Darcy's Utopia (6 page)

I just smiled and said ‘a little’—but I was hurt. I thought he was laughing at me. I joined the staff of
Aura
shortly afterwards. ‘Mussed’ is a word so outmoded I’m surprised the God of Media didn’t strike him down on the instant with a thunderbolt. Pre-Hugo, come to think of it, my hair never got mussed. Now I can scarcely get a comb through it in the morning. To each their own earthquake.

Q
: TELL ME ABOUT
your educational background. Were there books in your house? Did your parents encourage you to read?

A: What you want me to tell you is how I, victim of a class-ridden society, managed to escape the long side streets of the outer suburbs and reach the shores of academia. Well, a few of us manage it. It helps to have a high IQ, though I suspect a talent for mimicry is more useful; being able to adopt at will the tones and attitudes of the educated middle classes. That I have.

Valerie sat on the sofa. Eleanor sat in a chair. Why, Valerie wondered, did Eleanor share the sofa with Hugo, but not with her?

First, of course, you have to know what you are: that there is another life, another set of attitudes, other responses out there in the world, which prevent most of us from aspiring to better things. We know what we like, like what we know, unless something quite powerfully intervenes to shake us out of it. The child from the fish and chip shop can only end up running Liberty’s if he has some idea of what Liberty’s
is
. How very snobbish of you, you will say; why should Liberty’s be seen as superior to a fish and chip shop?

Q: I wasn’t conscious of accusing you. Aren’t you being a little defensive?

A: I daresay. I was married to Bernard Parkin for fifteen years, a man who came from the lower middle class, but identified quite violently, for a number of years, with the workers. He would never set foot in Liberty’s, let alone Harrods—those haunts of the rich and the would-be rich represented for him the scornful laughter of the haves towards the have-nots. While some downright starve, and others scrimp and save to afford the large cod and chips, not the small, a few spend thousands on sunken baths and antique rugs. Poor Bernard. He was a good man.

Q: Was?

A: One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same?

Q: I don’t have an ex-spouse.

A: No? Well, I daresay you will, from what Mr Vansitart tells me.

To cover her discomposure, Valerie readjusted the microphone. She was flattered and excited that Hugo had talked of their relationship to Eleanor: offended that her privacy had been thus violated. The pleasurable feeling won.

You have pushed the microphone out of range. Shall I adjust it? We live in a world of surplus but can’t bring ourselves to believe that we do. We go on behaving and thinking as if there would never, never be enough. Gimme, gimme, gimme! Before someone else gets it. My sunken plastic bath better than your old cast-iron tub. If the poor have their faces ground into a mud made sharp and painful by slivers of diamond and chunks of ruby, whose fault is that? Those who shove their faces into it?—Bernard’s view. The consistency of the mud?—my view. Or that of the poor themselves, for daring to bend their heads and stare?

Q: You went first to the Faraday Junior School, I believe, an ordinary state school. What were your experiences there?

A: I understand what you are saying. Badly born, poorly educated as I am, how do I have the nerve to pass comment on the society I live in—let alone marry a professor of economics and co-author with him—the publisher’s term, not mine—a book on Darcian Monetarism?

She rose from the chair. She paced. Today she wore a tan silk shirt and tight dun-coloured trousers. She had the air of a female terrorist: someone who might take it into her head to shoot at any moment. Valerie thought, Good heavens, it was safer, after all, on the
Mail on Sunday
than on
Aura
, earthquakes notwithstanding. This may yet be the end of me.

Q: No. I was not saying any of that. I was asking how you enjoyed school.

Eleanor calmed, sat down again.

A: Yes, I believe you were. I had a bad time at the hands of male journalists during Julian’s trial and in the period leading up to it: some residual paranoia sticks. They look for a
femme fatale
, a Mata Hari of world finance, a seductress. If a woman is to be taken seriously she must either be past the menopause or very plain, preferably both.

