Class (36 page)

‘I am your demon lover in my new red sleep coat.’

Jison Richards, as a member of the telly-stocracy, wears three-piece suits in white with a black shirt and no tie, or very light blue suits with the jackets so waisted and with such long slits at the back that they look like miniskirts. He used to wear very fat, flamboyant ties borrowed from Wardrobe at the B.B.C. but the knot is getting slimmer. He often leaves his make-up on after a programme when he goes to the pub to remind people he’s a telly star.

The spiralist who is climbing very fast, but hasn’t got the same kind of money as Jison, studies the fashion magazines slavishly and co-ordinates carefully. He might select a neat check jacket to go with plain beige slacks, and a ‘wesket’ to match the slacks; the whole ensemble can double up as a business suit during the week. He’s also very keen on herring-bone suits, which, worn with a sporty cravat, will double up as a sports suit for leisure wear. He likes British accessories—a jaunty check cap matching the check insets of his high-button jacket or a Donegal tweed hat with the brim turned down worn with a matching coat and ‘holld-all’. He’s also heavily into luggage. Last year’s gold plastic bag on a coathanger has been replaced this year by a ‘travel robe’ in tartan which has a handle to enable him to carry all his co-ordinates vertical. Nattiness reigns.

Bryan Teale is dressed from top to toe in drip-dry clothes. Sometimes Bryan thinks Jen might put him through the washing machine under the setting for ‘whites lightly soiled’. Bryan wears burgundy crimplene slacks (which never fit because Jen brought them by mail order in the
Daily Mail),
rust cable-stitch cardigans and cavalry-twill-style trousers in brown/black/ navy/lovat/fawn in 100% washable polyester. He wears his rotary badge on his lapel. Instead of pants he wears tartan jockey shorts. He wears striped ties which the shop categorizes as a ‘Club tie’. Bryan also has a whole robe unit in the bedroom for his car wear, woolly hats, zip-up car coats, fake sheepskin coats for cold days, overalls to save his good clothes when he’s lying under the car, and driving gloves with holes in the back.

Gideon changes out of a suit into old clothes when he gets home or at the weekends. Mr D-D changes out of old clothes into one of Gideon’s old suits that Mrs D-D bought at a jumble sale. It is a bit shiny but still has plenty of wear in it. She likes a good fight at the jumble on the weekend. Indoors Mr D-D always removes his coat and sits in a waistcoat and collarless shirt; any shoes he wears inside the house will be called slippers. His bedroom slippers he calls ‘carpet slippers’. If he wears a shirt with a collar with a coat, he arranges the collar neatly outside the jacket. He always keeps his hat on in the pub.

Apart from the fact that Caroline Stow-Crat never wears man-made fibres except for stockings, it is far more difficult to tell the difference between her clothes and those of Mrs Weybridge. It is even more difficult to distinguish Fiona Stow-Crat from Sharon Definitely-Disgusting. Aware of the cruelty involved, Caroline reluctantly no longer wears her fur coat, which was a marvellous standby for London and in the evenings. Since sheepskin coats have sunk down the scale, the upper classes of both sexes wear a hideous quilted rubber coat called a ‘husky’, not unlike Mrs D-D’s dressing gown, except it is nylon and green or blue. Soon we can expect ‘husky knickers’ to keep out the cold. They sound as though they ought to be white and furry and matted with arctic snow, but actually turn out to be overtrousers.

Caroline tends to underdress. Except for a watch or a small brooch, nothing but pearls before sundown is her maxim. Her pearls have little knots between each pearl. (The world is divided into have-knots and have-nets.) At night she wears some very good, inherited jewellery, which adds a lot of light to her face; she would never wear modern jewellery, and particularly never refer to it as ‘costume jewellery’. After she’d been through her wild deb stage, and certainly after she was married, she wouldn’t show cleavages, or wear mini-skirts, whatever the fashion; nor would she wear see-through shirts. (She thinks the word blouse is very common).

