Class Read online

  The employers are by now frightened of using the car in case the nanny is intending to take it home for the weekend, and start fighting as to which one of them is going to ask her to baby-sit, if they occasionally want to go out, standing outside her door, saying, ‘No, you do it. No, you do it.’

  By now the boyfriend starts shop-stewarding around, telling the nanny she oughtn’t to be working those hours: ‘Girls in our office only do nine to five, and you never get a lunch hour.’ More and more concessions are made, anything to avoid the hassle of working in a new girl.

  Usually a row blows up about once a month, whereupon the nanny sits in the kitchen muttering to next door’s nanny and ringing ads in the Evening Standard, or The Times. While her employer doesn’t feel up to going to work and sits nervously writing an ad for The Lady, or ringing up agencies on the upstairs telephone: ‘Tell anyone who might be interested to ring my husband at the office, or she can ring here at weekends.’ Usually she and the nanny get bored of rowing by the evening, and make it up over a litre bottle of Pedrotti. By the time the husband comes home all wound up to read the riot act, wife and nanny are plastered but fondly tearful over an empty bottle.

  A few years ago middle-class husbands used traditionally to knock off the au pair. Today, far more often you find husbands getting jealous of the mutually sycophantic, love-hate relationship that exists between the wife and the nanny, particularly since the advent of the permissive society, when nanny often covers up for the wife’s sexual peccadilloes and therefore has even more power over her.

  Samantha Upward only works part-time and doesn’t feel this justifies a nanny so she gets au pairs to help Zacharias with his French and says, ‘Go and do your devoir, darling,’ when he gets home from school. Gideon hopes every time for someone like Brigitte Bardot, but Samantha has so much middle-class guilt about employing anyone, and spends so much time scurrying round doing all the work, that the various Claudines and Marie Joses soon become au pear-shaped.

  No such scruples overcome Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who, as a first-generation employer, is determined to get several pounds of flesh off the nannies. She expects them to work six days a week for only £12, to wear uniform, to keep the children upstairs and to address her as ‘Mrs Nouveau-Richards’. One nanny told us that her newly rich employer allowed her to call her by her Christian name only if they went out together in the evening, never during the day. She also allowed the nanny to use the front stairs, but the other servants had to use the back stairs.

  One of nanny’s least enviable tasks is helping with the playgroup. The rich send their children to nursery schools, where trained nannies take them over for three hours a day and teach them the rudiments of reading, writing and making castles out of lavatory paper rolls. The less rich have to make do with playgroups, where different mothers take it in turns to supervise the children. Here the lower-middle Jen Teales are far more bossy than the upper-middle mums and if a working mother sends her nanny or her au pair instead of going herself, the Jen Teales, probably feeling themselves perilously close to the status of the nanny, refuse to talk to her, except for telling her to do all the dirty work. When my own nanny used to do it she was the only adult who wasn’t offered a cup of coffee.

  Many people who didn’t have nannies themselves regard them as a status symbol. One nouveau riche family who employed a nanny, insisted she wear a uniform but gave her a nervous breakdown by never allowing her near the baby.

  Esther Rantzen devoted a whole column in the Evening News to her daughter’s ‘lovely Nanny, who even likes the mucky bits’, but who only has to wear uniform when she goes to official B.B.C. events like Miss United Kingdom. A Birmingham journalist, who had a baby at 42, had a nanny she described as a ‘lovely lady, who we call Auntie Margaret’. Being called ‘a lovely lady’ in the national or provincial press is worth at least £10 a week.

  Many permanent nannies today act as managing director for the whole household, but for some reasons they hate admitting to the outside world what their job is. I had one girl who used to tell her boyfriends that she was on the dole and just staying with me. Another nanny was getting her employers and the children off for a weekend when some man rang up.

  ‘Hang on,’ her employers heard her saying, ‘I’m just saying goodbye to some friends.’

  On another occasion, when a commercial was being made in her boss’s house, she asked him to carry his newly-ironed shirts upstairs because she didn’t want the film crew to realize she was a nanny. If asked what she does she says she’s a P.A.

  The nanny-employer relationship is interesting because it is one of the few occasions when the classes meet head on, not just during the day, as people do in offices, but at all times, and the nanny has to adjust to a completely different lifestyle.

  Nannies divide households into ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ families. The upstairs families keep the children upstairs and allow the nanny complete if lonely autonomy. Downstairs families are usually middle class; the nanny and the mother muddle along, both looking after the children in uneasy complicity.

  Differing taste, of course, is frequently a bone of contention in the nanny-employer relationship and there’s often a problem when a member of the serviette union goes into a family which says ‘napkin’. Children soon suss out areas of discord. Samantha Upward’s au pair comes in very red in the face, saying, ‘Zacharias refuses to say “Pardon”.’

  Whereupon Samantha goes even redder and stands on one leg, saying, ‘Well actually we always say “What”. I don’t know why.’

