Class (29 page)

The middle classes sometimes have net upstairs. If Eileen Weybridge is changing out of her tennis shorts in the middle of the day, she doesn’t want the workman mending the road looking in. If they have nets downstairs, they might explain it by saying they’ve got an American mother.

The rough and friendly element of the working classes never bother with net at all and have an expression for someone putting on airs: ‘Net curtains in the window, nothing on the table.’

It is where the more thin-lipped element of the working classes blends into the lower-middles that net reigns supreme. You can see out and chunter over everyone else’s behaviour, and twitch the curtains to indicate extreme disapproval, but they can’t see you. Suburban privet hedges and Weybridged latticed windows fulfil the same function.

Jen Teale, however, wanting to priss everything up and shake off the stigma of upper-working class—which is a bit too close for comfort—hangs pink jardinière festoon cross-over drapes which leaves three-quarters of the window clear. This allows space for ‘floral decorations’ on the window ledge, makes the windows look ‘so feminine’ and enables the neighbours to see how ‘spotless’ (a favourite lower-middle word) her house is. Other examples of the lower-middles trying to go one better are ruched nets, putting a row of package-tour curios on the window ledge outside one’s nets, or hanging one’s curtains so the pattern shows on the outside. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting tried yellow nets once, but they made the whole family look as though they’d got jaundice.

BEHIND THE MAUVE FRONT DOOR

Jen Teale, liking to have everything dainty, wages a constant battle against dust and untidiness. Bryan sits in the lounge with his feet permanently eighteen inches off the ground in case Jen wants to ‘vacuum’ underneath. In a bedroom, a Dralon button-back headboard joins two single divans with drawers underneath for extra storage, into which Jen might one day tidy Bryan away for ever. Gradually all their furniture—wardrobes, sideboards, cupboards—is replaced by fitted ‘units’ which slot snugly between ceiling and floor, rather like Lego, and leaves no inch for dust to settle.

As soon as the Teales move into a house the upper-middle process is reversed: all the doors are flattened so the mouldings don’t pick up dust any more; the brass fittings are replaced by aluminium, which doesn’t need polishing; all the windows and old ‘French doors’ (as Jen calls French windows) are replaced by double-glazed aluminium picture windows. Being hot on insulation, because they loathe wasting money, the Teales even have sliding double-glazed doors round the porch. Bryan does all this with his Black-and-Decker.

The mauve front door has a rising sun in the bottom left-hand corner of the glass. The doorbell chimes. The house smells of lavender Pledge and Freshaire. In the lounge the fire has a huge gnome’s canopy to concentrate the heat and keep smuts at bay. Beside it stands the inevitable Statue-of-Liberty combination of poker, brush and shovel in a thistle motif. On the walls Bryan and his Black-and-Decker have put up storage grids, like vast cat’s climbing frames with compartments for the hi-fi, records, scrabble, the odd spotlit bit of Wedge-wood or ‘vawse’ of plastic flowers. (‘Fresh’ flowers, as Jen would call them, drop petals and paper ones gather dust.) A few years ago the Teales wouldn’t have had any books—too much dusting—but as culture seeps downwards, there might be a few book club choices tastefully arranged at an angle to fill up a compartment.

The lounge suite has easy-fit nylon William Morris stretch covers which have interchangeable arms that can be switched from unit to unit or rotate on the same chair to give that straight-from-the-showroom look which is the antitheses of the shabby splendour—‘majestic though in ruin’—of the upper classes. Jen also rather likes the continental habit of offering lounge furniture as a group, comprising three-seater settee, two-seater settee and one armchair, called ‘Caliph’. (Down-market furniture invariably has up-market names like ‘Eton’ and ‘Cavendish’.) There is also a Parker Knoll recliner in case an ‘elderly relative comes to visit’.

As well as her books Jen also has her Medici prints and her Tretchikoff (under a picture light, to show there’s no dust on the frame), and in the dining-room there’s a David Shepherd elephant gazing belligerently at Bryan’s vintage car etchings. There is no bar because the Teales are tight with drink; Bryan keeps any bottles in another room with measures on. Just as a guest is putting his glass down, a mat with a hunting scene is thrust underneath to stop rings on a nest of tables called ‘Henley’.

The kitchen is like a laboratory. No ornaments alleviate the bleakness. As the lower-middles disapprove of money spent on luxuries, Jen probably wouldn’t have a washing-up machine. She doubts it would get things really clean. She calls washing up ‘doing the dishes’. She washes, Bryan ‘wipes’ with a ‘tea towel’ rather than a ‘drying-up cloth’. (Caroline Stow-Crat would call it a ‘clawth’.) Jen also does a lot of ‘handwashing’ and, as she’s very conscious of understains, she ‘boils’ a lot. Friends say her whites are spotless.

In the bedroom a doll in frills, to show Jen’s just a little girl at heart, lies on the millpond smooth candlewick bedspread. (Caroline Stow-Crat has a worn teddy bear). ‘Robe units’ with motifs and very shiny lacquered brass handles slot into the walls. Jen tidies her make-up away in a vanity case. The only ornament on her white formica-topped vanity unit is a circular plastic magnifying mirror. When she makes up and brushes her hair, she protects her clothes from ‘dandruff with a pink plastic cape. The matching bathroom suite, in sky blue or avacodo, with a basin shaped like a champagne glass, has a matching toilet cover, toilet surround and bathmat in washable sky-blue nylon fur.

A Spanish ‘dolly’ with Carmen skirts discreetly conceals the toilet tissue (pronounced ‘tiss-u’ not ‘tishu’ as Samantha Upward would pronounce it). Jen, being obsessed by unpleasant odours, has Airwick, potpourri and a pomander on top of the cistern, and a deodorant block hanging like a sloth inside. In the toilet there is bright blue water. Bryan and Jen prefer showers to baths; they waste less water and are easier to clean up after. Jen calls a bathcap a ‘shower cap’.

Although she keeps her house like a new pin, Jen always does housework in tights and a skirt rather than trousers. Her whole attitude is summed up by her feather duster, which keeps dirt at a distance.

THE CHROME SQUAD

There was an advertisement recently in a magazine called
Home Buying
offering ‘Modern houses in Wood Green, the ideal site for those who want a convenient rung on the home-ownership ladder’. Among the other attractions was ‘garage with space for work bench’.

This was aimed at the spiralist who is continually buying houses, doing them up, selling them at a profit and moving on to a better part, which means a safer suburb, with a nicer class of child, more amusing parents at the P.T.A. and no danger of coloureds (although a black diplomat is O.K.) Usually the process is to start with a flat, then move to a terraced house, then to a large ‘period semi’, where you let off the top flat to pay the mortgage. Then, as soon as the house is done up, you buy a cheap flat for the sitting tenant, put it on the market and look for an even bigger house. The process is basically the same as that of the upper-middle-class couple, except that the spiralist moves as soon as he’s got the house together, while the upper-middles wait until they’ve run out of room.

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!’