Class (38 page)

Ironing out an accent can, of course, cut you off from your background. It didn’t matter to Shelley because her parents were both dead, but the schoolmistress admitted that she was ashamed of her parents:

‘They have every awful pseudo-refinement of the lower-middle classes.’

Harry Stow-Crat has a very distinctive accent. Because of his poker face he only uses vowels that will hardly move his face at all. You open your mouth far less if you say ‘hice’ rather than ‘house’, and ‘aw’ rather than the short ‘o’. Thus Harry automatically says ‘orf’, ‘corsts’, ‘gorn’, ‘clorth’ and ‘lorst’. This of course is old pronunciation: ‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Crorse’. Harry also manages to move his face less by clipping his words: hence ‘Lond’ndri’ and ‘mag’str’t’ instead of ‘Londonderry’ and ‘magis-trate’. He often uses a short ‘e’ for ‘ay’, like the man who went into the village shop and asked for some pepper.

‘Red or black pepper, sir?’ asked the shopkeeper.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ snapped the man, ‘lavatory pepper.’

The upper-class accent may alter, but they are united in their absence of euphemism or circumlocution. They don’t say ‘pleased to meet you’ because they don’t know if they are, and anyway wouldn’t feel the need to resort to such flattery. They are not arch. They never talk about ‘botties’ or the ‘little girl’s room’, or ask, as Howard Weybridge might, if they can go and ‘point Percy at the porcelain’.

‘If “loo” is out now, there’s “bathroom”, “gents”, “ladies”, “convenience”, “lav”, “water-closet”, “WC”, “bog”, “john”, “can”, “heads”, “latrines”, “privy”, “little girls’ room”, “smallest room”, “powder room”, “khasi”, “rears” . . . There must be
something
we can call it. . . .’

Samantha Upward enunciates more clearly than Caroline. Her features are more mobile, she smiles more, her voice is less clipped. She is also less direct, talking about ‘having help’ in the house rather than ‘servants’, and saying, ‘How’s your glass’ rather than ‘Would you like another drink?’ Because she is slightly unsure of herself she will probably cling to words like ‘wireless’ and ‘children’ long after the upper classes are saying ‘radio’ and ‘kids’. On the other hand she clips her words far more than Eileen Weybridge—saying ‘’dmire’ rather than ‘
ad
-mire’, ‘s’cessful’ rather than ‘
suck
-sessful’ and ‘c’m
pete
’ rather than ‘
com
-pete’. She doesn’t say ‘lorst’ or ‘corst’ but she would say ‘sawlt’ and ‘awlter’. She keeps forgetting to say ‘knave’ rather than ‘jack’ when she plays cards and to call Gideon’s ‘wallet’ a ‘notecase’. Dive Definitely-Disgusting couldn’t distinguish Samantha’s voice from Caroline Stow-Crat’s, but he would think Caroline sounded more commanding, and Samantha more hearty and jolly hockeysticks.

If you meet Howard Weybridge you probably won’t be able to tell immediately what part of the world he comes from; he will be very careful not to let his voice slip—a sort of Colonel Bogus. Mrs Weybridge articulates far more than Samantha—she talks about ‘coff-
ee
’ and ‘syst-
im
’, like Mr Healey, who is very Weybridge and probably says ‘higgledee-piggledee’ between each word.

There was a Howard Weybridge living in Yorkshire who had a marvellously haw-haw voice, but slipped once at a dance when a fat teenager doing the Dashing White Sergeant with much vigour stepped back on to his foot and induced him to let out a most uncharacteristic yell of ‘Booger’.

Enough has been said about Jen Teale’s refinement. Many of the lower-middle genteelisms—commence, pardon, serviette, perfume, gâteau, toilet—probably became currency to show off the speaker’s familiarity with French. When it comes to ‘o’ sounds though, one might have thought that the English language had been deliberately invented to fox the Teales and the Nouveau-Richards. I defy anyone to say the following list of words very fast three times without slipping: ‘Dolphin, dolt, doldrums, revolving, revolting, involved, holiday, hold, holly, holm, whole, golf, gold.’ Class is a sort of sadistic
Histoire d’O
.

Mr Nouveau-Richards packs Mrs N-R and all his children off to elocution lessons when he becomes mayor and takes a W.E.A. course in public speaking. Mrs N-R, opening the Bring and Buy, exhorts everyone to ‘give generously like what I have done’.

Mr N-R ticks Jison off for talking too posh in the factory; it alienates the lads. ‘Sorry Dad’, said Jison, ‘You shouldn’t have sent me to such a good school.’

Mrs Definitely-Disgusting has a directness of speech not unlike Harry Stow-Crat. She says ‘definitely’ instead of ‘yes’; Harry says ‘absolutely’. She speaks in very short unfinished sentences, with a total disregard for syntax, and makes great use of conjunctions like ‘so’ and ‘but’ and ‘like I said’. Sentences are often left unfinished. She uses very few subordinate clauses, and punctuates with words like ‘shame’, ‘just fancy’, ‘only natural, innit’ and ‘do you mind’. Statement and answer are often the same.

‘I told you to hold on tight,’ she says.

‘Why,’ asks Dive.

‘I told you to hold on tight, din’ I?’

Dive often changes the first consonant and the final one—’I’ve fort a’ somefink’—and drops the middle one, as in ‘me-al’ for ‘metal’. Because the working classes tend to be inarticulate, they also rely very largely on facial and bodily gestures—shrugging their shoulders, waving their hands, jerking their heads, rolling their eyes, and raising them to heaven, just like Old Steptoe.

