Class Read online

  Spiralists like anonymous furniture—chrome, glass, and unit sofas and chairs—because they can be shifted around to fit into any size of house. Just as they often adopt a phoney American accent to hide the Cockney or the Yorkshire, they also embrace American terminology: ‘trash cans’, ‘garbage’, ‘closets’ and ‘car ports’. Even in the short time they stay in a place the spiralists are deeply competitive.

  The spiralists are likely to buy a three-piece suite in a sale, then put it in a Harrods depository so it can be delivered three weeks later in a Harrods van.

  They are the estate agent’s nightmare—they never stop arguing and expecting more for a house because of another brick on the night storage heater. Evidently the upper-middles treat the agent like a pro, because they’re used to one chap doing one job.

  HOME SUITE HOME

  When Mr Definitely-Disgusting thinks of buying a house other than his own council house, he fills in a coupon and goes off and sees a show house on an estate called some grandiose name like ‘Northumbria’ and puts his name down for it if he likes it. Attractions include ‘teak laminated kitchenette, stainless steel sink, coloured bathroom suite with matching vein tiles, veneered doors in the living room, kitchen dinette and shower room’.

  Ads in the ‘homebuying’ press show neighbours looking friendly and helpful in wide-bottomed trousers, so as not to intimidate Mr Definitely-Disgusting. In a comic strip guide to ‘homebuying’ the solicitor has spectacles and brushed-back hair, and wears a suit and a tie, while the buyer has wide trousers again, an open-neck shirt and hair brushed over his ears. His wife has shoulder-length hair swept back from her forehead by a kirby grip, and a skirt on the knees. This is presumably the ideal working-class prototype.

  ‘Well it’s the Council’s job, innit?’

  The Definitely-Disgustings hurry now and buy everything from Williams’s sale, even the once-famous actor with tired eyes doing the telly commercial. Up to their necks in H.P., they get carried away by the ads and buy three-piece suites in deep-pile uncut moquette and wildly expensive domestic appliances, which go back when they can’t keep up the payments. The house-to-house upstaging is as subtle as the spiralists.

  ‘You can’t hang your washing out anymore, because everyone’ll know you haven’t got a tumble dryer,’ said one wife.

  Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, on the other hand, buys a fridge for the first time and stands at the front door saying, ‘I’m worried the kiddies will catch their fingers in the door,’ just to show she’s got one.

  (My favourite advertisement of all time appeared in an Indian magazine and showed a woman and child gazing admiringly up at a huge fridge with the caption: ‘Just right for our living room’.)

  Mrs Definitely-Disgusting’s front room, if she’s feeling flush, will be dominated by a black cocktail cabinet with interior lighting, containing every drink known to man, just like the Nouveau-Richards, and a glazed tile fireplace with a gas fire (although councils are beginning to put in what is known as a ‘fuel alternative’). Most of the ornaments look as though they have been won at a fair, or bought for his mother by Zacharias Upward: china Alsatians, glazed shire horses, china ladies in poke bonnets and crinolines. Here also are the curios from a hundred package tours—green donkeys with hats and panniers, matadors under cellophane, a mass-produced plastic bull with a piece of the next bull’s back attached to its cock, ashtrays barnacled with olives and souvenirs of trips to historic houses. There might be a few very small reproductions: Constable’s Haywain, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or the Queen by Annigoni.

  The colours are garish, with everything—wallpaper, sofas and chairs—in different patterns. The carpet, a symphony of yellow, nigger brown and orange exploding in circles, doesn’t cover the linoleum. On the huge colour television there might be a clock with the works well exposed under a pyrex dome. Mrs D-D’s plastic flowers differ from Jen Teale’s in that they make no attempt to copy the originals: mauve snapdragons and blue roses, pink primroses and da-glo tulips mass gaudily together in a sharply cut glass vase (to rhyme with praise).

  The less respectable element of the working classes would have no ornaments or pictures, having smashed the lot during drunken brawls. The room would be furnished by a huge colour television and biked bean tins.

