Class (21 page)
Unlike Thalia Upward, if Fiona Stow-Crat sees a boy she likes:
‘I dance over and hope he notices me. If that doesn’t work I find someone who knows him and get that person to introduce me. If he still isn’t interested I give up.’
When they’re older, the upper classes meet skiing, shooting and at various up-market occasions like Ascot and Henley. At parties they go in for lots of horse play and shrieking. Linda in
Love in a Cold Climate
was far more attractive to the opposite sex than the more beautiful Polly because she was a ‘romper’—almost a sort of chap. The upper classes are inclined to lean out of windows and pour champagne on tramps and parked cars, or to charge around at dead of night changing road signs. The sexes also meet each other at drinks parties in the girls’ flats in Knightsbridge and Belgravia. Even if the party isn’t being given in her flat, the hostess sends out ‘At Home’ cards, and the recipient automatically runs her thumb over the words ‘At Home’ to see if they’re engraved.
THE SEASON
Up to the late ’fifties most upper-class girls ‘came out’. One’s mother, who’d been presented herself, presented one to the Queen, and the Nouveau-Richards bribed some impoverished upper-class woman to do the same for Tracey-Diane. In 1958, however, the Queen abolished the whole presentation ceremony, which meant that anyone could become a deb. The season was swamped by social climbers and lost any kind of cachet.
Despite this setback, a few hundred girls still come out every year. The process is to write to Peter Townend, the social editor of
The Tatler
for a list of ‘gairls’ doing the season. Then follows a string of luncheons where the mothers get together, see that party dates don’t clash and make sure that their daughters get asked to as many things as possible. Clued-up mothers have stickers printed with their own and their daughter’s addresses on. The minute the first luncheon reaches the coffee stage out come the diaries and everyone charges round seeing how many stickers they can get into other people’s diaries.
Many of the upper classes sell farms or woods to pay for dances. It is also necessary to suck up to Peter Townend in order to get your daughter’s picture in
The Tatler.
He can also produce young men out of a hat whose background, education, regiment or sheer cash-flow make them eligible. Most of the young men live in the country or a precious stone’s throw from Harrods.
One of the great dangers is that one’s daughter may fall in love with one of them at the beginning of the season and wreck her chances with other men. ‘Don’t you dare go steady,’ I heard one mum say recently. ‘Just like the lower classes.’
One has the feeling that the mothers enjoy the season almost more than the daughters. Many of them, still youngish and pretty, have the chance to meet up with old gairlfriends and flirt with old flames.
At the end of the season I asked a deb’s mum, did she feel all the expense had been worth it?
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘The gairls have all had such fun, and at the worst, they’ll have built up a network of jolly nice gairlfriends.’
‘And even if they do go astray’, boomed her friend, ‘one knows they’ll go astray with the right sort of chap,’ (which is back to endogamy again).
ROUGH DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
‘When the mind is full of tit and bum,’ a friend of mine once said, ‘it tends to be a-critical,’ meaning that, in the first flush of love, you don’t mind what class a person is. The fact that he’s not ‘the right sort of chap’ makes him even more attractive. When they are young, the insecure of both sexes tend to drop class. Older upper-class men love going to bed with working-class girls. It reminds them of nanny. For the same reason, they adore big strapping Australian girls. One Australian journalist went to interview an earl about wealth tax and only moved out six months later.
Equally, going out with a yobbo gives the middle- and upper-class girl a feeling of superiority. She also finds working-class men more respectful but at the same time more dominating than their public school counterparts. (Geoffrey Gorer claims that the skilled worker has the highest sexual energy—so she’s on to a good thing.)
It should be pointed out here that the working and upper classes tend to be far more chauvenistic than the upper-middle and middle-middle classes. This is perhaps because they are more reactionary, but also because they tend to have everything done for them by their mothers or nannies; whereas the middle-class mother, struggling for the first generation without servants, is much more likely to have made her son run around fetching and carrying for her. The middle-class man will therefore be far more prepared to reverse roles. This is important because it is crucial to an understanding of the different attitudes to sex, dating and women in general.
The first great love of my life was a miner’s son who’d become a millionaire. I was working on a newspaper in Brentford. He passed by in a vast, open, dark green car, and screeched to a halt. I bolted into my office, but when I sidled out two hours later he was still waiting. He was the most handsome man I’d ever seen, and it was all very disgraceful and wildly exciting. He took me straight back to his house, whereupon he told me to go and make him a cup of tea. I was far more shocked than if he’d tried to seduce me. None of my stuffy middle-class boyfriends had ever bossed me round like that.
We went out for nearly three years . . . Whenever he went abroad on business, and, I suspect, pleasure, he never wrote. This broke my heart. I only discovered years later that he was ashamed of being ill-educated. He was shocked if I said ‘blast’, and would never come to any of my parties, although I was dying to show him off, because he was shy and probably bored by my friends. He went to see his mother every day.
He was bossy, yet socially tentative, prudish yet unfaithful, and mother-fixated—all working-class qualities; yet we had three marvellous years. He was incredibly generous, showering me with presents which cost a fortune and which were returned (my middle-class background again) whenever we had one of our periodic bust-ups. And he was far more masculine, more reassuring and more fun than any of the uptight barristers, stockbrokers and account executives I’d run about with before. If he had asked me to marry him, I should certainly have said yes, but he had the good sense to realize we were far too different for it ever to work. For when the class war and the sex war are joined, hostilities always break out in the end.
Alan Coren said that, when he was at Oxford, upper-class undergraduates screwed nurses and married upper-class girls, while working-class undergraduates married nurses and screwed upper-class girls, yelling ‘One for Jarrow’ at the moment of orgasm.