Caroline would prefer the expression ‘coat and skirt’, and although Fiona might say ‘suit’, neither of them would ever say ‘two-piece’ or ‘costume’ or ‘skirt suit’. Caroline wears trousers, but never very tight, and never a trouser suit. Her shoes would be plain and never too high or brightly-coloured or decorated with bows or with peep toes. Wedge heels and platform heels and coloured boots, particularly drum majorette white boots, would also be out. She used to prefer the word ‘frock’ to ‘dress’, but since Samantha’s taken up ‘frock’ as being more old-fashioned and Kate Greenaway, Caroline’s swinging back to ‘dress’ again. Other expressions she doesn’t use are ‘ball gown’, ‘hostess gown’, ‘evening gown’, ‘house coat’ and ‘bathrobe’ instead of ‘dressing gown’. As she has very good legs, she doesn’t need the flattery of dark stockings, but if she did she’d wear navy blue with blue shoes, rather than black which she thinks a bit tarty.

Samantha is much more untidy in appearance. She is just emerging from her Third World ethnic phase and still has a sloppy, bra-less, long-straight-haired, intellectual earth-mother look. She’s not as good at staying on diets or as naturally thin as Caroline and found those kaftans and peasant dresses almost better than Gideon’s sweaters for covering up a multitude of tums.

At dinner parties she’s weighed down with ethnic jewellery picked up from various Oxfam or African project shops, which is the nearest she gets to abroad, now they’re so poor. The difference between the upper-middle classes and the lower-middle is admirably illustrated by Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher. As Rebecca West pointed out, Mrs Thatcher has one great disadvantage—she is a daughter of the people and looks trim as daughters of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she’s a member of the upper-middle classes and can achieve that distraught kitchen sink, revolting look that one cannot get unless one’s been to a really good school. The upper-middles tend to be untidy not only because they are more secure than the lower middles but because they like to look vaguely intellectual and because, unlike Caroline Stow-Crat, they don’t feel they need to set an example to anyone.

The middle-middles try to dress just like Mrs Thatcher, the Queen and Grace Kelly, very upper classical. Eileen Weybridge shops at Dickins and Jones, Peter Jones or Bentalls of Kingston. She wears velvet jackets over a shirtwaister pleated dress, or a blouse with a pussy-cat tie bow and a pleated skirt. When it rains she puts on a scarf decorated with snaffles and horses’ heads, which she thinks give it a very nice country look. She wears a camelhair coat with saddle stitching in slightly too dark a shade, and a brown melusine bowler hat for shopping. Her shoes are in slightly too orange a tan and she spends days and days finding a matching ‘handbag’ as she calls it. She rather lets the side down by buying an emerald-green trouser suit with a matching peaked cap for Twickenham. In the evening she wears a polyester floral shirtwaister bang on the knee. She would never show bare arms after thirty-five.

Mrs Nouveau-Richards, coming from working-class origins, likes to dress up whenever she goes out, even to the shops. In the evening she wears white or silver fox furs and a great deal of very flash modern jewellery, particularly diamonds. On her dresses she has lots of spangles and sequins, and her figure is as heavily corsetted as her ve-owell sounds but inclined to break out above and below her stays to give her a cleavage like the Grand Canyon and makes her straight skirts ‘rade’ up. She wears long coloured gloves and invariably very high-heeled shoes with straps round the ankles, and a spangled butterfly or a flower in her hair, which is peroxide blonde like Diana Dors.

Jen Teale, like Bryan, lives in drip-dry co-ordinates—little terylene tops which she’s always pulling down over the derrière of her terylene slacks when she is doing anything strenuous. (Mrs Nouveau-Richards talks about ‘botties’.) As she hates untidy hair she puts on one of those scarves with a fitted pleated centre for tying at the nape of the neck. She wears rain hats which match her raincoat and carries a plastic transparent concertina hood in her bag in case it rains. Everything is washed after one wearing and she never buys from jumble sales—’You don’t know who’s worn it’—or wears clothes bought in a sale until she’s ‘hand-washed’ them first. She always wears a bra and panti-girdle, not only to keep Bryan and others out but to make her figure as anonymous as possible. She’s very keen on capes, because they don’t reveal a single outline, and yet look neat. Mrs Whitehouse wore one recently when flying to America and was described in the
Daily Mirror
as ‘The Caped Crusader’. If Jen wears a transparent shirt, she always wears a full-length petticoat and a bra underneath, so all you see is rigging. Even when she relaxes in the evening her primrose brushed nylon housecoat is worn over all her underclothes. Although she’s not a catholic, she wears a gold cross round her neck to remind people she’s a ‘nice girl’. For weddings her ‘outfit’ is a navy crimplene two-piece trimmed with lemon, bought from the Littlewood’s catalogue. Her uniform with a summer dress is a long white orlon cardigan.

