Class (22 page)

Caution is the watchword of the lower-middles. Wayne daren’t be romantic in case some unsuitable ‘young lady’ traps him into matrimony. He would call it getting ‘invōle-ved’ with a long ‘o’. He doesn’t resort to insults and backchat like the working classes, but his conversation is arch, and rather hearty with an air of continual interrogation, rather like Bob Dale or the non-yokels in
The Archers
. He will use expressions like ‘Chop Chop, Young Lady’, or, even worse, address his girlfriend as ‘Woman’. She will say in reply, ‘Stir your stumps, Wayne Teale.’ It is frightfully lower-middle to address people by both their Christian name and surname. Any money Bryan makes will be spent on what he calls ‘home improvements’ or on his car, which has a Christian name and is always referred to as ‘she’.

Zacharias Upward likes entertaining girlfriends in his flat where he can show off his gourmet cooking. This is cheaper than going to restaurants, saves on petrol, and is much nearer the bedroom. All his friends say Zak is very ‘hos
pit
able’ (the upper classes emphasize the first syllable).

Howard Weybridge’s idea of an exciting date is to ask his girlfriend to freeze on the touchline while he grapples muddily with a lot of other fifteen-stoners on the rugger field. Later she will be expected to talk to rugger wives about deep freezes while he frolics naked in a plunge bath with the rest of the team, and then make one warm gin and tonic last all evening while he downs pints and pints of beer. In summer she might get taken to cricket, which is sometimes warmer but goes on longer.

Georgie Stow-Crat will be very generous to his girlfriends—like Oscar Wilde who, when asked why he gave champagne to a barrow boy, replied, ‘What gentleman would starve his guests?’ Georgie can’t cook and would starve in a well-equipped kitchen. So, as he is too thick to make conversation for very long, he takes girls to dine in a night club or a disco. Romance, according to Tina Browne in
Over 21
, blooms in the twilight gloom of smart places like Wedgies and Annabels. As the upper classes tend to leave London at the weekend, Fridays and Saturdays are very bad nights at Wedgies.

WHO MARRIES WHOM

‘Education! I was always led to suppose that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talk about notepaper—the irritation!’

Uncle Matthew in
The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford.

As the upper classes all know each other, they get in a panic if their children get engaged to someone they haven’t heard of.

Georgie Stow-Crat plays around with girls of other classes before and after his marriage, but he’ll try and settle for one of his own kind. For what are a few nights of passion for a lifetime at the wrong end of the table? Lord Lichfield took out a string of models and actresses, but he ended up with Lady Leonora Grosvenor. More recently the Marquess of Douro married the Princess of Prussia, the Duke of Roxburghe married Lady Leonora’s sister, Lady Jane, while their brother, the 6th Duke of Westminster, chose Miss Natalie Phillips, granddaughter of Sir Harold and Lady Zia Wernher. As the aristocracy are forced ‘to straphang through life like the rest of us’, they are closing their ranks and marrying the sort of gairl who will bring some cash or property with her, or as one aristocrat put it, ‘can make a decent lunch for a shooting party’. ‘The reason why my marriage came unstuck,’ said a duke’s daughter, ‘was because I was upper-class and he was only landed gentry.’ The moment Georgie Stow-Crat gets engaged he takes the girl to meet nanny, which is far more of an ordeal than meeting Harry and Caroline.

What the upper classes really dread is their child falling for someone middle-class.

‘A thoroughly conventional man in good society,’ said Edward Lyttelton, a former headmaster of Eton, ‘would rather that his son should resort with prostitutes than that he should marry a respectable girl of distinctly lower station than his own. Indeed it is not going too far to say that he probably would rather his son should seduce such a girl, provided there were no scandal, than marry her.’

In order not to be continually irritated by class differences the aristocracy often marry rich Americans or foreigners, who they can instruct in upper-class English behaviour without being too insulting:

‘In England, Ortrud, we have a funny national custom of not saying “horse racing”.’

