Class (9 page)

My husband heard about sex for the first time when he was walking in a prep-school crocodile along the beach.

‘I say, chaps,’ said a boy called the Hon. James Stewart, ‘I know how babies are made.’

Whereupon they all gathered round saying, ‘Go on, Stewart, tell us.’

‘The man lies on top of the woman,’ said Stewart portentously, ‘and is excused into her.’

The middle classes will start taking their children to the dentist almost before they’ve got teeth; the working classes tend only to go when their teeth ache. ‘You can tell what class a person is the moment he opens his mouth,’ said John Braine, ‘by the state of his teeth.’ That’s why Sharon Definitely-Disgusting claps her hands over her mouth whenever she laughs.

The upper classes give their children 10p from the fairies when a tooth comes out. Inflation and indulgence have pushed the middle classes up to 50p. Among the upper-middle merrytocracy the fairies often get drunk and forget to put the money under the pillow and have to compensate with twice as much the next day. When the fair arrives each year, children have been known to tug teeth out with forceps for more money to spend on the fruit machines.

People are gradually realising that illiteracy in schools today is nothing to do with the teaching, but simply because children have been turned into a race of zombies by watching television. Soon the middle classes will start banning television altogether, and illicit watch-easys will be set up in darkened dives round the country.

Samantha Upward doesn’t let Zacharias read comics or watch more than an hours’ television a day. Upper-class children go into the kitchen and read the housekeeper’s children’s comics. Samantha reads out loud to Zacharias in a clear voice altering words she thinks are common and remembering to say ‘orf’.

The Queen evidently read very early because in the evenings her mother used to read her books ‘about animals and horses and they would recite gay poetry.’ (Marlowe and Oscar Wilde perhaps.) Before he reads, the working class child can write C.F.C. and SHED and SOD and FUK on bus shelters.

By the age of two little George Stow-Crat will be looking out on life with a clear blue gaze, frightened of no one, totally self-confident. He will also have a frightful accent from playing in the stable but no one is in the least bit worried. Working-class children always hold their noses in the country.

The middle-class child will already be shell-shocked with instructions. Don’t tread in Doggie’s duty; put your hand over your mouth when you cough; don’t turn your fork over to eat peas; it’s rude to whisper; it’s rude to shout; talk in a low clear voice like Anna Ford or Mrs Thatcher. Class is beginning to creep in. Middle-class children twig that they can bully the char’s children, but the char’s children can’t beat them up in return. They also know that there are certain children in the road their mother prefers them playing with to others. Samantha has great difficulty explaining to little Zacharias why he may sprinkle his pepper but not his salt.

I once heard my son regaling his friends:

‘Mummy says “pardon” is a much worse word than “fuck”.’

Jen Teale’s child will be constantly pulled up for some real or imagined coarseness of speech or enunciation. It’s so important to be ‘well-spoken’.

Middle-class children put cherry stones on the side of their plate with their spoon and chant, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief’. Upper-class children conceal the journey from mouth to plate with curled fist and say ‘Army, Navy, Law, Divinity, Independent, Medicine, Trade’. The working classes only eat cherries out of tins of fruit salad with the stones already removed.

Children’s parties are a sophisticated form of torture. The upper classes tend to give parties just for nannies and children, mid-week, and ending at six so as not to involve the husbands. No drink is offered to collecting parents.

Nanny Stow-Crat couldn’t stop Fiona inviting Tracey Nouveau-Richards as they sit next to each other at nursery school, but Caroline says she’s not having those ghastly parents in the house: ‘They never know when to leave and once through the door, they might make a habit of dropping in.’

Samantha Upward, being very democratic, encourages Zacharias to invite all his little state school friends who run absolutely wild all over the newly planted perennials that were once going to make an herbaceous border. They refuse to play party games and drive the conjuror into hysterics by explaining in loud voices how every trick is done.

Mr Nouveau-Richards, who feels that only the best is good enough for my Tracey-Diane, employs Searcy’s to do the catering, Dick Emery for the cabaret, gives each child a Tiger Tiger doll’s house as a going-away present, and shows the premiere of
Star Wars II
after the interval. All the surrounding middle-class mums would like to refuse, but daren’t because they’d get such flak from their children.

The upper-middle merrytocracy mix drink, nannies and mothers, thereby making the children’s party a much more jolly occasion. Parties in Putney are rather like singles bars with separated fathers turning up to collect children and meeting pretty divorced mothers and getting nose to nose over the Soave and the hassle of bringing up children on one’s own.

3   THE NANNY

‘The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be the inmates of our dwellings or guardians of our children’s minds, and persons.’

Charlotte Brontë.

Anyone studying the English class system will have noticed certain similarities between the extreme upper and lower classes; toughness, xenophobia, indifference to public opinion, passion for racing and gambling, fondness for plain speaking and plain untampered food. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in
The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny
, says the reason is that the ruling classes for the last two hundred years have been brought up almost entirely by working-class nannies, their parents abdicating all responsibility.

‘With monthly nurses, nannies, prep school and public school,’ admitted one mother, ‘it’s almost as though we put them in care.’

Certainly one of the reasons why the aristocracy has always notched up so many marriages has been because thay never had any boring middle-class worries about how it might affect the children. Nanny would always be there to look after them and provide continuity.

