Class (2 page)

MR NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
, a millionaire

MRS NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
, his wife

JISON NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
, his son

TRACEY-DIANE NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
, his daughter

Introduction

In the middle of the seventies when I tentatively suggested writing a book about the English class system, people drew away from me in horror.

‘But that’s all finished,’ they said nervously, ‘no one gives a hoot any more. Look at the young.’ They sounded as if I was intending to produce a standard work on coprophilia or child-molesting. It was plain that, since the egalitarian shake-up of the ’sixties and early ’seventies, class as a subject had become the ultimate obscenity.

What struck me, however, as soon as I started the book was the enormity of the task I had taken on. It was like trying to catalogue the sea. For the whole system, despite its stratification, is constantly forming and reforming like coral. ‘Even a small town like Swansea,’ wrote Wynford Vaughan Thomas ‘has as many layers as an onion, and each one of them reduces you to tears.’ To me the system seemed more like a huge, striped rugger shirt that had run in the wash, with each layer blurring into the next and snobbery fiercest where one stripe merged with another.

I found, too, that people were incredibly difficult to pin down into classes. John went to a more famous boarding school than Thomas, who has a better job than Charles, who’s got smarter friends than Harry, who lives in an older house with a bigger garden than David, who’s got an uncle who’s an earl, but whose children go to comprehensive school. Who is then the gentleman?

A social class can perhaps be rather cumbersomely described as a group of people with certain common traits: descent, education, accent, similarity of occupation, riches, moral attitude, friends, hobbies, accomodation; and with generally similar ideas and forms of behaviour, who meet each other on equal terms and regard themselves as belonging to one group. A single failure to conform would certainly not exclude you from membership. Your own class tend to be people you feel comfortable with – ‘one of our sort’ – as you do when you are wearing old flat shoes rather than teetering round on precarious five-inch heels. ‘The nice thing about the House of Lords,’ explained one peer, ‘is that you can have incredibly snobbish conversations without feeling snobbish. Yesterday I admired a chap’s wife’s diamonds; he said they came from Napoleon’s sword, and before that from Louis XIV.’

I was continually asked as I wrote the book what right had I to hold forth on the English class system. Most people who had tried in the past, Nancy Mitford, Christopher Sykes, Angus Maude, had been members of the upper classes. The answer was no right at all. All I could claim was a passionate interest in the subject and, being unashamedly middle class, I was perhaps more or less equidistant from bottom and top.

It might therefore be appropriate here to digress a little and explain what my origins are. My paternal grandfather was a wool-merchant, but my paternal grandmother’s family were a bit grander. They owned newspapers and were distinguished Whig M.P.s for Leeds during the nineteenth century. My mother’s side were mostly in the church, her father being Canon of Heaton, near Bradford. Both sides had lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire for generations and were very, very strait-laced.

My father went to Rugby, then to Cambridge, where he got a first in two years, and then into the army. After getting married, he found he wasn’t making enough money and joined Fords and he and my mother moved, somewhat reluctantly, to Essex, where I was born. At the beginning of the Second World War he was called up and became one of the army’s youngest brigadiers. After the war we moved back to Yorkshire, living first in a large Victorian house. I was eight and, I think for the first time, became aware of class distinction. Our next-door neighbour was a newly rich and very ostentatious wool-merchant, of whose sybaritic existence my parents disapproved. One morning he asked me over to his house. I had a heavenly time, spending all morning playing the pianola, of which my mother also disapproved—too much pleasure for too little effort—and eating a whole eight-ounce bar of black market milk chocolate, which, just after the war, seemed like stumbling on Aladdin’s cave. When I got home I was sick. I was aware that it served me right both for slumming and for over-indulgence.

Soon after that we moved into the Hall at Ilkley, a splendid Georgian house with a long drive, seven acres of fields for my ponies, a swimming pool and tennis and squash courts. From then on we lived an élitist existence; tennis parties with cucumber sandwiches, large dances and fetes in the garden. I enjoyed playing little Miss Muck tremendously. I had a photograph of the house taken from the bottom of the drive on my dressing table at school and all my little friends were very impressed.