If Georgie Stow-Crat did marry down, he would tend to pick a very beautiful girl, which is why the aristocracy is so good-looking. In general, good-looking people marry up—Tony Armstrong-Jones and Captain Mark Phillips being notable examples—and the insecure and ugly tend to marry down. Just as they dropped class while dating, they tend to pick a partner who’ll look up to them and make them feel superior.

When people get married for the first time late in life—in their forties or fifties—parents are inclined to waive class prejudices out of sheer relief that their ‘child’ is finally off their hands.

It is debatable whether the middle classes have any real desire to land an aristocrat any more. As has been said already, the peer is no longer the favourite hero of romantic fiction (unless he’s in costume of course) and has been replaced by the middle-class doctor or surgeon.

Heather Jenner says her marriage bureau clients ‘don’t give a hoot’ what class people are any more. ‘Why should they want to marry a lord and cope with a falling-down overgrown house? On the whole blue-collar men are far better at giving a woman a good time. One upper-class woman was so fed up with the sexual and financial ineptitude of the aristocracy she put “Working Class Only” on her form.’

On the other hand, another girl who ran a marriage bureau, discovering she had a baronet among her clients, promptly whipped him off the books and married him herself. Another friend of mine, born on a council estate, can pinpoint the moment she fell in love with her future husband, who is a peer: ‘He signed a cheque to pay for our dinner with his surname only.’ Finally one has only to read the small ads in
The Tatler
— ‘Very attractive blue-blooded academic in his early thirties equally at ease on the hunting field or engaged in economic and political discussion’ (sounds hell)—to realize that class does have a pull. The Blue Bloody is still holding his own against the Blue Collar.

The upper-middle-class man, preferring to get his career together before settling down, tends to marry late, between twenty-eight and thirty-two; his bride will be in her mid-twenties. Often they live together first, particularly if one set of parents disapproves. Then gradually, out of sheer force of habit, or desire for grandchildren, the parents come round.

Samantha Upward, who’s always taught Zacharias to be unsnobbish, finds the thought of being a mother-in-law awfully trying. First there was Zulanka from the Fiji Islands, who was really wonderfully dark, but who spoilt it all by referring to all those nice Africans as ‘no-good blacks’. And now there’s Mikki (who’s really called Enid) who appears to have no surname. Mikki does something nebulous in the music business, is totally uncultured, but full of pretensions. In referring to herself and Samantha collectively as ‘middle-class folk like ourselves’ she is obviously totally unaware that Samantha’s family is much better than hers is. Even more maddening Gideon obviously thinks that Mikki is quite, quite perfect, particularly as she doesn’t wear a stitch in bed. Gideon insists on taking her a cup of tea first thing to admire her early morning teats.

The lower-middle parents, being materialistic, aren’t sure whether to oppose early marriage as unsound financially or welcome it as better than pre-marital promiscuity. One lower-middle spiralist said the reason he finally decided to marry his wife was because she’d been brought up in a careful household, and therefore would be a good manager of his money. Believing in deferred satisfaction, Wayne tends to be engaged for several years, rather than live with a girl, so he can put down a deposit on a house. He will ‘study for exams’ in the evening, his ‘fiancay’ Shirl will work in a bar, and bank the lot, so they have enough money to move into a perfectly ‘decorated home’. Shirl can’t stand disorder—she must have everything nice. The upper-middle girl who wanted to get married in a hurry would be perfectly happy to move into a rented box in Fulham and run up an overdraft doing the place up, or expect Daddy to fork out for carpets and things later.

The Nouveau-Richards will be absolutely furious if Tracey-Diane doesn’t marry up. In the same way that the middle-class Princess Grace was livid, having hooked a prince herself, that her daughter settled for a middle-class industrialist.

Parents are very seldom cross about upward mobility. Even when engagements are broken off, they can make social capital out of it, like the mother who went round telling her friends:

‘It’s such a bore having to pick the coronets off all the linen.’

