After going all X-rated, I feel I have to up the controversy stakes here at Slaminsky. What else gets people all riled up? Ah yes, class. I am watching some stupid match-making programme with half an eye. An Indian woman from a dating agency is meeting a sloaney blond woman who has decided she's in the Last Chance Saloon. She's giving responsibility for her romantic future over to her friends, family (chills!) and a formal match-making service. As the Indian woman interviews her, she asks about her past relationships and asks were they professional, were they middle-class... the blond woman gets quite agitated when she says the C word. 'That doesn't matter to me, and I'm getting quite annoyed.' (Though she confesses that she's only ever been out with middle-class, professional men. ) The Indian woman says gently that this is the first thing that an Indian match-maker would establish.
I reckon this woman was in deep denial. Because we're SO hung up on class in this country and it cuts very, very deep. (I'm a big fan of Nancy Mitford and not much seems to have changed since the 30s & Noblesse Oblige. The toffs look down on the middle classes, the working class despise them, everyone else fears and patronises the working class, and the middle class are in perpetual guilt and anxiety, all is in its natural order...)
Which wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't so taboo. Can't we just admit it? We don't want to be like the Americans - they pretend they're all Horatio Alger, classless types, and anyone can make it to the President, but who invented the concept of trailer trash, hey?
(In case you're wondering... I'd class myself as working class... as my old sociology teacher Mr Connolly used to say, if you have to work for a living, you're working class...)
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19 comments:
If your name is on your uniform you're working class, if your name is on your desk you're middle class*, if your name is on the building you're upper class.
*Has anyone ever worked somewhere where you have a block on your desk with your name on? I never have.
I remember, while on holiday years ago, listening to a radio programme about the attitude of the various social classes to holidays. The suggestion was that the upper classes and the working class essentially wanted the same thing from a holiday, i.e. relaxation with little or no taxing activity, although for very different reasons; the upper class because well, that's how they live all the time and the working classes because they've worked so bloody hard for the rest of the year. However, the middle class, it was suggested, could not enjoy a holiday unless they felt they were engaged in some educationally or culturally worthwhile activity.
As we were at the time sitting in a car on Skye, looking at horizontal rain bouncing off the windscreen, on our way to a gallery selling local crafts (we had stopped to look at a map because we were lost) we wondered what it said about us.
oh i could go on about this a little bit...and i think it depends where in the country you live becasue someone middle class in London/South East wouldn't be the same as someone middle class up North... i don't think anyway.
I guess i'm middle class...am I? I don't know...my Dad drives an Audi TT and we go on at least 2 holidays a year...so i guess that does!
Class is something you should have, not something you should belong to.
Good point LC.
I agree - if you work for a living, you're working class, regardless of how many holidays you have or what car you drive. But would you label someone like Alan Sugar as working class too? Bit of a different league, isn't he? I wouldn't know where to draw the line between working and middle. My mum used to say we were upper-working class. She had delusions of granduer.
I don't have a class hangup so much as an intelligence one; not even education so much but more whether people seem prepared to learn (and it may in all fairness be as much whether they're capable of learning).
I might consider my family middle class, but that was only from the last generation because my father was a solicitor: he got there by working his way up from the ground and was from a more working class background.
My father´s family where upper middle class, they had servants, a tennis court, a lake and an aunt who supported Hitler (truly, she went to live in occupied Paris)and I have never heard my father once refer to a "toilet" always lavatory or loo, but my mother´s family was working class, grandmother was a cleaner. However, then you chuck education into the pot and my father left school at 15 to work on a building site, and my mother had a scholarship to the local grammar school. I suppose this all makes me very much middle class.
One side of my family comes from a long and distinguished line of Kent peasants.
The other side comes from some long gone obscure central european country in order to escape a pogrom.
They new all about class - haves/havenots.
As for me, I don't really give it much thought.
Despite being working class, my parents had a weirdly middle class outlook (well, weird for the 1970's, at any rate). They were very much into scrimping and saving. My mum was the first person in her family to live in a mortgaged house and relatives used to take the piss out of her because of that.