  Nannies in the past have tried to impose gracious living on our household: mauve bath crystals, Freshaire, white plastic flower vases filled with plastic flowers, plastic punch bowls with eight little matching cups and a glass ladle, short back and sides for both children, an acrylic white cardigan edged with pink tulips which my daughter thought was absolute heaven, as she did a pair of wedge-heeled walking shoes. Nothing could illustrate my innate middle-classness more than the fact that I was too wet to put my foot down and insist they should either be taken back or not used.

  Caroline Stow-Crat wouldn’t have had any such problem. On the other hand she would never correct her nanny in front of anyone else like a woman with her nanny and child who passed me and my dog in the street.

  ‘Look at the lovely doggie,’ said the nanny to the child.

  ‘That is a dog, not a doggie,’ said her employer in chilling tones.

  Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy claims that there was never any strain between the upper-class ‘What’, the lower-middle ‘Pardon’ or the working-class ‘Eh’. Nannies simply became bilingual and said ‘lounge’ to their friends and ‘drawing-room’ to their employers.

  Nannies in the past, however, made up their own little snobbish rules: ‘Nanny Ellis said it was common to stare, common to play with children whose friends were in trade, however rich, common to play in the front garden, or to eat jelly with anything but a fork. Vulgar children say “Hip Hip Hooray” and eat Fry’s chocolate. We say “Hip Hip Hurrah” and eat Cadbury’s.’

  Nannies today don’t ask the wilder state school children to tea because, instead of please and thank you, they say, ‘Cor what’s this crap?’ when last night’s réchauffé Boeuf Bourgignon is served up to them. If they don’t eat up nanny doesn’t allow them any dream topping or fruit salad, so they don’t want to be asked again either.

  Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who pays her nanny a pittance, is careful to steer her away from the fast piece at No 10 who gets £35 a week and every weekend off, and who might preach subersive ideas. Even the Philippinos are getting less biddable, Conceptione, who used to do everything for £7, has got herself a job in a hotel for £8. An actress I know had a Philippino girl for a second interview to finalize details. Suddenly she got to her feet and said:

  ‘Mrs Francis, I must be level with you. I cannot after all come to work for you. I have fallen in love with Mrs X (her previous employer). She is going to leave her husband and live wit
h me, but as she is used to a certain standard of living, I am honour bound to support her so I am going to train to be doctor.’

  4 EDUCATION

  O Teacher mine! Where are you roaming?

  After three years at a private day school, the upper classes pack their children off to prep school at eight because they’re too stupid to do the homework any more, because they can’t cope with the complications of the milk run, and because, even though they’re not at all afraid of the school staff, they have no desire to mix with them socially at the string of fund-raising events laid on by day schools. Even at eight, little Georgie Stow-Crat misses home less than a middle-class child because his affection is divided between his mother and nanny. He misses Snipe, the labrador, most of all and calls Caroline Stow-Crat ‘sir’ in the holidays. Any boisterousness or subversive tendencies are ironed out of him at school, and everyone, particularly his grandmother, says how much he has improved. No one, on the other hand, can explain why the housekeeper’s cat has been strangled.

  Samantha Upward, trying to be enlightened, starts Zacharias off at a state primary which she refers to as ‘the village school’, but, even with his head start, little Zacharias doesn’t do as well as expected and develops a frightful accent which makes his grandmother wince and his cousins at Summerfields take the mickey out of him. After a lot of heart-searching and Gideon having to give up smoking and drink wine instead of whisky, Zacharias is sent to the local day prep school at eight, to find that all the upper-middles by now have been sent off to boarding school, and the place is crawling with pushy lower-middles and Nouveau-Richards. Against such competition Zacharias does less and less well. He’s called ‘Zacharine’ and beaten up in the playground by Jison Nouveau-Richards and his gang and is eventually sent off to a crammer at eleven, because the headmaster has hinted at the horrible possibility that he might not pass Common Entrance, and because Gideon and Samantha can’t get him to do three hours’ homework a night against a background of The Sweeney.

  Left-wing intellectuals pack their children off to the local comprehensive, rejoicing in the spare cash and the first glottal stop. Actually their children are bright enough to waltz through any system; if not, they have them coached. The parents shriek like hell when they have to fork out for a university.

  The middle classes, of course, always work the system. They have cars to take them to the better state schools, and they deliberately buy houses in the right area. The Oxford local papers, for example, advertise houses with swimming pools, four bedrooms and location in the catchment area of a fashionable state school.

  Often a group of middle-class parents picks on a school and enforces its own standards, until it’s so oversubscribed that the head can pick and choose. There is a school in Berkshire known as ‘the Trojan horse of the state system’, where the headmaster only takes children whose parents have been to boarding school or a university, or whose mothers are extremely pretty. The result is scholarships to all the top public schools, and speech days full of headscarves and labradors, not unlike the Fourth of June at Eton. The only difference between this and the local day prep school is that the mothers picking up their children from the state school are better dressed because they have more cash to spend.

  ‘Hooray, we can afford a Volvo,’ said one mother when she heard her child had got a place.