Working for the great, nannies took on their own snobbisms, not unlike suburban crones working in Knightsbridge dress shops for £50 a week who make you feel bitterly ashamed of your scuffed heels and the fact that you can’t afford £500 for a little black dress.

There was a group of nannies who ruled Hyde Park.

‘Are you a titled mummy’s nanny?’ said one gorgon, when a newly employed nanny sat down beside her.

The new nanny shook her head.

‘Well I’m afraid,’ said the gorgon, ‘that this bench is reserved for titled mummies’ nannies.’

Until a few years ago nanny was a fixture in the upper-class house, taking on the surname of the family and often staying with them until she died, when an announcement would appear in
The Times
expressing the family’s gratitude and giving her length of service. When her charges grew up, there were always grandchildren. Sometimes she regained her ascendancy when the master became senile and needed looking after, or when Miss Caroline became an alcoholic. One friend of mine spends £6000 a year keeping a large house in Sussex going simply as a base for his old nanny and her dog. Another nanny, when her children grew up, took over the care of the three family dogs, keeping them in baskets upstairs and giving them the same nursery routine of brushing, walks, mealtimes and early beds. While another old nanny keeps an eye on visiting dogs. When a friend’s golden retriever had been cavorting in the loch for an hour, she sidled up and said, ‘I think Porridge has been in for long enough.’

Today, alas, the old-fashioned nanny whose life was her children, who welcomed the role of surrogate mother, imposed on her by her employers, delighting in the challenge of coping with everything, never taking a holiday, is virtually an extinct breed.

‘You’ll be lucky if you get a girl to stay six months,’ said Nannies of Kensington. ‘They just don’t want to get involved for too long.’ A few years ago Mrs Walters of Knightsbridge Nannies, who provided ‘treasures’ for half the crowned heads of Europe, said her telephone was permanently jammed with cries of ‘Help me, Help me’ from harassed society women left in the lurch by their nannies and faced with the appalling prospect of having to forego a game of bridge or a trip to Fortnums. It also suits the agencies to foster this myth of unavailability. The more often a nanny moves around, the more often they get their rake off.

By the end of the ’seventies, however, the position had changed slightly. The rocketing cost of living has made the nanny’s job much more attractive. If she lives in, she gets all her bills paid: rent, telephone, rates, electricity, gas and food, and £25 – 35 tax-free pocket money on top of that, which makes her far better off than a secretary on £5,500 a year. The only way you distinguish the nannies from the mothers picking children up from school is that the nannies are younger and better dressed.

‘Well I make it that you’ll have to get a rise of £15,000 just to pay for Nanny.’

On the other hand the more women go out to work, the more they are dependent on others to look after their children. If the nanny is working for a divorced or separated woman, or even in a household where the woman is the chief breadwinner, her power is absolute. If she walks out, her employer will have to jeopardize her job staying at home and looking after the children, or fork out for a temporary at £50 a week.

Before the war, the upper and middle classes tended to be undomesticated (my grandmother once went into the kitchen, saw a dishcloth and fled, never to return) and were therefore neurotically dependent on servants. Today any career woman or working mother who has to rely on a recalcitrant daily woman (someone once said they were called ‘dailys’ because they leave after one day) or a capricious nanny in order to go out to work will understand this neurosis.

One sees this absolute power developing so often. A plump little lower-middle-class girl arrives from the country with rosy cheeks and a Yorkshire accent. She starts off doing absolutely everything for £10 a week, but gradually she makes herself indispensable. She also starts aping the mannerisms of her employers and goes to a West End hairdresser, her accent disappears as do the inches off her hips. Next she meets a boyfriend and, terrified of losing her because she’s become such a treasure, her employers let the boyfriend move in. Soon there’s a broad-shouldered denim-jacketed back watching television every time the parents come in from an evening out, which is soon followed by additional aggro because he’s having fry-ups in the morning, drinking the house Carafino and using the bath.

The employers are by now frightened of using the car in case the nanny is intending to take it home for the weekend, and start fighting as to which one of them is going to ask her to baby-sit, if they occasionally want to go out, standing outside her door, saying, ‘No, you do it. No,
you
do it.’

By now the boyfriend starts shop-stewarding around, telling the nanny she oughtn’t to be working those hours: ‘Girls in our office only do nine to five, and you never get a lunch hour.’ More and more concessions are made, anything to avoid the hassle of working in a new girl.

Usually a row blows up about once a month, whereupon the nanny sits in the kitchen muttering to next door’s nanny and ringing ads in the
Evening Standard
, or
The Times
. While her employer doesn’t feel up to going to work and sits nervously writing an ad for
The Lady
, or ringing up agencies on the upstairs telephone: ‘Tell anyone who might be interested to ring my husband at the office, or she can ring here at weekends.’ Usually she and the nanny get bored of rowing by the evening, and make it up over a litre bottle of Pedrotti. By the time the husband comes home all wound up to read the riot act, wife and nanny are plastered but fondly tearful over an empty bottle.

A few years ago middle-class husbands used traditionally to knock off the
au pair.
Today, far more often you find husbands getting jealous of the mutually sycophantic, love-hate relationship that exists between the wife and the nanny, particularly since the advent of the permissive society, when nanny often covers up for the wife’s sexual peccadilloes and therefore has even more power over her.