Class (5 page)

The Weybridges

The lower-middles never had any servants, but as they are obsessed with cleanliness, and like everything nice, they buy a small modern house and fill it with modern units which are easy to keep clean. Jen and Bryan have two children, Wayne and Christine, and a very clean car.

As Jen and Bryan didn’t go to boarding school, didn’t make friends outside the district, and don’t mix with the street, they have very few friends and keep themselves to themselves. They tend to be very inner-directed, doing everything together, decorating the house, furnishing the car, and coaching and playing football with the children. Jen reads knitting patterns,
Woman’s Own
and
Reader’s Digest
condensed books. To avoid any working-class stigma she puts up defensive barriers— privet hedges, net curtains—talks in a ‘refained’ accent, raising her little finger when she drinks. Her aim is to be dainty and wear six pairs of knickers. She admires Mary Whitehouse enormously, disapproves of long hair and puts money in the Woolwich every week. She sees herself as the ‘Woolwich girl’. The Teales don’t entertain much, only Bryan’s colleagues who might be useful, and occasionally Bryan’s boss.

THE WORKING CLASSES

One of the great class divides has always been ‘them’ and ‘us’ which, as a result of the egalitarian, working-class-is-beautiful revolution of the ’sixties, and early ’seventies, has polarized into the Guilty and the Cross. On the one side are the middle and upper classes, feeling guilty and riddled with social concern, although they often earn far less money than the workers, and on the other are the working classes who, having been totally brain-washed by television and images of the good life, feel cross because they aren’t getting a big enough slice of the cake.

In a time of economic prosperity everyone tends to do well. Wages rise; the middle classes can afford a new car, or central heating; the working-class man buys a fridge for the missus. Man’s envy and rivalry is turned towards his neighbour—keeping up with the Joneses—rather than towards the classes above and below. But in times of economic stress, when people suddenly can’t get the things they want and prices and the cost of living outstrip wages, they start turning their envy against other classes. Antagonism against a neighbour feathering his nest tends to be replaced by an awareness of class inequalities.

In a time of economic security, society therefore tends to look fairly cohesive, which is probably why in the early ’seventies a lot of people genuinely believed that class barriers had finally broken down; but, as the decade advanced, the working-class people who’d bought their own houses and were up to their necks in mortgage and hire-purchase payments suddenly found they couldn’t keep up. Their expectations had been raised, and now their security was being threatened by the additional possibility of mass unemployment. This discontent, fanned by the militants, resulted in the rash of strikes in the winter of 1978/79.

Although the middle classes often think of the working-class man as earning huge sums on overtime, the rewards of his job in fact are much less. The manual worker seldom has job satisfaction or a proper pension; he doesn’t have any fringe benefits such as a car, trips abroad, expense account lunches and longer holidays; he has to clock in and out and his earning span is much shorter. Once his physical strength goes, he can look forward to an old age of comparative poverty and deprivation. This all results in workers avoiding any kind of moral commitment to the management. ‘We cheat the foreman,’ is the attitude, ‘he cheats the manager, and the manager cheats the customer.’

Richard Hoggart in
The Uses of Literacy
brilliantly summed up the workers’ attitude to them:

‘They are the people at the top, the highers up, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to work, fine you, make you split up the family in the ’thirties (to avoid a reduction in the means test allowance) get yer in the end, aren’t really to be trusted, talk posh, are all twisters really, never tell yer owt (e.g. about a relative in hospital) clap yer in the clink, will do y’down if they can, summons yer, are all in a click together, treat y’like muck.’

Because they dislike the management, the working classes don’t like people saving their money or getting on through hard work. They put a premium on enjoying pleasure now, drinking their wages, for example, or blowing the whole lot on a new colour telly. The only legitimate way to make money is to win it. Hence the addiction to football pools, racing, bingo and the dogs.

Living from hand to mouth, they can’t manage their money like the lower-middles. When the army started paying guardsmen by cheque recently, my bank manager said they got into the most frightful muddles. If he wrote and told one of them he was overdrawn by £30, he promptly received a cheque for that amount.

Traditionally working-class virtues are friendliness, co-operation, warmth, spontaneity, a ready sense of humour and neighbourliness. ‘We’re all in the same boat’ is the attitude. That ‘love’, still the most common form of address, really means something. They have been defined as people who belong to the same Christmas Club, characteristically saving up not for something solid, like the deposit on a house, but for a good blow-out. They have a great capacity for enjoyment.

Because they didn’t have cars or telephones and couldn’t afford train fares, and the men tended to walk to work nearby, life centred around the street and neighbourhood. ‘Everyone knew your business,’ said one working-class man, so it was no good putting on airs because you earned more. The neighbours remembered you as a boy, knew your Aunt Lil, who was no better than she should be, and took you down a peg. The network acts as a constant check!