  Miss Definitely-Disgusting’s house or flat might smell of cabbage, stale fat or leaky gas, and Jen Teale, wrinkling her retroussé nose, would claim, dirt. One of the ensuing battles in the class war is Samantha Upward, Eileen Weybridge, Jen Teale and Mrs Definitely-Disgusting all accusing each other of being sluts.

  The Bronco is hung up with string in the outside lavatory, which is probably shared with several other families. This explains why so many of the working classes suffer from constipation. Only two per cent of the professional classes are overcrowded, compared with over fifty per cent of the working class.

  10 GEOGRAPHY

  Oh, to be in Great Britain

  Now that April’s here.

  Where you live is just as important as what you live in. I myself keep very quiet about having been born in Hornchurch, always justifying it by saying we were only there temporarily because my father was working at Fords. At the time my parents’ friends used to laugh it off by saying: ‘Bill and Elaine live in the slums. Ho! Ho! Ho!’

  With relief, after two years, we moved back to Ilkley in Yorkshire, where my father was born. Even here the Middleton side of the valley was much smarter than the town side, because it was greener and got the sun all day; but at least Ilkley was smarter than Otley because the inhabitants were richer and because it was further away from the industrial towns of Bradford and Leeds; and Harrogate was much smarter than Bradford and Leeds because it was more rural and nearer the East Riding, which was much smarter than the industrial West Riding, but not as smart as the North Riding. And so it went on.

  All over the North, as in the South, there are snob patches, immortalized by John Braine as ‘T’Top’. Hoy-lake is ‘T’top’ for Liverpool; Cheshire is ‘T’top’ for Manchester; Ilkley is ‘T’top’ for Bradford and Leeds. ‘You can’t get anyone local to char for you,’ said a friend who lives there now. ‘When people move to Ilkley they think they’ve arrived.’

  Certainly when we lived in Ilkley, which was devoid of anyone one would have thought of as upper-class, the upper-middles (or people who considered they spoke the King’s English) stuck together. There were plenty of people we knew well and who came to our parties, but only a handful of them were invited to meet friends who came up from the South, particularly London, because the southerners were so easily bored and so much fussier about Yorkshire accents. One Ilkley woman was described as having ‘snobbed her way out of friends’, because she never invited any of the locals to meet any of her friends from London. The North think, quite mistakenly, that they’re much less snobbish and more open than the South, despising the emollient phrases of the southerner, which they think smack of insincerity.

  Fulham, from a class point of view, is an interesting part of London. In the early ‘sixties it was principally working-class and considered very unsmart. We lived in Redcliffe Square (which called itself Kensington in those days,) and I remember saying in shocked tones to my solicitor, ‘But you can’t live in Fulham’. Fifteen years later Fulham is swarming with upper-class and upper-middle young marrieds in their first house, probably before moving to the country. And in estate agents’ ads, Redcliffe Square is not described as Kensington any more but as Fulham.

  As the Arabs take over Mayfair (they must have access to strip and gambling clubs,) and Saudi Kensington, and as Paddington and Maida Vale are invaded by ‘chocos’, the upper classes and trendies are tending to move further and further out. In the old days they liked to keep their ‘S.W.s’ low—one, three, five, and seven being the best, like the Beethoven Symphonies—but now one finds them in Battersea, Clapham, Camberwell and particularly Islington and Canonbury, because the two latter are so convenient for the City.

  As birds
of a feather traditionally flock together, the B.B.C. wireless people who work in Langham Place, the New Statesman readers and the left-wing trendies tend to go north to Hampstead, Highgate and St John’s Wood, while the telly-stocracy polarize around Barnes, Putney, Chiswick and even Hammersmith, because it is near the television centre. The richer ones even buy houses along the common in Wimbledon, which was once regarded by the upper classes as somewhere you only visited during the tennis fortnight. Certainly the older generation of the aristocracy still think of North of the Park and South of the River as beyond the pale, regarding anyone who lives there as a taxi-exile. (You can’t pick up a taxi in the area and you can’t get a taxi to take you out there because they won’t get a fare back.)

  If you pick up upper-class address books, they are still full of Flaxman, Fremantle, Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Mayfair numbers. And the upper classes still tend to live in places like Cadogan and Eaton Squares, (although even these are getting a bit ‘araby’) where they set up elaborate systems of one-way streets, which make it impossible for the hoi polloi to find their way around.