Dive Definitely-Disgusting marries the earliest. This is probably due to frustration. He’s likely to have no flat or car to make love in. If he goes home Mrs D and the children are watching the telly—and it’s too cold outside, except in summer. They also started dating earlier anyway, and if they do screw they don’t bother to ‘take precautions’, get pregnant and can’t afford abortions.

‘I didn’t
have
to get married, I married for love,’ a working-class minicab driver told me the other day, as if it were the exception to the rule.

Engaged at seventeen Sharon Definitely-Disgusting gets ‘eternized’ at eighteen, which means she receives an eternity ring from her betrothed. At Christmas and birthdays she will send him a four-foot-square card padded with red satin, saying ‘To my Darling Fiance’ (without the accent).

The word ‘fiancé’, perhaps because so many people live together now, has become distinctly vulgar, particularly when it is pronounced ‘fee-on-
cay
’ with the weight on the last syllable. Debs get round sometimes by saying ‘my fiasco’ or ‘my intended’ in inverted commas.

THE WEDDING

The wedding is another occasion when the classes meet head on. People who marry up choose tiny churches, or have registry office weddings so they don’t have to invite less grand relations. It doesn’t matter having common friends; everyone thinks one’s frightfully democratic. But common relations are quite a different matter. Wedding presents aren’t displayed either, because they might cause derisive mirth at the reception. Embarrassing relations also show up less at a stand-up reception with food you can eat with your fingers (which Jen Teale calls a ‘finger buffet’), so people’s table manners don’t show up—and with any luck working-class relations will push off early because they hate not being able to sit down.

There will invariably be a panic about protocol. One girl said her mother poured over
The Tatler
for months, studying every detail of the weddings, muttering ‘we’re going to get this right if it kills me’. ‘We even put a sleeping pill in Grandad’s cocoa the night before, because he refused to wear morning dress.’

When John Betjeman married a very upper-class girl, he drove his future mother-in-law insane at the pre-wedding party by wearing a made-up bow tie on elastic and flicking it all the way through dinner.

But, however critical he or she may be of the behaviour of others, the true aristocrat is a law unto himself. The men had just finished dinner at a stag party in a private room at a London club when the bridegroom’s father, an aged Earl, suddenly beckoned to a waiter and said, ‘Pot’.

‘We’re not allowed to supply it, Sir,’ said the waiter, nervously.

‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ roared the Earl. ‘I mean pisspot.’ Whereupon a huge chamber pot was brought down from one of the bedrooms and the Earl proceeded to use it in full view of the other guests.

The upper classes get married in the country in their own churches. As they are accustomed to giving and going to balls and big parties, the wedding is not such an event as it would be in a middle-class family. Quite often the bride wears her mother’s wedding dress, and a 200-year-old veil of Brussels lace held in place by the family tiara. (One upper-class bride was so relaxed she spent her wedding morning washing her horse’s tail.) She doesn’t usually have a long engagement or any of the hassle of finding a house, because her parents or her in-laws have already given them a ‘place’ with lots of ‘pieces’ in it.

The wedding invitations are engraved in black; the service cards have the bride and bridegroom’s (pronounced ‘gr’m’ not ‘grume’) Christian names printed at the bottom. Flowers in the church are usually something unostentatious like lilies of the valley, with the bride’s bouquet (pronounced ‘
book
-kay’ not ‘buke-ay’) of white roses or spring flowers.

The men wear their own morning coats. There are usually hordes of little bridesmaids called Sophie and Henrietta, a page with patent leather hair wearing a replica of a Blues and Royals uniform, and a labrador who wriggles ingratiatingly into the wedding photographs. No one minds about the music—’Here Comes the Bride’ up, Mendelssohn down. The bride agrees to honour and obey. It used to be unsmart to get married at the weekend, particularly in London, as everyone had gone away. But now that most of the upper classes and their show business friends have jobs it is considered perfectly all right. Saturday police have to be deployed from the local football match to deal with the traffic. Several of the guests arrive by helicopter.