Girls seldom moved away from their mothers when they married; sons often came home for lunch every day, or lived at home, even after marriage. The working-class family is much closer and more possessive. They seldom invite friends into the house.

‘I’ve never had a stranger (meaning non-family) in here since the day I moved in,’ said one woman. ‘I don’t hold with that sort of thing.’

Being so dependent on the locality, the working classes are lost and desperately lonely, if the council moves them to housing estates, or shuts them up in little boxes in some high-rise block. The men have also lost much of the satisfacton that came from the old skills and crafts. Many of these have been taken away from them and their traditional occupations replaced by machines. In the old days the husband gained respect as a working man in the community.

Women’s Lib hasn’t helped his self-respect much either. The working classes are the most reactionary of all the classes. (You only have to look at those Brylcreemed short back and sides, and wide trousers flapping like sails in the breeze at the T.U.C. Conference.) But despite this, the working-class housewife now reads about Women’s Lib in the paper and soon she’s fretting to go back to work and make some extra cash, rather than act as a servant to the family and have her husband’s dinner on the table at mid-day when he gets home. She starts questioning his authority and, having less autonomy at home, and never having had any at work, he feels even more insecure. Battering often starts if the woman is brighter than the man and the poorly educated husband sees his security threatened.

Leaving school at sixteen, he feels inadequate because he is inarticulate. He is thought of as being bloody-minded and rude by the middle classes because he can’t express himself and to snort ‘Definitely, disgusting’, in answer to any question put to him, is the only way he can show his disapproval.

The Definitely-Disgustings

The Nouveau-Richards

The working classes divide themselves firmly into the Rough and the Respectable. The Rough get drunk fairly often, make a lot of noise at night, often engage in prostitution, have public fights, sometimes neglect their children, swear in front of women and children, and don’t give a stuff about anything—just like the upper classes, in fact. The Respectables chunter over such behaviour, and in Wales sing in Male Voice Choirs; they are pretty near the Teales. They also look down on people on the dole, the criminal classes and the blacks, who they refer to as ‘soap dodgers’.

MR AND MRS DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING

Our archetypal working-class couple are Mr and Mrs DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING. They have two children, SHARON and DIVE, and live in a council house with walls so thin you can hear the budgie pecking its seed next door. Mr Definitely-Disgusting is your manual worker. He might be a miner in the North, a car worker in the Midlands, or a casual labourer in the South. He married young and lived for a while with his wife’s parents. After a year or two he went back to going to the pub, football and the dogs with the blokes. He detests his mother-in-law. But, despite his propensity to foul language, he is extremely modest, often undressing with his back to Mrs D-D and even peeing in a different way than the other classes, splaying out his fingers in a fan, so they conceal his member. He might do something mildly illegal, receiving a car or knocking-off a telly. He is terrified of the police, who, being lower-middle and the class just above, reserve their special venom for him. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting wears her curlers and pinny to the local shop and spends a lot of the day with a cigarette hanging from her bottom lip gossiping and grumbling.

MR AND MRS NOUVEAU-RICHARDS

The other couple you will meet are the NOUVEAU-RICHARDS, of working-class origin but have made a colossal amount of money. Boasting and ostentation are their salient characteristics. At coffee mornings Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who lives in lurex, asks anyone if they’ve got any idea ‘whether gold plate will spoil in the dishwasher’. She has a huge house and lots of servants, who she bullies unmercifully. She is very rude to waiters and very pushy with her children, TRACEY-DIANE and JISON, who have several hours after-school coaching every day. Mr Nouveau-Richards gets on the committee of every charity ball in London. The upper classes call him by his Christian name and appreciate his salty humour, but don’t invite him to their houses. Jison goes to Stowe and Oxford and ends up a member of the Telly-stocracy, who are the real powers in the land—the people in communication who appear on television. They always talk about ‘my show’.

2   CHILDREN

The kiddy is the dad of the guy

At the beginning of the ’seventies the small-is-beautiful brigade mounted a campaign to bring down the birthrate. Family Planning Association supporters brandished condoms outside the House of Commons and at parties sidled up bossily to women who’d just had babies saying, ‘Two’s yer ration’. Middle-class lefties were rumoured to be concealing third babies in attics rather than display evidence of such social irresponsibility. Disapproving ads appeared in the cinemas showing defeated slatterns in curlers trailing herds of whining children along the street. ‘Superdad or Scrounger?’ demanded the
Daily Mirror
when a man on Social Security proudly produced his twenty-first child.