Let us return to the Faraday Junior School. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, we five-year-olds trooped off to school: troubled and sophisticated we returned, the stuffing all knocked out of us. Schools are a strange contrivance; they do not occur in nature, yet somehow we suppose they do. Because a woman, by virtue of giving birth to a succession of children, is then landed with the task of bringing them up, is no cause to suppose children are best taught by the handful, the dozen, the score. Nature, as ever, provided a minimum, not a maximum, for our survival. Any mother knows that it takes more than one adult to cope properly with even a single child. The child has more energy and more passion than the adult. To make it sit still, sit up and oblige, because it is smaller than you and you can compel it, is unkind. To make it do so in company is bizarre.

In Darcy’s Utopia the first rule of education will be that in any school the teachers shall outnumber the pupils, and no pupil need attend who does not wish to do so. I suspect budding essayists and technicians will continue to turn up to be educated; those others, who find lessons a humiliation because they are daily exposed and defined as dullards, will not. Much will be gained by the individual and very little lost to society. Teachers, teaching only those who wish to learn, will regain their self-respect and that of their pupils. They will stay even-tempered from morning to night. In Darcy’s Utopia you will not see the eyes of the child dulling, the brow furrowing, as puberty arrives.

Children do quite like to gather together, in fits and starts, to enjoy one another’s company, to find out how others live. It is natural enough for them to want to acquire knowledge from their elders. But it is unreasonable from this to extrapolate ‘the school’ as one of the cornerstones of society—for what are schools but institutions in which, in the name of knowledge, we ghettoize the young, and keep them from adult company, coop up the violent with the meek, those who like learning with those who don’t, and in general fit them for the modern world, which one quick glimpse of the television will show them to be a violent, murderous, greedy, vulgar and horrid place, in which people in a good mood throw custard pies at one another and in a bad mood chop each other to pieces?

Q: I take it you did not like school?

A: I liked it very much. I was sorry for those who didn’t, who by far outnumbered those of us who did. I daresay the Faraday Junior was no worse than any other school: indeed even a little better. No one was moved to burn the place down and the teachers were not encouraged to beat the children: though I had my knuckles painfully rapped on various occasions when I had apparently failed to decode some mysterious message or other. Teachers get irritated, of course they do, their elaborate and expensive training courses notwithstanding. Why? Because they are doing the most unnatural thing in the world, which everyone tells them is perfectly natural, in order that little children should all sit down quiet and good in one place and learn to take the world for granted, and not attempt to change it.

Q: But you tried to escape? You did want to change your situation?

A: When you ask that you betray your belief that one class is indeed superior to another: that to be born to the uneducated lower classes is a singular life-problem: though I’m sure if I asked you straight you would, in your gentle, blind, liberal way, deny it. The class distinctions we employ, you would maintain, are descriptive not pejorative. The person with, say, the pinched and nasal accents of the English Midlands is no worse than the one whose language has the rounded and lordly ring of London’s Knightsbridge, merely different. Tell that to employers, boyfriends, doctors, the dinner party hostess. Second-class citizen! goes up in neon lights when those who use the pronunciation of the streets and not of the written word open their mouths. Rightly they are discriminated against! Woe unto them, say I, who do not seek to improve themselves but cling with misplaced loyalty to the speech of their parents, as they do to the homes they were born into.

In Darcy’s Utopia it will be as normal to practise elocution as to brush your teeth. If more than lip service is to be paid to the notion that we are all equal, then it must be first acknowledged that we are born unequal, and that some of us have to work harder than others to make up for it. We must be prepared to make value judgements—allow Milton to be better than Michael Jackson in absolute terms, not just because that one’s your cup of tea and that one’s mine. The politeness of the cultured towards the uncultured, the hurt defiance of the latter to the former, compound one another. With misplaced kindness, the best of us refuse to discriminate against the worst. All things are equal, we say, and we lie, and know we lie.

Q: You seem very conscious of class discrimination. Were you much aware of it as a child?