Mrs Definitely-Disgusting only started wearing trousers a few years ago when she was cleaning Samantha’s house. Normally she does housework in a skirt, tights and bedroom slippers. Like Caroline Stow-Crat she always wears a scarf outside, but hers is in shiny rayon and made in Hong Kong. Like Jen Teale she buys by mail order—it’s the only post she gets—filling in coupons in the
T.V. Times
while Mr D-D watches Match of the Day. When she tried it on in the privacy of her own home, she finds ‘the princess-line dress in dusky pink/African violet two-tone floral, in uncrushable polyester 100% washable with figure-flattering panels’ doesn’t look nearly as good as it did in the
Daily Mirror.
The stretch waist band for comfort seems to be stretched to its utmost. Like Harry Stow-Crat, Mrs D-D has a change coat, in new French navy with a nylon fur collar. She needed it to cheer her up: her old burgundy barathea clashed with her ’ot flushes.

HAIR

How men wear their hair is an invaluable social litmus—less so with women. Although there are exceptions (Lord Weymouth may wear his hair long and in a million pigtails; Lord Lichfield, at least in his photographs, looks like a hairdresser). Most of the aristocracy if they’re over thirty-five brush their hair backwards, with the parting directly north of the outer corner of the eye, two wings above the ears and cut just above the collar. Harry Stow-Crat wears his hair very shiny, probably as a result of Nanny’s hundred brushes a night, and because he doesn’t have much stress worrying about himself like the middle classes, or tend to work so hard, he seldom goes bald. If he did, however, he would never brush his hair forward to cover a receding hairline, or in strands over a bald patch, or part the hair above the ears and brush all the remaining hair over his bald cranium like anchovies over a hard-boiled egg.

Aristocrats seldom wear their hair over their ears. Mr Heath dropped a class or two visually when, instead of brushing his wings back, he trained them forward in two tendrils over his ears. Nor would Harry Stow-Crat cut his hair short in front so it fell in a cow’s lick like Dr Owen, or in a serpentine ripple like Lord Mancroft, or in a just-breaking fall-over wave like Peter Jay and David Steel. His sideboards would stop level with the entrance to the eardrum. Neither he nor Georgie ever comb their hair in public.

Georgie Stow-Crat might well have a fringe, not to hide a receding hair line but because it was trendy, but he would start off brushing his hair back, and letting it fall forward, and it would be so well cut, and his features so lean and finely drawn, that the effect would never be like the lacquered thatched roof on top of a cottage-loaf of the spiralist. At the moment there seems to be a trend towards the Edward Fox short-back-and-sides look, so soon, no doubt, Georgie will be looking just like Harry again.

Harry has his hair cut at least once a month at Trumpers, which shows how often he stays in his Chelsea flat. He refers to the man who cuts his hair as his ‘hairdresser’ and asks him to ‘wash’, never to ‘shampoo’, his hair. He occasionally buys a bottle of Bay Rum which has a nozzle on it like Angostura bitters in cocktail bars. His hairdresser clips the hair out of his nostrils, but not his ears.

Gideon Upward’s hair is still longer and more straggly than Zacharias’s, because that used to be trendy in the late ‘sixties; but it’s getting shorter. He goes to the barber when he finds that his shirt collars are getting dirty on both sides. The barber is Cypriot and near the office. After the perfunctory snipping and primping Gideon is asked if he wants anything else, which means French letters, always prominently displayed alongside metal combs, razor blades and various cheap male toiletries. Gideon secretly admires Michael Heseltine who claims only to have his golden mane cut on quarter days. Occasionally in the privacy of his own bathroom Gideon brushes his hair forward like Melvyn Bragg, screws up his eyes, and wonders when he’ll ever get an opportunity to use one of those French letters.

The only men left clinging to long straggly hair are middle-class left-wing trendies. As a reaction the right-wing Howard Weybridge has his hair cut short. So does Mr Nouveau-Richards, but, having spent so much of his youth working hard to get to the top, he tries to stay young with Grecian 2000. Jison Richards, now he’s a member of the telly-stocracy, brushes his blond, tinted locks firmly forward to hide any incipient wrinkles across his ‘fawhead’ and round the eyes. He has it cut at Smiles, and washes and blow-dries it himself before television appearances. He keeps it in place with all sorts of toiletries. If he is not pulling a bird, he might even sleep in a hair net. He ages ten years in a high wind.