Mrs D-D is full of malapropisms. She’s always wanting to get up a ‘partition’ or ‘fumigating’ with anger. She also uses adjectives instead of adverbs: he cooks lovely, she dresses fantastic. Because of her limited vocabulary she is likely to latch onto a new adjective and flog it to death. The ghastly ‘caring’ is becoming a great favourite, with Express Dairies running a competition now to find your ‘caring’ milkman. Because Mrs D-D has received so many lectures from lefties on the dignity of the individual, however lowly, she’s quite keen on the word ‘dignified’ as the opposite of ‘vulgar’.

When a working-class girl played truant last April and posed naked on a horse in the middle of Coventry, her mother said afterwards,

‘Louise made a very dignified Godiva. We are not ashamed of her showing her breasts. We are liberated parents.’ One would have thought it was more Louise’s breasts that were liberated.

16   THE ARTS

The creative writing is on the wall

Of all élite, the two that mix most easily are the aristocracy and the arts—Hamlet and the players—traditionally perhaps because they have the same bohemian disregard for other people’s opinion and the same streak of exhibitionism. In the past, as we shall see later in this chapter, artists have been tragically dependent on the caprice of their rich patrons, but things have changed in the last century. Now successful writers, actors and singers no longer struggle, but are often far richer than the aristocrats. Mick Jagger now dines with Princess Margaret and has Patrick Lichfield as his best man. Jack Hedley and Margaret Drabble have lunch at Buckingham Palace. Elton John keeps his flat cap on throughout Prince Michael’s speech because of a hair transplant he didn’t want anyone to see. And you even have a group of Etonians coming out of a punk concert nearly in tears saying, ‘We put safety pins in our ears, but they
still
don’t like us.’

The Royal family have over the years been consistently resistant to the arts. George I hated all ‘boets and bainters’. ‘Was there ever such stuff as Shakespeare?’ asked George III, although he did have a massive crush on Handel, and even re-wrote one of Dr. Burney’s reviews of a Handel concert because it wasn’t favourable enough. Even today one has only to watch the jaws of the Royal Family absolutely dislocated with trying not to yawn at gala performances at Covent Garden. If you go to an investiture at Buckingham Palace, you find red flock wallpaper like in an Indian restaurant, pictures that need cleaning and a band playing gems from
South Pacific
and
White Horse Inn
. It is at this stage that someone always leaps to their defence and starts talking about Prince Charles’s cello and Princess Margaret being a good mimic.

On the other hand, when one thinks of Lady Diana Cooper, Nigel Nicolson, Caroline Blackwood, Lord Ravensdale who, as Nicholas Mosley, writes brilliant novels, Lord Anglesey’s military history, Lord Weymouth’s murals and novels, the Sitwells, the Pakenhams, the Mitfords and many others one realizes that for a section of society that is statistically negligible the aristocracy have done pretty well for the arts.

The upper-classes were traditionally patrons of the arts, but because they have had their libraries, their old masters and minstrels in their galleries for so long they tend to take the arts for granted—unlike the middle classes who today make up the audiences at the theatre, ballet and the opera and who tend to regard a knowledge of the arts and literature as a symbol of having got on.

In the same way the lower-middles who want to get on equate culture with upper-class, and promptly start acquiring books, pictures and records. In the furnishing trade bookshelves and record cabinets are actually categorized as ‘furniture for the better home’. The more upmarket a newspaper or magazine is, the more comprehensive the coverage of the arts.

ART

Put not your trust in prints.

Crossing the threshold of Sotheby’s, one feels that sacred frisson, that special reverence evoked when great works of art and vast sums of money are changing hands. Of all the arts painting is the smartest, because it involves the best-dressed people and the most money. Private views are far more frequently covered by the glossies than first nights (which Jen Teale calls ‘preemiaires’), publishing parties or concerts. This may be because the best galleries are situated around Bond Street and Knightsbridge, not far from the offices of
The Tatler
, and because all the elegant, aesthetic young men, with their greyhound figures and Harvey and Hudson shirts, who work in them, look aristocratic even if they are not.

Caroline Stow-Crat often goes to private views when she’s in London. It’s nice to have a free drink and meet one’s chums after an exhausting day at Harrods, and she likes bumping into all those old school-friends of Harry’s who, in spite of being devastatingly handsome, somehow never got married. The upper classes, too, are very good at looking at paintings. They are able to keep their traps shut and whiz round galleries very fast. Samantha Upward, brought up to fill gaps with conversation, can’t repress a stream of ‘How lovelies’.

What of the social standing of the painter himself? Andy Warhol and David Hockney are asked to the best parties—but they are not restricted by wives. ‘Society is so constituted in England,’ wrote Samuel Rogers, ‘that it is useless for celebrated artists to think of bringing their families into the highest circle when they themselves are only admitted on account of their genius.’

But even genius has to be tempered with charm. No one asked Hogarth to dine, because he was the son of a tradesman. Reynolds on the other hand was taken up by society because he was urbane, intelligent and a gentleman. Sir Alfred Munnings, when he went to Eaton Hall to paint the Duchess of Westminster, was not invited to eat with the Duke and Duchess.

Despite upper-class philistinism, it has always been a status symbol to have one’s portrait painted to provide ancestors to be shown off by future generations. Elizabeth I epitomized the Royal attitude. ‘There is no evidence that she had much taste for painting,’ said Horace Walpole drily, ‘but she loved portraits of herself.’ Once a portrait painter became fashionable he went from one stately home to another, sucking up to duchesses—a sort of Toady at Toad Hall.