Class (11 page)

‘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 schoolmaster 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.

About once a week a note about forthcoming events with a perforated slip at the bottom is sent round; full of lower-middle-class words like ‘nearly new’, ‘refreshments’, ‘pleasant’ and ‘enjoyable’, it ends, rather wildly, ‘If you can be of service as a helper please tear off your slip and send it to one of the committee.’

At Christmas there’s a nativity play, which, at state schools, is often held in the morning. This means lots of working-class fathers on shift work and Gideon Upward looking at his watch and wondering how late he dare be at the office. The Virgin Mary’s parents are invariably divorced and acrimonious; they turn up and sit glaring from opposite ends of a school bench, but in the end are forced to sit next to one another through lack of space. No one can hear the kiddies tunelessly chanting ‘’Ark and ’erald’ or ‘Once in Royal Divid’ because of all the baby brothers and sisters squawking their heads off.

At fee-paying schools there are no babies because the parents pay someone to look after them for the afternoon. The following announcement was once sent out by my son’s old day prep school:

‘We hope you will all come to our informal Carol Service on December 15. This year we shall be having kindergarten boys for the first time. I’m sure we shall all enjoy them.’

SCHOOL MEALS

When my son first went to a primary school five years ago, faced with the utter impossibility of having the right dinner money every day, I asked if I could pay by cheque for the whole term. The school was extremely shocked. It was good for discipline, they said, for the children to bring the right money each day; and was I too insensitive to realize that it was beyond most working-class budgets to fork out all at once for a whole term? Now I notice that most state schools allow parents to pay by cheque. Private schools call it ‘lunch’ and put it on the bill. State school dinners are supervised by someone grandiosely called a ‘dinner lady’.

The working classes, being picky eaters, often take their own.

‘My Mum packs me sandwiches,’ says Sharon Definitely-Disgusting, ‘and I buy a sweet off the ice-cream van.’

THE MILK RUN

The routine of parents taking children to school by car on a rota basis, often known as the ‘milk run’, causes more aggravation than any other part of the school day, particularly when mothers are trying to collect children from three different schools all coming out at the same time. Where the children are concerned it’s one of the last bastions of snobbery—the bigger and shinier the car you’re picked up in the better. On the whole, mothers dress more scruffily the higher-class they are. Caroline Stow-Crat turns up in jeans in a filthy Range Rover and is admonished by George who thinks she ought to wear smarter trousers and clean the car more often. Why can’t she be more like Mrs Nouveau-Richards who is always dressed up to the nines and takes the ‘show-
fur
’ and the Rolls?

‘Why can’t we get a motorbike Dad?’

Jen Teale, who is terrified her children may miss a second of school that’s being paid for, gets quite hysterical when Samantha’s French
au pair
oversleeps and picks up the Teale children ten minutes late.

Caroline Stow-Crat is always getting stuck in the country at weekends and ringing up at midnight saying she’s snowed up and can Samantha do the milk run. Samantha is furious, but doesn’t say so. ‘A lady never lets herself go.’ Nor can she get any sympathy out of Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who is only too glad to put her show-
fur
at Caroline’s disposal at any time. Jen Teale, who cleans the Volkswagen herself, thinks Caroline’s Range Rover is much too draughty, and she’s fed up with having Snipe’s hairs all over little Wayne’s newly brushed blazer.

On Wednesday the milk run to the doctored state primary, where the music’s so good, is like the bus of the L.S.O. with all the children’s instruments sticking out of the window.

Georgie Stow-Crat complicates matters on Samantha’s milk run by telling everyone that he’s being allowed to stay up till midnight tonight because his mother is giving a party for eighty people, to which none of the milk run mothers have been asked.

A friend’s child went to a pre-school open day at one of the most fashionable London High Schools. All the little new girls were told:

‘At the end of the afternoon you stand in the hall, and the moment you see your Mummy’s car coming up the drive you tell your form mistress and go and meet Mummy.’ It was automatically assumed that all the parents had cars. In state schools many of the children walk or go by bus. When Samantha suggested Zacharias might go by bus, so she could take a part-time job, Zacharias refused. He didn’t want his cap knocked off by ‘comprehensile’ boys.

The most relentless upstaging goes on between children on the school runs.

‘My mother went to Princess Anne’s wedding,’ said one child.

After a long pause, the second child replied,

‘My parents were asked, but they didn’t want to go.’