My brother, however, still had doubts about our lifestyle. It was too bourgeois, too predictable and restricted, he thought. One wet afternoon I remember him striding up and down the drawing-room going on and on about our boring, middle-class existence.

Suddenly my mother, who’d been trying to read a detective story, looked over her spectacles and said with very gentle reproof ‘Upper-middle class, darling.’

Occasionally we were taken down a peg by a socialist aunt who thought we’d all got too big for our boots. One day my mother was describing some people who lived near York as being a very ‘old’ family.

‘Whadja mean old?’ snorted my aunt. ‘All families are old.’

There were very few eligible young men in Ilkley; the glamorous, hard-drinking wool-merchants’ sons with their fast cars, teddy-bear coats and broad Yorkshire accents were as far above me sexually as they were below me, I felt, socially. But when I was about eighteen two old Etonians came to live in the district for a year. They were learning farming before going to run their estates. They were both very attractive and easy-going, and were consequently asked everywhere, every mum with a marriageable daughter competing for their attention. I was terribly disconcerted when, after a couple of visits to our house, and one of them taking me out once, they both became complete habitués of the house of a jumped-up steel-merchant across the valley. Soon they were both fighting for the hand of his not particularly good-looking daughter. But she’s so much commoner than me, I remember thinking in bewilderment, why don’t they prefer my company and our house? I realize now that they far preferred the easy-going atmosphere of the steel-merchant’s house, with its lush hospitality, ever-flowing drink and poker sessions far into the night, to one glass of sherry and deliberately intelligent conversation in ours. I had yet to learn, too, that people invariably dislike and shun the class just below them, and much prefer the class below that, or even the one below that.

I was further bewildered when, later in the year, I went to Oxford to learn to type and shared a room with an ‘Hon’ who said ‘handbag’. This seemed like blasphemy. Nancy Mitford’s
The Pursuit of Love
had been my bible as a teenager. I knew that peers’ daughters, who she immortalized as ‘Hons’, said ‘bag’ rather than handbag. At that time, too, aware of a slowly emerging sexuality and away at last from parental or educational restraint, I evolved a new way of dressing: five-inch high-heeled shoes, tight straight skirts, very, very tight cheap sweaters and masses of make-up to cover a still rather bad skin. I looked just like a tart. People obviously took me for one too. For when my room-mate introduced me to all her smart friends at Christ Church, one young blood promptly bet another young blood a tenner that he couldn’t get me into bed by the end of the week. Before he had had time to lay siege the story was repeated back to me. I was shattered. Shocked and horrified to my virginal middle-class core, I cried for twenty-four hours. My would-be seducer, who had a good heart, on hearing of my misery turned up at my digs, apologized handsomely and suggested, by way of making amends rather than me, that he take me to the cinema. On the way there he stopped at a sweet shop and bought a bar of chocolate. Breaking it, he gave me half and started to eat the other half himself.

‘But you can’t eat sweets in the street,’ I gasped, almost more shocked than I had been by his intended seduction.

‘I,’ he answered, with centuries of disdain in his voice, ‘can do anything I like.’

Hons who talked about handbags, lords who ate chocolate in the street like the working classes, aristocrats who preferred the jumped-up to the solidly middle class: I was slowly learning that the class system was infinitely more complicated than I had ever dreamed.

‘It takes many years,’ writes Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in
The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny
, for the outsider to master those complex, subtle distinctions, those nuances of accent, attitude and behaviour which went, indeed which go, into that living, changing thing—English upper-class snobbery. He might have added that this is true of any class’s snobbery.

