Class (30 page)

With relief, after two years, we moved back to Ilkley in Yorkshire, where my father was born. Even here the Middleton side of the valley was much smarter than the town side, because it was greener and got the sun all day; but at least Ilkley was smarter than Otley because the inhabitants were richer and because it was further away from the industrial towns of Bradford and Leeds; and Harrogate was much smarter than Bradford and Leeds because it was more rural and nearer the East Riding, which was much smarter than the industrial West Riding, but not as smart as the North Riding. And so it went on.

All over the North, as in the South, there are snob patches, immortalized by John Braine as ‘T’Top’. Hoy-lake is ‘T’top’ for Liverpool; Cheshire is ‘T’top’ for Manchester; Ilkley is ‘T’top’ for Bradford and Leeds. ‘You can’t get anyone local to char for you,’ said a friend who lives there now. ‘When people move to Ilkley they think they’ve arrived.’

Certainly when we lived in Ilkley, which was devoid of anyone one would have thought of as upper-class, the upper-middles (or people who considered they spoke the King’s English) stuck together. There were plenty of people we knew well and who came to our parties, but only a handful of them were invited to meet friends who came up from the South, particularly London, because the southerners were so easily bored and so much fussier about Yorkshire accents. One Ilkley woman was described as having ‘snobbed her way out of friends’, because she never invited any of the locals to meet any of her friends from London. The North think, quite mistakenly, that they’re much less snobbish and more open than the South, despising the emollient phrases of the southerner, which they think smack of insincerity.

Fulham, from a class point of view, is an interesting part of London. In the early ‘sixties it was principally working-class and considered very unsmart. We lived in Redcliffe Square (which called itself Kensington in those days,) and I remember saying in shocked tones to my solicitor, ‘But you can’t live in Fulham’. Fifteen years later Fulham is swarming with upper-class and upper-middle young marrieds in their first house, probably before moving to the country. And in estate agents’ ads, Redcliffe Square is not described as Kensington any more but as Fulham.

As the Arabs take over Mayfair (they must have access to strip and gambling clubs,) and Saudi Kensington, and as Paddington and Maida Vale are invaded by ‘chocos’, the upper classes and trendies are tending to move further and further out. In the old days they liked to keep their ‘S.W.s’ low—one, three, five, and seven being the best, like the Beethoven Symphonies—but now one finds them in Battersea, Clapham, Camberwell and particularly Islington and Canonbury, because the two latter are so convenient for the City.

As birds of a feather traditionally flock together, the B.B.C. wireless people who work in Langham Place, the
New Statesman
readers and the left-wing trendies tend to go north to Hampstead, Highgate and St John’s Wood, while the telly-stocracy polarize around Barnes, Putney, Chiswick and even Hammersmith, because it is near the television centre. The richer ones even buy houses along the common in Wimbledon, which was once regarded by the upper classes as somewhere you only visited during the tennis fortnight. Certainly the older generation of the aristocracy still think of North of the Park and South of the River as beyond the pale, regarding anyone who lives there as a taxi-exile. (You can’t pick up a taxi in the area and you can’t get a taxi to take you out there because they won’t get a fare back.)

If you pick up upper-class address books, they are still full of Flaxman, Fremantle, Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Mayfair numbers. And the upper classes still tend to live in places like Cadogan and Eaton Squares, (although even these are getting a bit ‘araby’) where they set up elaborate systems of one-way streets, which make it impossible for the hoi polloi to find their way around.

But, in spite of their flats or houses in London, the upper classes still live mainly in the country, while the upper-middle classes live in London and have cottages in the country. I know one Mrs Nouveau-Richards who has the only country cottage in the
A-Z.
Despite pleading poverty the middle classes still have a million second houses.

Harry and Caroline Stow-Crat would never be in London at the weekend—which they call ‘Friday to Monday’—although Georgie and the younger generation call it ‘weekend’ and tend to stay up more often.

‘You’d never have got this sort of person in Harrods on Saturday in the old days,’ a friend overheard one Harrods shop assistant saying to another recently.

Harry Stow-Crat is usually out of England skiing in February, and in Scotland shooting in August. Scotland is always smart, and packed with upper-class English, but the Highlands are smarter than the Lowlands, although Northumberland and the border country is considered pretty grand.

Although you will find upper-class people in all counties, there tend to be more in Yorkshire than in Lancashire. The Midlands are beyond the pale, except for Rutland, Herefordshire and Lincolnshire. Norfolk and Suffolk are much smarter than Cambridgeshire, which is not as grand as Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and of the home counties only Sussex and Kent are tolerable.

Just as the upper-middles in Ilkley stuck together, the grander aristocracy might deign to know some of the people who live in the neighbourhood, but on the whole prefer to go into another county to dine with people they regard as their own level—this presumably is where the expression ‘county’, to describe the upper classes, came from. Hence you get those interminable forty-mile drives just to go out to dinner.

If they were going to stay with the Tavistocks at Woburn Abbey or the Sitwells at Weston Hall, they would say, ‘I’m going to Woburn’ or ‘Weston’, and expect the other person to know where they meant. They always spell out the whole county, i.e. Warwickshire nor Warwicks, and Yorkshire not Yorks on envelopes, writing paper, and in conversation.