The attitude towards chauffeurs is interesting, too. One working-class boy, whose father had made good, made the chauffeur drop him a quarter of a mile from his primary school and walked the rest of the way, so the other boys wouldn’t mob him up. Two teenagers at a day public school had a different problem. The younger sister hated the chauffeur wearing his cap because the other girls would think it snobbish. The older girl, on the other hand, hated him not wearing his cap:

‘It would be so awful, if anyone thought he was Daddy.’

ACCENT

Primary Mary, teacher wary,

How does your accent grow?

With cockney vowels, and Mummy’s scowls

And glottal stops all in a row.

An English upper-class accent is often called a ‘public school accent’. But, as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has pointed out in
The Public School Phenomenon
, accent became a socially distinguishable characteristic long before the founding of the public schools. The dialect of London, Cambridge and Oxford was originally South-East Midland but by the sixteenth century London English (hence the King’s English) was regarded as the only language for a literary man or a gentleman, and remained so throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The public schools only intensified this.

In the nineteen-sixties, during the hippy revolution against materialism and never-having-had-it-so-good, the upper and middle classes identified profoundly with the new culture and became devotees of long hair and pop music. Working class became beautiful and everyone from Princess Unne downwards spat the plums out of their mouths, embraced the flat ‘a’ and talked with a working-class accent. Even today you can invariably tell the age of twenty-two to thirty-year-olds by their voices. Prince Charles preceded the revolution and speaks his mother’s English; Prince Andrew came after it. Nicholas Monson, who is one of the more enlightened and intelligent of the new wave of right-wing writers, said that during that period he got very embarrassed about being at Eton and having a smart background, but, by listening carefully to the housemaid and watching ‘Rossel Harty’, he learned to talk with a modulated regional accent.

‘After Eton,’ he said, ‘I put off trekking to Katmandu and discovering Zen. Instead I went to Kingston Polytechnic. As I was mixing with ‘real’ people, I put on sweaty T-shirts and dirty jeans, let my hair collapse in rat-tails over my shoulders and affected an accent that owed its origins to Cilla Black, California and the East End of London. I was uncomfortable with this voice, so I said little, but nodded vigorously and tried to look tough. We also sneered at a certain lecturer who wore a pinstriped suit and talked posh. It was at such an airing of bigotry that I realized to my acute embarrassment that I was guilty of the same crime as before. I was a snob.’

It must have been about this time in the ’seventies that many other people were undergoing the same realization. The prosperity ran out and the working classes, the simple life and dropping out became less attractive, because there were no jobs to drop back into when you’d had enough. Upper- and middle-class schoolchildren became more conventional again and shed most of their working-class accent. As my niece said:

‘It simply isn’t cool to talk like a yobbo any more.’

The result is a different kind of speech, much more clipped: ‘awf’ly’ and ‘frightf’ly’, ‘ya’ or “y’p’ instead of ‘yer’ or ‘yeah’. Georgie Stow-Crat might say ‘funtustic’ and ‘whole’ to rhyme with ‘doll’, but he wouldn’t say ‘amizing’ like the cockney child. He is often bi-lingual and will lapse into mid-atlantic or disc-jockey when he’s with his friends. And when he wants to irritate Caroline in the holidays he cultivates a glottal stop and asks her to pass the ‘bu-er’. To the middle classes, although they won’t admit it, a fee-paying school means ‘no more ghastly accent’. Or, as a headmaster said euphemistically, ‘We try to get rid of accents. They’re a lazy way of speaking.’

Alas for the Nouveau-Richards, the effect often isn’t lasting. When I lived in Yorkshire the rich manufacturers all sent their sons to Oopingham and Roogby to iron out their accents, but a few years after they left they were speaking broad Yorkshire again.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said a don at Radley, ‘how bucolic some of the old boys sound when they come back after a few years.’

Quite often you get marked class discrepancies in a family because a father has made his pile while his children were growing up and has only been able to send the younger children to boarding school, or equally gone bankrupt in the middle and been forced to send the youngest child to a comprehensive.

The left-wing trendies send their children off to the local state school and go into ecstasies over the first flat ‘a’. She has not failed us, she has not failed us. Accent makes the heart grow fonder.

The socially ambitious Jen Teales often regard moving from place to place as an advantage, not only does Bry-an up his salary, but there is more likelihood of Wayne and Charlene being well spoken and not picking up a regional accent.