Class (25 page)

‘Oh, Angie thinks the word “cruet” is common.’

In the same way, if Thalia Upward were to marry Dive Definitely-Disgusting, she would start making Mrs D-D feel that her anti-black and generally zenophobic attitudes were uncouth. Mrs D-D, in retaliation, would disapprove of the way Thalia made Dive do the housework, get his own supper when she went to maths workshops, and even went out to work when she needn’t.

The middle classes, disliking friction, try to keep a superficial peace with their in-laws, even if they disapprove. The upper classes don’t bother. A middle-class friend of mine was pointedly told by her very grand old mother-in-law, ‘Divorce is considered perfectly respectable now.’

On the middle-class front, one often gets antagonism between two sets of in-laws if the wife is working. Samantha’s parents say, ‘You must be getting
so
tired. Gideon really ought to be able to support you, darling.’ Colonel and Mrs Upward, nettled by such disapproval, retaliate with ‘Poor Gideon being hampered in his career by having to help with the housework and cook dinner when he gets home in the evening’.

Parents whose children marry and move away often complain that young people today are selfish and ungrateful. ‘He’s become like that Greta Thingamy;’ grumbles Mrs D-D. ‘He wants to be alone.’

One girl who married a man in the R.A.F. said it was a nightmare everytime her working-class parents came to stay.

‘Dad sneers every time Don brings out a bottle of wine at meals, and says, “We
are
pushing the boat out, aren’t we?” Then he expects Don to take him for a drink at the Officers’ Mess. If only they’d behave like the jolly kind of people they normally are.’

‘My daughter goes to sherry parties now,’ said another working-class mother sadly, ‘and has a little car of her own. She asks me to go and stay but I don’t go. I might show her up.’ Stay in your own world, you’re OK. Move up and you’re out of step.

As Tracey Nouveau-Richards says,

‘If Dad wasn’t my dad, I’d laugh at him myself.’

One lower-middle girl I know describes a horribly embarrassing occasion when she got engaged to a peer’s son and his father came for a drink to meet her parents.

Her mother’s first words were,

‘We’re all of a flutter. We don’t know whether to call you “Your Grace” or “Dad”.’

DIVORCE

As you go down the social scale, the more rigid and unforgiving you find the attitude towards infidelity . . . The upper-middle-class couple, according to Geoffrey Gorer, believe in talking over the situation if they discover one of them is having an affair. The lower-middles would try and reconcile their differences, and get over what they hope will be a passing fancy. The skilled worker might advocate separation but not divorce. But Classes IV and V would be all for punitive action: clobber the missus and clobber the bloke, and after that the only answer is divorce.

Of all social classes, in fact, Class V clocks up the most divorces. This is probably because they marry so young, often having to get married, and because they find it impossible to discuss their problems when things go wrong. The husband can’t cope with the pressure of so many children, and as he often takes casual labouring jobs in other parts of the country, the temptation to shack up with another woman is very strong. He can sometimes get legal aid, and doesn’t have to pay for a divorce, and, finally, because the parental bond is so strong, it is quite easy for both husband and wife to go home and live with their own parents, whereas the middle-class wife, having achieved a measure of independence, would find this far more difficult.

What else wrecks a marriage? The middle classes mind most about selfishness, conflicting personalities and sexual incompatibility, while the working-class wife objects to drinking, gambling and untidyness, and the husband going out on his own with his mates.

Despite all the country cottages, Class I (engineers and oculists) has the fewest divorces, probably because they can’t afford two mortgages and two sets of school fees if they marry again, because no one’s going to give them legal aid, and because they think divorce would be bad for their careers.

According to Ivan Reid’s
Social Class in Britain
, the lower-middles get divorced more frequently than the skilled workers. Maybe this is because the lower-middles, working together in offices, have more opportunity to meet the opposite sex on a long-term basis, while the skilled worker is stuck on the factory floor assembling tools. Maybe, too, the skilled worker has enough potency to keep both girlfriend and wife happy, and has no particular desire for a divorce.

The aristocracy, statistically negligible though they may be, tot up more divorces even than Class V. Since the turn of the century, thirty-three per cent of all marquesses and earls have been married twice, twenty-four per cent of viscounts and twenty per cent of barons. That’s why
Debrett’s
is such a fat book, listing all the marriages.

‘The reason for this,’ explained a peer ‘is that few blue-blooded aristocrats have inhibitions about what their neighbours think.’ Presumably if you live at the end of a long drive the neighbours don’t get a chance to see anything.

Only three per cent of life peers get divorced—too busy getting to the top to have anything on the side, and too hopeless in bed for anyone to want them.

One of the saddest victims of the class war is the wife of the ambitious spiralist. While
he’s
been living it up in foreign hotels, eating expense-account lunches and playing golf with the boss, she’s been stuck at home with the children. He has a whole new life-style, and he wants a new wife to complement it, someone more glamorous and more socially adept. Husbands justify abandoning the first wife by saying:

‘Anita didn’t travel with me’ or ‘I married a local girl [euphemism for ‘common’] first time round’.

People who’ve been married several times tend only to mention the grandest ex they’ve been married to. Woodrow Wyatt has had several wives, but in
Who’s Who
only lists the one who was an earl’s daughter.

8   HOMOSEXUALITY

‘The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.’

Virginia Woolf.