  But, in spite of their flats or houses in London, the upper classes still live mainly in the country, while the upper-middle classes live in London and have cottages in the country. I know one Mrs Nouveau-Richards who has the only country cottage in the A-Z. Despite pleading poverty the middle classes still have a million second houses.

  Harry and Caroline Stow-Crat would never be in London at the weekend—which they call ‘Friday to Monday’—although Georgie and the younger generation call it ‘weekend’ and tend to stay up more often.

  ‘You’d never have got this sort of person in Harrods on Saturday in the old days,’ a friend overheard one Harrods shop assistant saying to another recently.

  Harry Stow-Crat is usually out of England skiing in February, and in Scotland shooting in August. Scotland is always smart, and packed with upper-class English, but the Highlands are smarter than the Lowlands, although Northumberland and the border country is considered pretty grand.

  Although you will find upper-class people in all counties, there tend to be more in Yorkshire than in Lancashire. The Midlands are beyond the pale, except for Rutland, Herefordshire and Lincolnshire. Norfolk and Suffolk are much smarter than Cambridgeshire, which is not as grand as Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and of the home counties only Sussex and Kent are tolerable.

  Just as the upper-middles in Ilkley stuck together, the grander aristocracy might deign to know some of the people who live in the neighbourhood, but on the whole prefer to go into another county to dine with people they regard as their own level—this presumably is where the expression ‘county’, to describe the upper classes, came from. Hence you get those interminable forty-mile drives just to go out to dinner.

  If they were going to stay with the Tavistocks at Woburn Abbey or the Sitwells at Weston Hall, they would say, ‘I’m going to Woburn’ or ‘Weston’, and expect the other person to know where they meant. They always spell out the whole county, i.e. Warwickshire nor Warwicks, and Yorkshire not Yorks on envelopes, writing paper, and in conversation.

  It is very lower-middle to talk about ‘Great Britain’ rather than ‘England’, and to describe oneself as ‘British’ rather than ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ or ‘Welsh’.

  In London the richer of the middle classes tend to polarize round greens and commons, and on hills like Hampstead, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Richmond, Kingston and Putney. The exception is the Thames. Water in a city plays a dual role: it repels the rich where there are docks and industry, but attracts them where there are not. As the docks fall into disuse, people are moving in. The former Foreign Secretary for example has a house in Narrow Street, so he can boast on television that he lives in the East End, implying that he’s an authority on the slums, like the Duke who said he lived among miners, because his estate flanked some coalfields. Narrow Street, in fact, is a comfortable middle-class enclave on the river’s edge, and when pressure got too great, the Foreign Secretary whizzed off to his vicarage in Wiltshire.

  The papers a year or two ago quoted a taxi-driver grumbling about the erosion of cockney London by the middle classes, pouring into Hackney, Whitechapel, the Old Kent Road and the Isle of Dogs, wanting a house with a bit of garden for the children and within bicycling distance of the library. Soon the new settlers start action groups to have their own areas barricaded off against the traffic, so it spills into peripheral working-class areas; football is stopped in the streets; prices rocket, and the pubs are full of people called Nigel drinking gin and tonic. The old shops are rapidly replaced by antique shops and expensive delicatessens catering for career couples (‘Ossie’s Taramasalata is so delicious, it would be crazy to make it myself’). The garish-looking dress shops crammed with skirts and sweaters in da-glo pink and royal blue vanish in favour of ethnic boutiques catering for size twelve upwards.

  One of the great urban middle-class movements of the late ’seventies has been the development of community associations. When we were in New York in 1971 a publisher’s wife was talking about a block fête she and her friends had organized, and what fun it had been. Didn’t we think fêtes were fun?

  No we didn’t, my husband answered, appalled. They were absolute anathema. One of the best reasons for living in London was to escape from that sort of thing.

  ‘But we met so many nice new middle-class people,’ she said.

  ‘Oh Bryan—it must be the great community feeling they told us about.’