Richard Hoggart, that champion of the lower orders, says that one of the most valuable characteristics of the working classes is the ability to take the mickey and say ‘Come off it’, which the middle classes usually translate as having a ‘bloody great chip on one’s shoulder’. This trait frequently comes out in working-class intellectuals when they have affairs with middle-class girls. One remembers Jimmy Porter constantly bitching at his gentle, long-suffering wife.
Another example of working-class chippiness coupled with macho occurred recently with a beautiful girlfriend of mine who was running two men at once, one of them an underwriter and the first man ever to wear full eye make-up to Lloyd’s, the other a working-class pop music promoter. One day the Lloyd’s underwriter took her for a row in Hyde Park. They were just pulling into shore when the music promoter leapt out of the bushes where he’d been lurking and pushed the underwriter into the lake, where he stood spluttering and threatening to call the police.
‘If he’d been working-class,’ said the music promoter later, ‘he’d have slugged me back. I didn’t throw him in the water because I was jealous about you but because he was upper class.’
If Zacharias Upward goes out with Christine Teale, Gideon and Samantha will talk scathingly about ‘Not quite P.L.U. [People Like Us] darling’ or ‘rather Pardonia’, and pray that their children will grow out of it. Middle-class parents also become particularly tolerant in the face of eligibility. If you go out with someone much grander than yourself, you tend to take on some of their mannerisms. Friends noticed that when Roddy Llewellyn was going out with Princess Margaret he assumed the patrician poker face, used the pronoun ‘one’ instead of ‘I’, and started walking around with his hands behind his back like Prince Philip.
THE DATE
When Dive Definitely-Disgusting takes a girl out on a date he’s likely to be much cleaner than Zacharias Upward who often goes out straight from the office. Dive has a bath and a good scrub before getting dressed for the evening. He’ll reek of Brut and over-scented deodorant and wear an open-necked shirt to reveal a hairy, muscular chest clanking with medallions. He’ll be very generous with drinks, but he’ll tend not to give the girl dinner (having already had high tea, so as not to drink on an empty stomach) because he’s frightened of ‘resteronts’ as he calls them. He can’t understand the menu if it’s in French, he doesn’t know how to order wine or how to eat asparagus, and is terrified of making a fool of himself asking for steak tartare to be well done or complaining that the Vichysoisse is stone cold. This is why many restaurants qualify food on the menu, like ‘chilled’ watercress soup, and probably explains the popularity of melon because it’s the same in French and English.
Being taken out to dinner is such a treat for Sharon Definitely-Disgusting that she always goes right through the menu, and always has pudding. She won’t comment on the food or say ‘Thank you’ afterwards. One working-class girl I know went out with a lower-middle sales rep who had an expense-account acquaintance with ‘resteronts’. ‘He was so charming and well spoken,’ she said afterwards, ‘and such a gentlemen. He kept telling me what knife and fork to use and correcting my conninenal accent.’
‘Waiter! There’s an eyelash in my friend’s soup.’
Georgie Stow-Crat would never correct pronunciation or comment on table manners. If his companion wants an ‘advocado’ pear, let her have one.
The manager of our local restaurant is a great observer of dating couples. ‘You can always tell a girl who’s escalated,’ he says. ‘She talks direct to the waiter, instead of letting the man order for her. Artichokes are a great leveller; I saw one girl trying to eat the whole thing.’
‘People who belong,’ he went on ‘always hold their coats in mid-air when they take them off. The
nouveau riche
never say “good evening”, are curt with waiters, snap their fingers and then over-tip. They also put vinegar on their chips.’
Both Christine Teale and Sharon Definitely-Disgusting prefer sweet drinks to dry: sweet Cinzano, Martini, Baby Cham and orange (a sort of Doe’s fizz), Tia Maria, Crème de Menthe. If they drink gin, it’s with orange.
Sharon also likes a man to be neatly dressed on a date. ‘If he had a holey sweater or holey jeans I wouldn’t entertain him,’ she says. ‘And he must be clean. I couldn’t stand all those rockers a few years back with dirty hair. I like a boy with a bit of life in him, but not rough.’ She would also say, ‘I’ve got a snapshot of him indoors’ (which is working-class for ‘at home’).
Christine Teale refers to a boyfriend over twenty-one as a ‘boy’ (‘I’m going out with a wonderful boy’). Most people say ‘boyfriend’ or ‘man’. The upper classes, when they’re trying to be democratic and trendy, say ‘guy’ in inverted commas. One should never talk about an ‘escort’. According to
U and Non-U Revisited
one should say ‘male companion’, which seems a bit pedantic. Most people merely say the person’s Christian name, and leave you to guess who they’re talking about. It is also vulgar to say, ‘May I bring my girl?’ as opposed to ‘a girl’ when you mean a girlfriend.
Unlike the working classes who don’t bother about the morrow, Wayne Teale tends to be tight with money. To splash it around is both prodigal and cheap. He won’t buy a girl dinner, so he’ll put on a paisley scarf, which he calls a ‘cravat’, tucked into a sweater, and take her to a bar where he knows the landlord by his Christian name. This he calls ‘social drinking’. If he’s over thirty, he might wear a white orlon polo-neck jersey which he’ll call a ‘rŏllneck’ (to rhyme with doll) sweater, because a touch of white is so flattering after a certain age and the neck hides the wrinkles in his throat. He refers to a girl as an ‘attractive young lady’. He would prefer her to wear a skirt than jeans, even though his trouser creases are sharp enough to ladder her tights. He’s also read somewhere that it’s common to say perfume, but scent sounds too foxy, so he settles for ‘fragrance’. Gideon would probably say, ‘That’s a nice pong’.