  Meanwhile Jen Teale is tearing her hair out because she can’t get Wayne or Christine in, and has to fork out for a day prep. Having forked out, she is extremely pushy. She always goes along to open day to see what she’s paying for, and says she’s ‘very satisfied’ because little Wayne is bound to get qualifications later, and that’s all that matters. Wayne has also brought home some very nice boys, which could never have happened at the local primary, where the hazard of him chumming up with the local dustman’s son was always a terrifying possibility. In conversation with friends who have children at state schools she often mentions Wayne’s French or asks them if they’ve got a Latin dictionary.

  The Nouveau-Richards dispatch Jison to a day prep, and then to one of the top boarding schools, paying exorbitant fees to buy a little upper-middle-class child on the never-never.

  The Tory press recently reported that a docker, a warehouseman and a gasmeter reader were sending their children to private schools, while a vast number of middle-class parents couldn’t afford it any more. How ironic, the report went on, if the working classes comandeered private education as it moved further and further out of the reach of the middle classes. I think this is unlikely. Traditionally the financial situation of working-class parents make them accept the state system as normal. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, for example, wouldn’t dream of sending a child to a fee-paying school: too many Arabs, and far too many ‘soap dodgers’ as she calls the black coloured. Cheltenham Ladies even had a black head girl. The working classes also have a traditional resistance to uniform, punishment, homework and ‘posh’ but useless subjects like music and French.

  Both in streamed and unstreamed schools, the middle classes receive different and longer education and are educationally more successful. The chances of the child of an unskilled worker being a poor reader at seven are six times greater than the upper-middle-class child, who arrives at school tuned in to educational demands, and who, when he gets home, has someone to help him with the homework and somewhere quiet to do it.

  While half the children in the Census Social Class I (the upper-middles) reach higher education, either at university or polytechnic, only one in a thousand of Class V (unskilled workers) stays on after 16. Leaving school young is deeply embedded in working-class sections of the community, where parents keep their children at home to babysit or do housework, or, if money is short, send them out to work.

  The middle-class child is realistic about prospects and sees success in terms of steady progress and cumulative success, while the working-class child sees it in terms of a quiet life, or sudden fame as a pop star or a footballer.

  PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

  The National Foundation for Educational Research, who ought to be collectively shot, is convinced that the greater the parental involvement the more able the child will be. Parental involvement is the main hobby of the non-working mother who sees it as an extension of justifying her existence by creative child-rearing. The frightfully lower-middle expression, a ‘caring and concerned parent’, is bandied around a great deal both by the press and the teaching profession. If a child isn’t doing well at school the teacher rings up the parents and tells them that the home back-up isn’t ‘caring’ enough. Another trick is to ask the children to write essays entitled ‘My Mummy’ or ‘My Daddy’. If Zacharias Upward writes: ‘My Daddy drinks whisky all day, and my mother looks like a princess, but never comes to kiss me goodnight,’ you get a black mark. You also rate as a bad parent if you don’t visit the school enough—but if you visit and criticize rather than help with the jumble sale, you are marked down as ‘overzealous’.

  ‘The middle classes can be a frightful bore,’ said one schoolmaster. ‘The ideal pupil would be an industrious middle-class child with working-class parents who kept out of your hair.’ The worst parents are evidently middle-class intellectuals, who can’t accept that their child is average and the child gets so pressurized it just cops out.

  A daunting idea put forward by all schools today is that parents should educate themselves in order to help their children—‘father education’ my husband calls it. Samantha Upward is taking an Open University course in absolutely everything in an attempt to push Zacharias. Jen Teale has gone back to part-time teaching to catch up on the latest techniques.

  Parents are advised to join the P.T.A. and bully for their own maths workshops. As communists monopolize union meetings, so the middle classes, even in a comprehensive school, tend to take over the P.T.A., leading to a serious distortion of influence. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting doesn’t speak the same language as the staff and is often frightened of them. With massive condescension, one school
master suggested starting a school playgroup, or a building project, or even a car mechanics club to attract the working classes into the P.T.A.

  FUNCTIONS

  Not only are the middle classes being taxed out of existence and struggling to pay the fees, they are also made to feel guilty if they’re not pouring money into the school kitty and taking afternoons off to be present at school events. If they asked one to sponsor a walk to save-the-parents it would make more sense.

  The schools themselves never let up—coffee mornings, knit-ins, jumble sales, P.T.A. dances. These are usually organized by the Friends of the School, a posse of busybodies in tweed skirts who call the headmistress by her Christian name, and haven’t enough to do in the afternoons. The good parent has to be there on Saturday afternoon manning a stall. It’s not enough to send a cheque for £5 on the Monday after.

  The Nouveau-Richards go to everything because you meet such a nice class of parent there. Samantha Upward goes to everything because she feels it helps Zacharias. Her social life is entirely taken up with school events, from biology workshops and concerts to P.T.A. dances, and, as she insists on Gideon coming as well to create an impression of solidarity, they have to spend a bomb on baby-sitters.

  The Stow-Crats never go to anything. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting arrives at the door, hears the Hampstead middle-class whine and goes home again. The upper-middles often feel it their duty to patronize events of this kind, have several drinks at home first and refuse to dance.