  Where America leads England usually follows, and now, eight years later, community and conservation societies flourish, and every bit of urban grass has its own horse show, street party, or block community fête to raise money for park benches and shrubs round the churchyard—all organized by the middle classes banding together to protect their own property.

  ‘I may have a large, beautiful garden crammed with climbing frames,’ says Samantha, ‘but I don’t want a hair of the common outside touched by adventure playgrounds and hockey pitches. And don’t you dare build houses in the churchyard to pay off your parish debts, or the price of my house will plummet.’

  As the authors of Voices from the Middle Classes have pointed out, in London you can often tell at a glance whether a street is basically middle or lower-middle class. The latter has narrow, terraced houses, with no room for a front garden. People are cleaning their cars and windows, and painting their houses. Mongrels roam around the streets chasing cats away. An occasional cake tin, painted to look like a burglar alarm, hangs on the wall, and there will be several ‘For Sale’ signs, as the spiralist, having done up his house, is ready to move on. His aim is the middle-class street, probably only blocks away, which has large houses set back from the road, hidden by a privet hedge and with full-grown trees in the front garden, burglar alarms and cats asleep on the window sills. There is very little do-it-yourself; no one is seen cleaning their cars or their windows. You might even find a couple of horse-boxes parked. There are very few ‘For Sale’ signs here, because people usually stay until their children leave home, whereupon they retire and move into a smaller house.

  The lower-middles tend to colonize in suburbs like Worcester Park, Cheam, Morden and Hendon.

  To the spiralist, as we have seen, St George’s Hill, Weybridge, East Horsley, Cobham and Sunningdale are social meccas. Here he will meet more people in Who’s Who than in any other county and rub shoulders on the train with more commuters from Social Classes I and II of the Census (stockbrokers, architects, Harley Street specialists and rich businessmen) than anywhere else.

  There was recently a programme on television about the inhabitants of Cheam in Surrey, in which they interviewed a lot of spiralists with brushed-forward hair who all talked about the importance of ‘competing’ and ‘living in an upper-class he-ome’. There was great community feeling in Cheam, they said; the ‘holl’ thing had exploded at the Jubilee Party in 1977 and they all got on because they had the same sense of humour and enjoyed the same sor
t of hobbies: going ‘horse racing and playing for Esher Rugby Club’. The wives had coffee evenings if their husbands had a night down at the Club. They all thought of themselves as living in upper-class he-omes’. These are the kind of people the spiralist regards as ‘upper-class’. He doesn’t realize that the real upper classes—except for one or two like the Earl of Onslow whose family have lived near Guildford for centuries—wouldn’t be seen dead in Surrey.

  ‘Now do tell me—does one go up or down to Weybridge?’

  According to a brilliant book by John Connell called The End of Tradition, which explores rural life in central Surrey, there are only two classes left there: the middle-class ‘foreigners’, i.e. rich commuters who’ve moved in and bought up the old cottages, doing them up at vast expense, and the villagers who used to live in the cottages but now live on council estates.

  Or as Jeffrey Bernard put it a few years ago in the New Statesman: ‘The place is divided into two halves. At one end it’s lavender, medium sherry, the Daily Telegraph and what a wonderful job the Conservatives are doing, and at the other end it’s baked beans, bicycle clips and what a lousy job Sir Alf Ramsey’s doing.’

  What is happening in Surrey is that gradually the ‘foreigners’ are imposing their own middle-class life style at the expense of the council tenants. The middle classes form their own preservation societies, rather like the community associations in London, and reject any improvement as ‘smacking of suburbia, and this is one up on suburbia’. John Connell points out the scarcity of bowling greens and football pitches, while there are plenty of tennis courts and rugger, cricket and hockey pitches. Proposals for launderettes, children’s playground and more shops are stamped on in case they spoil the beauty and quiet of the ‘countryside’. For the same reason the street lighting and bus shelters asked for by the council tenants are rejected. The middle classes, of course, are All Right, Jack. They’ve got cars to take them shopping at Bentalls, and out to their ‘rack of lamb’ dinner parties. What does it matter if they run over a few council tenants on the way? They’re only spoiling the ‘rural’ look of the ‘countryside’.