When
Class
was eventually published in 1979, it caused a fearful rumpus. Having written most of it hiding in the potting shed, to avoid our creditors, I was enchanted when it stayed on the best seller list for 20 weeks. Less fun was promoting it round the country. I was berated by tattooed and nose-studded radio presenters. I was shouted down by miners, egged on by Lord Montague of Beaulieu.

The Duke of Edinburgh attacked me at a Hatchard’s party, snarling that the class system no longer existed.

‘That’s odd,’ I said politely, ‘According to the 1971 Census, which categorizes people’s social class by their occupation, Princess Anne, as an event rider, is the same class: 111 (Non Manual) as a game keeper.’

‘Rubbish,’ thundered the Duke, ‘Keepers are working class.’

I got the most flak for being beastly to the working classes, by calling the couple who portrayed them: Mr and Mrs Definitely Disgusting. This was not because I thought them remotely disgusting, but because, as I point out, in reply to questions on everything from encroaching gypsy encampments to rocketing gas bills, they would tend to snort:

‘Disgusting! Definitely.’

The main difference today is that they would probably say:

‘Disgusting! Definitely. “Social” wouldn’t unblock our drains for nuffink, and they didn’t offer us any counselling neither.’

Having suffered so much opprobrium when
Class
came out I have hardly glanced at the book since, only opening it with colossal trepidation, like Pandora’s Box, because my publishers suggested in view of this beautiful new reprint, I might like to draw readers’ attention to how the class system has changed.

My first reaction was how on earth had I been brave or crazy enough to write all these things. But settling down, I realized I had been looking at a different era. For in 1979, everything changed. Margaret Thatcher came to power, and suddenly the English became obsessed with making money, buying their own houses, and rising socially. The Yuppie was born. Throughout the same time, recession kicked in, the stock market crashed, the power of the unions was broken. More tragically a new cardboard boxed underclass, suffering appalling poverty, grew up, which had hardly existed when I was writing.

Another tragedy I hadn’t anticipated was the demise of the miner. Back in 1979, he was the ultimate macho hero, king of the working classes. Mining, as I write on page 150, was regarded as much grander than building because it was a steady job. I also singled out miners, power workers, dockers, engineers and lorry drivers as the new élite, because by striking they had the power to bring the country to its knees.

Their hour of glory was brief, as pit after pit closed down. Today with short-term contracts, loss of pension and no certainty of a job for life, or in the poor miners’ case, no job at all, the majority of the working classes have suffered.

I also state on page 149 that becoming a shop steward was the easiest way for a working class boy to get on, but since the weakening of the unions, this no longer applies.

But not only the working classes lost clout. ‘Lorses’ at Lloyds decimated the upper classes more effectively than any revolution and the middle classes, who are light years behind the working classes when it comes to working social security and the black economy, have also been laid off in the most brutal way. There’s no kudos in working at a desk if it has to be cleared in an afternoon.

Much of what I wrote on my chapter on education, I think, still stands, except that since 1979 drugs have invaded all schools, and girls most of the public schools.

Eton has been one of the few schools resisting the latter.

‘If one is caught in bed with a girl,’ grumbled a young Etonian, ‘one gets chucked out, but if you’re caught with a boy, you get two hours gardening.’

Other changes were more of detail. Only the poorest of the working classes no longer have refrigerators. Mrs Definitely Disgusting has a hair dryer now instead of wearing her curlers to the corner shop and working class streets are entwined with satellite dishes like columbines. Upper class girls flaunt tattoos and nose-studs like radio presenters. Upper class mothers no longer wear fur coats and only think babygros are common if they have logos on. Many of the regiments I wrote about have sadly been amalgamated or disbanded. Many men’s clubs now allow in women and are particularly charming to them.

Generally though, I was surprised and pleased, despite these changes, how the archetypes I’d created behave in just the same way today, and can be found in Harry Enfield’s working class couple, Wayne and Waynetta, in his chinless wonder, Tim Nice But Dim, and in the socially mountaineering Hyacinth Bucket—all characters we love as we laugh at them.