As far as I was concerned, I wasn't allowed to watch ITV as a young child, in case I grew up to be a foul mouthed degenerate. They were pretty keen that I should learn to play the piano (don't laugh). All this was done in the in vague hope that I would grow up to marry a nice accountant or doctor, preferably called Gordon, and escape from a life of drudgery working in a factory. Problem is, I was too stupid to get to university, so the dream fell through!
From caravans and ferry boats. I'm trash, trash all the way!
(I'm wondering what other toff lady writers you like; as well as Mitford, I still enjoy Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehemann).
I'm firmly middle class. Grew up in home counties suburbia, went to a grammar school, now work in the media. But my folks never really had much money. And my mum worked as a cleaner for a bit to make ends meet. So it's never really as simple as that.
I think the distrust between the classes, based on old divisions. I've been looked down on by folks better off than me, and felt the force of arrogant working class types with a chip on their shoulder who think they're inherently more authentic and special cos they're working class.
At the end of the day, people are just people. But lots of people are prats.
Class is all a load of donkey bollocks if you ask me.
I hate the way society tries its hardest to seperate and pidgeon-hole people, when the reality of it is quite simply that we all breathe the same air, we all bleed red when we're cut and we all hurt inside when somebody breaks our heart.
I'm always intrigued by people like my friend Keith. He earns, I suspect, 150K+ in a senior exec. position for a multi-national. He lives in a detached house in Herts. Wife, two kids, two cars, plays lots of golf. Name on his desk, possibly even the door. Staunch Labour voter although his views of Labour have been somewhat derailed since T. Blair came along. He contends he's working class, mainly I think, because his dad worked in a factory. I think he would feel rather insulted to be called anything other than working class. So (one's perceived) class I suspect, is more derived from where you came from rather than where you've got to and also possibly something to do with your politics.
Me? Single parent, not much money, working mum but she went to a very good public school till she was 18 when she was told that that was all the education a girl would need. Her parents were pretty well off, living on a comfortable inheritance being from a Lancashire mill owning family. My mum, as far as I can tell, never took any money from them and was fiercely independent, albeit permanently broke. She was/is definitely upper-middle class (in her mind). I don't know what class I am and the thought rarely crosses my mind.
I like Jessica Mitford.
I listen to Radio 4. Therefore I am middle-class.
There, that was easy.
I write poetry for a living. But to be precise poets usually make the money they need to live on in order to buy the preliminaries to write etc by speaking and writing and promoting poetry/literature, the arts, rather than from mere versification. I'll stick to Shelley who classed poets as the official under-underclass and called them "The unacknowledged legislators of the world."
I'm defiantly working class. I don't have aspirations to be middle class. I don't harbour resentment against the middle class or for that matter the upper classes in particular, but I do despise nepotism, cronyism, and the abuse of privilege.
Having said that, I always suspected that Del was middle class. He is after all, a Gooner! :D
I think I rate class by house type. My parents moved from a semi-detached to a detached recently, echoing the change in their class over the years from working to middle. My sister has just bought her first house and it's terraced on a housing estate. I live in a shoebox sized flat (albeit in Rome) so I can only deduce that we're in a different social class from my folks. phew!
Having said that, I always suspected that Del was middle class. He is after all, a Gooner! :D
Would you like some fish with that chip on your shoulder, etc ;) Don't make me ring up directory enquiries to hire someone to beat you up.
Heheh. I'm actually a Gooner cos my Grandad on my Mum's side was. And he was a cockney who ran a greengrocers. So...
Highly fascinating comments, everyone. Of course I agree with you Bedshaped, one hundred per cent - yet everyone was able to say exactly where they and their family fitted into this, which kind of proves my point.
Arabella, I loooove Rosamund Lehmann, a very underrated writer. One of my mates is her great great granddaughter (though shamefully has never read her.)Will check out Elizabeth Bowen.
King of Scurf, I also like Jessica Mitford - death to the horrible Counter-Hons.
Tim - I love Radio 4 for everything except John Humphries and their dire comedy dramas, whoever commissions them should be shot.
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