking for steak tartare to be well done or complaining that the Vichysoisse is stone cold. This is why many restaurants qualify food on the menu, like ‘chilled’ watercress soup, and probably explains the popularity of melon because it’s the same in French and English.

  Being taken out to dinner is such a treat for Sharon Definitely-Disgusting that she always goes right through the menu, and always has pudding. She won’t comment on the food or say ‘Thank you’ afterwards. One working-class girl I know went out with a lower-middle sales rep who had an expense-account acquaintance with ‘resteronts’. ‘He was so charming and well spoken,’ she said afterwards, ‘and such a gentlemen. He kept telling me what knife and fork to use and correcting my conninenal accent.’

  ‘Waiter! There’s an eyelash in my friend’s soup.’

  Georgie Stow-Crat would never correct pronunciation or comment on table manners. If his companion wants an ‘advocado’ pear, let her have one.

  The manager of our local restaurant is a great observer of dating couples. ‘You can always tell a girl who’s escalated,’ he says. ‘She talks direct to the waiter, instead of letting the man order for her. Artichokes are a great leveller; I saw one girl trying to eat the whole thing.’

  ‘People who belong,’ he went on ‘always hold their coats in mid-air when they take them off. The nouveau riche never say “good evening”, are curt with waiters, snap their fingers and then over-tip. They also put vinegar on their chips.’

  Both Christine Teale and Sharon Definitely-Disgusting prefer sweet drinks to dry: sweet Cinzano, Martini, Baby Cham and orange (a sort of Doe’s fizz), Tia Maria, Crème de Menthe. If they drink gin, it’s with orange.

  Sharon also likes a man to be neatly dressed on a date. ‘If he had a holey sweater or holey jeans I wouldn’t entertain him,’ she says. ‘And he must be clean. I couldn’t stand all those rockers a few years back with dirty hair. I like a boy with a bit of life in him, but not rough.’ She would also say, ‘I’ve got a snapshot of him indoors’ (which
is working-class for ‘at home’).

  Christine Teale refers to a boyfriend over twenty-one as a ‘boy’ (‘I’m going out with a wonderful boy’). Most people say ‘boyfriend’ or ‘man’. The upper classes, when they’re trying to be democratic and trendy, say ‘guy’ in inverted commas. One should never talk about an ‘escort’. According to U and Non-U Revisited one should say ‘male companion’, which seems a bit pedantic. Most people merely say the person’s Christian name, and leave you to guess who they’re talking about. It is also vulgar to say, ‘May I bring my girl?’ as opposed to ‘a girl’ when you mean a girlfriend.

  Unlike the working classes who don’t bother about the morrow, Wayne Teale tends to be tight with money. To splash it around is both prodigal and cheap. He won’t buy a girl dinner, so he’ll put on a paisley scarf, which he calls a ‘cravat’, tucked into a sweater, and take her to a bar where he knows the landlord by his Christian name. This he calls ‘social drinking’. If he’s over thirty, he might wear a white orlon polo-neck jersey which he’ll call a ‘rŏllneck’ (to rhyme with doll) sweater, because a touch of white is so flattering after a certain age and the neck hides the wrinkles in his throat. He refers to a girl as an ‘attractive young lady’. He would prefer her to wear a skirt than jeans, even though his trouser creases are sharp enough to ladder her tights. He’s also read somewhere that it’s common to say perfume, but scent sounds too foxy, so he settles for ‘fragrance’. Gideon would probably say, ‘That’s a nice pong’.

  Caution is the watchword of the lower-middles. Wayne daren’t be romantic in case some unsuitable ‘young lady’ traps him into matrimony. He would call it getting ‘invōle-ved’ with a long ‘o’. He doesn’t resort to insults and backchat like the working classes, but his conversation is arch, and rather hearty with an air of continual interrogation, rather like Bob Dale or the non-yokels in The Archers. He will use expressions like ‘Chop Chop, Young Lady’, or, even worse, address his girlfriend as ‘Woman’. She will say in reply, ‘Stir your stumps, Wayne Teale.’ It is frightfully lower-middle to address people by both their Christian name and surname. Any money Bryan makes will be spent on what he calls ‘home improvements’ or on his car, which has a Christian name and is always referred to as ‘she’.

  Zacharias Upward likes entertaining girlfriends in his flat where he can show off his gourmet cooking. This is cheaper than going to restaurants, saves on petrol, and is much nearer the bedroom. All his friends say Zak is very ‘hospitable’ (the upper classes emphasize the first syllable).

  Howard Weybridge’s idea of an exciting date is to ask his girlfriend to freeze on the touchline while he grapples muddily with a lot of other fifteen-stoners on the rugger field. Later she will be expected to talk to rugger wives about deep freezes while he frolics naked in a plunge bath with the rest of the team, and then make one warm gin and tonic last all evening while he downs pints and pints of beer. In summer she might get taken to cricket, which is sometimes warmer but goes on longer.

  Georgie Stow-Crat will be very generous to his girlfriends—like Oscar Wilde who, when asked why he gave champagne to a barrow boy, replied, ‘What gentleman would starve his guests?’ Georgie can’t cook and would starve in a well-equipped kitchen. So, as he is too thick to make conversation for very long, he takes girls to dine in a night club or a disco. Romance, according to Tina Browne in Over 21, blooms in the twilight gloom of smart places like Wedgies and Annabels. As the upper classes tend to leave London at the weekend, Fridays and Saturdays are very bad nights at Wedgies.