Heterosexuals, as we have seen tend to marry and go out with people of their own class. But, as Harry Stow-Crat might drop class if he had something on the side, because there would be less likelihood of his own set finding out, homosexual relationships (because until recently they were against the law) tend to be between people of different classes simply for safety reasons. Harry Stow-Crat pursuing rough trade in Brixton is not likely to bump into any of Caroline’s friends, any more than Dive Definitely-Disgusting bouncing around in the four-poster of some stately homo is likely to meet any of his mates.

Because there are fewer homosexuals (about one in ten) around than heterosexuals, it’s more difficult for them to find someone of their own class. Nor could you find a class of people more insecure socially than most homosexuals and, as we’ve already pointed out, the insecure tend to drop class. The upper-class man having an affair with Dive Definitely-Disgusting is given a nice feeling of social superiority.

Perhaps most important of all there is the psychological motive: if you’re going to descend into the pit of Sodom, you might as well degrade yourself further by dropping class. Hence the often tragic addiction of upper- and upper-middle-class queens to the criminal classes, laying themselves open to goodness knows what blackmail, beatings-up, and being left trussed up naked like a chicken for the char to discover in the morning.

Sometimes there are happier outcomes. A famous painter surprised a burglar rifling his house and invited the burglar to stay, which he did—for the next twenty years. Another friend has a running affair going with a wonderfully handsome married burglar. He was particularly enchanted the last time the burglar came out of the nick, ‘because he lied to his wife about the release date and spent the first night out with me.’

There’s no doubt there is something very attractive about a butch, muscular, working-class boy. ‘I’m simply not turned on by people who don’t have accents,’ said one aristocrat. A middle-class man said his father ‘warned me never to look below for a friend—how wrong he was.’

‘If I want to attract a toff,’ said an East-Ender, ‘I always thicken my accent and talk about “fevvers”. They think it’s marvellous.’

On the other hand the queen, whatever his class, always tries to be more upper-class, ironing out his accent like mad, and putting on what my East-End mates call a ‘posh telephone voice’. Because the middle classes tend to articulate their words very carefully, the homosexual voice is often very difficult to distinguish from Jen Teale refained. This is why the working classes roar with laughter at people like Larry Grayson, Frankie Howerd, Dick Emery and the two Ronnies when they do drag acts, because they think they are putting on lower-middle airs.

The upper classes are drawn to the working classes not only because they like the butch image, but also because, like women, they are drawn to people who give them a hard time. E.M. Forster, after years of falling in love with unreliables, said he was convinced that the working classes were incapable of passionate love—’All they have is lust and goodwill’. Ironically Forster at last found happiness with a married policeman, who after he died said, with typical lower-middle-class caution, that he’d never realized Forster was a homosexual.

Yet earlier Forster had advised the writer J.M. Ackerley, who suffered from a string of unreliable boxers, burglars, guardsmen and deserters, to bear in mind that the lower-class lover can be quite deeply attached to you, but may suddenly find the journey up the social scale too much.

Certainly if Dive Definitely-Disgusting gets taken up by the upper-class fag mafia he can lead an amazingly grand and glamorous life. A friend says his plumber spends his weekends moving from one stately home to another, the sort of life Mrs Nouveau-Richards would give her capped teeth for. Evidently a famous Oxford queen once took him to stay with Harold Nicolson, which he didn’t like because Harold had made him go and put on a tie for breakfast.

‘Well Doctor—it’s like this—I feel queer.’

One of the problems of staying in very grand houses is that the moment you arrive the servants remove your clothes, wash and press them, and you never have anything to wear. My husband woke up once and, finding no trousers, rang what he thought was a bell for a valet and set off the fire alarm. One homosexual friend who’d packed rather haphazardly and only put in one pair of shoes found they had vanished without trace at breakfast, so he went down with bare feet to find a Royal Duke eating kedgeree.

‘I should have thought he’d have seen enough bare feet on deck when he was in the navy,’ he said afterwards.

According to Geoffrey Gorer, the higher the social class, or rather the more educated people are, the more likely they are to be tolerant of homosexuality. As he was basing his finding on the census classifications, by the highest classes he would mean Gideon and Samantha Upward rather than Harry Stow-Crat. Certainly Jen Teale and the lower-middles who don’t enjoy sex and disapprove passionately of promiscuity would be the most intolerant, not being able to comprehend how anyone could do anything so ‘revollting’ for pleasure. The top rungs of the working classes are also very intolerant. One thinks of the poor electrician who wrote to
Coal News
saying he was a homosexual and pleading for tolerance, who was promptly sent to Coventry by his workmates. There is even less tolerance in the Midlands and North-East.

In Newcastle working-class homosexuals are so terrified of being rumbled that they always take girlfriends with them to the gay pubs.

‘I was chased by fifteen youths in Newcastle,’ said a Cockney boy. ‘They wanted to beat me up because I was carrying a handbag.’

Some policemen investigating a drug case went up to Wales incognito and tried to ingratiate themselves with the locals. But the locals automatically assumed they were homosexuals and resisted every approach, until the police imported some sexy police women. London, of course, is much more tolerant. When I went to a CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) meeting in Streatham, I was told that one lorry-driver came up from Wales regularly to meetings, because ‘you can’t come out in Cardiff’. And a boy who worked in a London betting shop said that when he told his mates at work that he was queer they were very understanding about it. ‘What they simply couldn’t understand—and I think this is a working-class attitude—was how I could sleep with a man and not get paid for it.’