A: Yes, but I can’t say I suffered from it. To have hurt feelings is not a particularly painful kind of hurt. Toothache is much worse. I was certainly made very aware, as a child, of the strange and complex attitudes people had towards my father, the entertainer. They depended upon him for their pleasure, they admired him because he had a skill they did not, they liked him because he was charming and energetic, but they did not treat him as their equal.

The best were patronizing; the worst could not help but insult him. The band would be required to eat, in the kitchen, cheaper food than that offered the guests: be offered beer if the guests had wine, wine if they had champagne. Should that have upset him? It always did. Jazz was popular in all circles during my childhood—the demand now is for more structured music or the cold beat of the synthesizer—but through the sixties the music of Black Africa in distress appealed to softened hearts. We went everywhere: from garden parties in the grounds of castles, wedding receptions in marquees, hunt balls in assembly rooms, university teas on graduation day, garden fêtes in the bishop’s palace, to the annual parties of car salesmen, the golden weddings of simple folk—once I even remember a gypsy funeral—ladies’ night at the masonic lodge, and the British Legion get-together. I went to them all and watched and listened and made my own judgements. To be the hired help is to be helpless in the face of taunts and insults. Just as the waitress gets blamed for the quality of the soup, so will the band get blamed for the non-vitality of the guests. If the guests won’t dance when the host expects them to, has depended on them to, that’s the band’s fault and they don’t get paid, or only after an argument. As the wine waiter trots back and forth to establish the status of the customer as connoisseur, so the band will be required to play the most tricky musical number—‘Maryland’ for example—to prove the musical expertise of one or other, of the revellers.

If I, the child groupie, was noticed—and I tried to make myself invisible—I would be treated in kindly enough fashion, but as something of a curiosity. Also, I used to think, as an embarrassment, as if the presence of children put a damp blanket on everything; made flirtation self-conscious, drunkenness difficult, dancing almost disgraceful. If the English do not like children, it is because they think they ought to behave properly, responsibly and quietly in their presence and can never riot or have a good time when they’re around. Children are real party-poopers. Ask Brenda. I learned a good deal about the role of food and drink as a socio-economic indicator. In the palace, the castle, the country house, the wine would be good but the food tasteless, and the band given beer and sandwiches on the assumption that this would be their preference. The middle classes would serve sour cheap wine but exotic foods and the band would eat whatever the guests ate, but not for long: the hosts having paid for the band to play, not to eat. The lower classes—if we talk about upper and middle how can we not talk about lower?—served tea, beer, gin and stodgy food, cut as often as not into hamfisted wedges, fit to fill the belly not the hand, and, understanding that the band was working for a living, treated it with respect and decorum. Everyone got happily drunk together and a good time was had by all; so long as the band kept the beat, what they played was immaterial. I was given, in all circles, a great deal of orange squash, then as now considered the drink most fit for children, though only loosely connected to the orange. I can tell you that the further down the social scale we went the brighter and sweeter and richer the orange squash, and the more I loved it.

In the palace, in the castle, at the hunt ball and the country house men brayed like donkeys and women shrieked and swooped like owls: the middle classes made me fidgety with their concern—was I not out too late? Was my father being nice to me? Not
too
nice? Wouldn’t I fall asleep in class tomorrow? Wouldn’t I like to curl up on the sofa?—and mostly I enjoyed the sweaty heaving pleasures of the British Legion do, where the guests galumphed and the men got drunk and waved bottles around—and one thing I noticed through all the ranks of society, no matter what the background, or the income, or the form the party took, was that as the evening wore on women would begin to look pained and patient and longed to get home, but didn’t like to say so for fear of being accused of ruining the evening’s fun. Men do so dislike women who stand between them and drink.

In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no drinking before six in the evening and no one will mind, because life will be okay without it. It will be the custom rather than the law. We will have as few laws as possible. Persuasion will replace compulsion. To be drunk will be recognized as a symptom not of manliness but of extreme unhappiness, and since only on rare occasion do we want to broadcast the fact of our unhappiness to the world, the lager lout, the whisky soak, the sherry drunk will become a rarer and rarer phenomenon, until finally withering away.