  WHO MARRIES WHOM

  ‘Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper—the irritation!’

  Uncle Matthew in

  The Pursuit of Love

  by Nancy Mitford.

  As the upper classes all know each other, they get in a panic if their children get engaged to someone they haven’t heard of.

  Georgie Stow-Crat plays around with girls of other classes before and after his marriage, but he’ll try and settle for one of his own kind. For what are a few nights of passion for a lifetime at the wrong end of the table? Lord Lichfield took out a string of models and actresses, but he ended up with Lady Leonora Grosvenor. More recently the Marquess of Douro married the Princess of Prussia, the Duke of Roxburghe married Lady Leonora’s sister, Lady Jane, while their brother, the 6th Duke of Westminster, chose Miss Natalie Phillips, granddaughter of Sir Harold and Lady Zia Wernher. As the aristocracy are forced ‘to straphang through life like the rest of us’, they are closing their ranks and marrying the sort of gairl who will bring some cash or property with her, or as one aristocrat put it, ‘can make a decent lunch for a shooting party’. ‘The reason why my marriage came unstuck,’ said a duke’s daughter, ‘was because I was upper-class and he was only landed gentry.’ The moment Georgie Stow-Crat gets engaged he takes the girl to meet nanny, which is far more of an ordeal than meeting Harry and Caroline.

  What the upper classes really dread is their child falling for someone middle-class.

  ‘A thoroughly conventional man in good society,’ said Edward Lyttelton, a former headmaster of Eton, ‘would rather that his son should resort with prostitutes than that he should marry a respectable girl of distinctly lower station than his own. Indeed it is not going too far to say that he probably would rather his son should seduce such a girl, provided there were no scandal, than marry her.’

  In order not to be continually irritated by class differences the aristocracy often marry rich Americans or foreigners, who they can instruct in upper-class English behaviour without being too insulting:

  ‘In England, Ortrud, we have a funny national custom of not saying “horse racing”.’

  If Georgie Stow-Crat did marry down, he would tend to pick a very beautiful girl, which is why the aristocracy is so good-looking. In general, good-looking people marry up—Tony Armstrong-Jones and Captain Mark Phillips being notable examples—and the insecure and ugly tend to marry down. Just as they dropped class while dating, they tend to pick a partner who’ll look up to them and make them feel superior.

  When people get married for the first time late in life—in their forties or fifties—parents are inclined to waive class prejudices out of sheer relief that their ‘child’ is finally off their hands.

  It is debatable whether the middle classes have any real desire to land an aristocrat any more. As has been said already, the peer is no longer the favourite hero of romantic fiction (unless he’s in costume of course) and has been replaced by the middle-class doctor or surgeon.

  Heather Jenner says her marriage bureau clients ‘don’t give a hoot’ what class people are any more. ‘Why should they want to marry a lord and cope with a falling-down overgrown house? On the whole blue-collar men are far better at giving a woman a good time. One upper-class woman was so fed up with the sexual and financial ineptitude of the aristocracy she put “Working Class Only” on her form.’

  On the other hand, another girl who ran a marriage bureau, discovering she had a baronet among her clients, promptly whipped him off the books and married him herself. Another friend of mine, born on a council estate, can pinpoint the moment she fell in love with her future husband, who is a peer: ‘He signed a cheque to pay for our dinner with his surname only.’ Finally one has only to read the small ads in The Tatler— ‘Very attractive blue-blooded academic in his early thirties equally at ease on the hunting field or engaged in economic and political discussion’ (sounds hell)—to realize that class does have a pull. The Blue Bloody is still holding
his own against the Blue Collar.

  The upper-middle-class man, preferring to get his career together before settling down, tends to marry late, between twenty-eight and thirty-two; his bride will be in her mid-twenties. Often they live together first, particularly if one set of parents disapproves. Then gradually, out of sheer force of habit, or desire for grandchildren, the parents come round.

  Samantha Upward, who’s always taught Zacharias to be unsnobbish, finds the thought of being a mother-in-law awfully trying. First there was Zulanka from the Fiji Islands, who was really wonderfully dark, but who spoilt it all by referring to all those nice Africans as ‘no-good blacks’. And now there’s Mikki (who’s really called Enid) who appears to have no surname. Mikki does something nebulous in the music business, is totally uncultured, but full of pretensions. In referring to herself and Samantha collectively as ‘middle-class folk like ourselves’ she is obviously totally unaware that Samantha’s family is much better than hers is. Even more maddening Gideon obviously thinks that Mikki is quite, quite perfect, particularly as she doesn’t wear a stitch in bed. Gideon insists on taking her a cup of tea first thing to admire her early morning teats.

  The lower-middle parents, being materialistic, aren’t sure whether to oppose early marriage as unsound financially or welcome it as better than pre-marital promiscuity. One lower-middle spiralist said the reason he finally decided to marry his wife was because she’d been brought up in a careful household, and therefore would be a good manager of his money. Believing in deferred satisfaction, Wayne tends to be engaged for several years, rather than live with a girl, so he can put down a deposit on a house. He will ‘study for exams’ in the evening, his ‘fiancay’ Shirl will work in a bar, and bank the lot, so they have enough money to move into a perfectly ‘decorated home’. Shirl can’t stand disorder—she must have everything nice. The upper-middle girl who wanted to get married in a hurry would be perfectly happy to move into a rented box in Fulham and run up an overdraft doing the place up, or expect Daddy to fork out for carpets and things later.