It is very lower-middle to talk about ‘Great Britain’ rather than ‘England’, and to describe oneself as ‘British’ rather than ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ or ‘Welsh’.

In London the richer of the middle classes tend to polarize round greens and commons, and on hills like Hampstead, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Richmond, Kingston and Putney. The exception is the Thames. Water in a city plays a dual role: it repels the rich where there are docks and industry, but attracts them where there are not. As the docks fall into disuse, people are moving in. The former Foreign Secretary for example has a house in Narrow Street, so he can boast on television that he lives in the East End, implying that he’s an authority on the slums, like the Duke who said he lived among miners, because his estate flanked some coalfields. Narrow Street, in fact, is a comfortable middle-class enclave on the river’s edge, and when pressure got too great, the Foreign Secretary whizzed off to his vicarage in Wiltshire.

The papers a year or two ago quoted a taxi-driver grumbling about the erosion of cockney London by the middle classes, pouring into Hackney, Whitechapel, the Old Kent Road and the Isle of Dogs, wanting a house with a bit of garden for the children and within bicycling distance of the library. Soon the new settlers start action groups to have their own areas barricaded off against the traffic, so it spills into peripheral working-class areas; football is stopped in the streets; prices rocket, and the pubs are full of people called Nigel drinking gin and tonic. The old shops are rapidly replaced by antique shops and expensive delicatessens catering for career couples (‘Ossie’s Taramasalata is so delicious, it would be crazy to make it myself’). The garish-looking dress shops crammed with skirts and sweaters in da-glo pink and royal blue vanish in favour of ethnic boutiques catering for size twelve upwards.

One of the great urban middle-class movements of the late ’seventies has been the development of community associations. When we were in New York in 1971 a publisher’s wife was talking about a block fête she and her friends had organized, and what fun it had been. Didn’t we think fêtes were fun?

No we didn’t, my husband answered, appalled. They were absolute anathema. One of the best reasons for living in London was to escape from that sort of thing.

‘But we met so many nice new middle-class people,’ she said.

‘Oh Bryan—it must be the great community feeling they told us about.’

Where America leads England usually follows, and now, eight years later, community and conservation societies flourish, and every bit of urban grass has its own horse show, street party, or block community fête to raise money for park benches and shrubs round the churchyard—all organized by the middle classes banding together to protect their own property.

‘I may have a large, beautiful garden crammed with climbing frames,’ says Samantha, ‘but I don’t want a hair of the common outside touched by adventure playgrounds and hockey pitches. And don’t you dare build houses in the churchyard to pay off your parish debts, or the price of my house will plummet.’

As the authors of
Voices from the Middle Classes
have pointed out, in London you can often tell at a glance whether a street is basically middle or lower-middle class. The latter has narrow, terraced houses, with no room for a front garden. People are cleaning their cars and windows, and painting their houses. Mongrels roam around the streets chasing cats away. An occasional cake tin, painted to look like a burglar alarm, hangs on the wall, and there will be several ‘For Sale’ signs, as the spiralist, having done up his house, is ready to move on. His aim is the middle-class street, probably only blocks away, which has large houses set back from the road, hidden by a privet hedge and with full-grown trees in the front garden, burglar alarms and cats asleep on the window sills. There is very little do-it-yourself; no one is seen cleaning their cars or their windows. You might even find a couple of horse-boxes parked. There are very few ‘For Sale’ signs here, because people usually stay until their children leave home, whereupon they retire and move into a smaller house.

The lower-middles tend to colonize in suburbs like Worcester Park, Cheam, Morden and Hendon.

To the spiralist, as we have seen, St George’s Hill, Weybridge, East Horsley, Cobham and Sunningdale are social meccas. Here he will meet more people in
Who’s Who
than in any other county and rub shoulders on the train with more commuters from Social Classes I and II of the Census (stockbrokers, architects, Harley Street specialists and rich businessmen) than anywhere else.

There was recently a programme on television about the inhabitants of Cheam in Surrey, in which they interviewed a lot of spiralists with brushed-forward hair who all talked about the importance of ‘competing’ and ‘living in an upper-class he-ome’. There was great community feeling in Cheam, they said; the ‘holl’ thing had exploded at the Jubilee Party in 1977 and they all got on because they had the same sense of humour and enjoyed the same sort of hobbies: going ‘horse racing and playing for Esher Rugby Club’. The wives had coffee evenings if their husbands had a night down at the Club. They all thought of themselves as living in upper-class he-omes’. These are the kind of people the spiralist regards as ‘upper-class’. He doesn’t realize that the real upper classes—except for one or two like the Earl of Onslow whose family have lived near Guildford for centuries—wouldn’t be seen dead in Surrey.

‘Now do tell me—does one go
up
or
down
to Weybridge?’

According to a brilliant book by John Connell called
The End of Tradition,
which explores rural life in central Surrey, there are only two classes left there: the middle-class ‘foreigners’, i.e. rich commuters who’ve moved in and bought up the old cottages, doing them up at vast expense, and the villagers who used to live in the cottages but now live on council estates.