Class (26 page)

Whereas in the old days the great fear was that one’s daughter would become a prostitute now it’s the young lads, referred to as ‘rent boys’, who run away from home, go up to what is known as the ‘Meat Rack’ in Piccadilly and hawk their bodies for £15 a throw.

One interesting point is that the working classes seem to get less flak than other classes when they tell their parents they’re homosexual.

‘My parents found out when I was about 18,’ said an East-Ender. ‘This boy kept writing to me. We don’t get many letters in our house, and I told Mum I was going to spend Easter with him. She said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I said, “No.” Well, I had a lousy Easter worrying about her, and the moment I got home I said, “I have got something to tell you, I’m homosexual.” Her reaction was, “Oh, thank God. I thought it was drugs.” I went to a shrink and he wasn’t any help, so now everyone’s accepted it. A lot of my gay mates are frightened of shrinks. The moment you tell them you’re gay, they leap on you. There’s a change in my Dad too. Before, he was always very undemonstrative, but now we get on very well, and he often puts a hand on my arm and says, “Are you all right, son?” My mum and dad don’t mind what friends say, because they haven’t got many friends; they’re too much into the family.’

One gets the impression that because the mother-son link is so strong in the working classes, a lot of them are subconsciously not displeased if their sons turn out queer: there won’t be any daughter-in-law problems and there won’t be the macho rivalry between father and son, when the son gets married to some lovely girl and starts jackbooting around the house. Since the working classes have large families, there’ll be other children to provide the grandchildren, and anyway there isn’t this middle- and upper-class obsession with carrying on the line. Nor, like Jen Teale, do they care much what the neighbours think. In fact they enjoy their sons bringing home all these nice young men.

Further up the social scale parents put appalling pressure on middle-class only sons who turn out to be gay, and don’t produce grandchildren to boast about at bridge parties.

‘All hell broke loose,’ said one middle-class girl, ‘when my parents discovered I was a lesbian. They read some of my girlfriend’s letters, and immediately started turning it all on themselves: “What have we done to deserve this? Where did we go wrong?” They packed me straight off to a psychiatrist, but as they’re both doctors, they made me use a false name. My girlfriend and I are still together after 6 years, but my parents won’t accept her, or stop harping on it.’

Rather like the lower-middle-class lesbian who fell in love with a married woman. When the married woman’s daughter got married:

‘I was allowed to act as chauffeur, fetching the cake and the bouquet, ferrying the bride’s mother to the Registry office, where I had to stay outside so no one would associate me with Pauline, then ferrying her to the reception. I wasn’t allowed to that either. They were ashamed I looked too masculine and might shock the bridegroom’s parents.’

The upper-class attitude to homosexuality is the same as it used to be towards heterosexuality. Marry well and produce an heir at all costs; then do what you like.

Samantha Upward, being terribly ‘aware’, would be particularly nice to homosexual men, trapping them at parties, because she wants to show them that she feels no animosity towards men she knows can never find her sexually attractive.

Howard Weybridge ‘comes out’ on the golf course at 45, and suddenly appears at dinner parties in white suits with brushed forward hair. His son, similarily inclined, works in a prep school.

Bryan Teale would have an absolutely miserable time at the office party, avoiding all the secretaries and longing to dance with one of the packers. He also has problems when his boss gives him two tickets for a function. He can’t take a man and if he takes a girl she’s bound to get ideas and expect him to kiss her goodnight. If the office gets too much he might become a male nurse or a purser, or work in the men’s department in a big store.

Some of the happiest marriages, in fact, are when homosexuals marry upper-class ladies, a kind of ‘with my buddy I thee worship’. The sex side works, because the upper-class woman doesn’t expect much, and the man just shuts his eyes and thinks of Benjamin Britten. Being a raging snob, the homosexual adores all the grand side of it, organizing smart parties and inviting all his prettiest menfriends. The wife, used to the male chauvinism of the aristocracy, is entranced to have a husband who can help her decorate her house, run her social life, advise her on clothes, cook delicious meals, and provide hordes of personable young men to chat away amusingly and quite safely for hours to all the gairlfriends. The two classic examples of such liasons in modern literature are Lady Montdore and Cedric in
The Pursuit of Love
and Norman Chandler and Mrs Foxe in
A Dance to the Music of Time
.

Homosexuals, because they are insecure and sometimes effeminate feel that socially they have to try harder. They worry terribly about accents, vocabulary, and laying the table properly. They always write letters after dinner parties, and send you change of address cards saying ‘Crispin and Terence are moving to . . .’ Because they have such good taste, their houses are often more upper class than they are.

I think because it’s euphemistic, Harry Stow-Crat would not use the word ‘gay’, nor would he say ‘homo’ or ‘lezzie’. Harry Stow-Crat’s mother would say ‘roaring pansy’; Harry would probably say ‘homosexual’ with a long ‘o’. Samantha, to show off her knowledge of Greek, would shorten the ‘o’. Gideon would say ‘queer’. Jen Teale would say ‘one of them’. Mr Definitely-Disgusting, luxuriating in alliteration, would talk about ‘effing fairies, like’. An old-fashioned expression used to be ‘T.B.H.’ (which Samantha muddles up with G.B.H.) meaning ‘To Be Had’. Also, in the old days, one used to say, ‘Is he
So
?’

9   HOUSES

I recall, I recall, the property where I was a happy event.

It is not possible to determine what class a person is solely from the house he lives in. Some of the upper classes have execrable taste and don’t give a fig about their surroundings, while some working-class people—probably homosexual—may have an instinctive sense of what is beautiful. How people do up their house is also considerably affected by fashion. A few years ago flying ducks were only acceptable if they were outside and moving. Now they’ve become
kitsch
and the young and trendy, raising two fingers to convention, are putting them on their walls. Or take someone who’s just moved into a new house. The haste with which they explain away the ox-blood fleur-de-lys wallpaper in the drawing-room as the taste of a previous owner might be more an indication of social insecurity than the wallpaper itself.

Electric logs have long been considered a Jen Teale indicator. My husband once worked for a man, whose son (an Old Etonian whom I will call Ambrose) asked us to dinner. The other guests were a very smart couple, whom Ambrose was determined to impress. We arrived first to find him switching off some electric logs in the drawing-room. He was worried the smart couple might think them common.

‘My mother, being Spanish, has terrible lapses of taste,’ he said apologetically.

So the three of us sat frozen to death until the smart couple arrived an hour later. Instantly some devil overtook my husband. He crossed the room and switched on the logs.

‘Have you seen Ambrose’s mother’s splendid fire?’ he asked the smart couple.

There was a ghastly pause. Ambrose’s face whitened like that of someone close to death. The merry flickering of the electric logs was nothing to the blaze of rage in his eyes. The evening was a disaster and my husband was fired within three months.

And yet I know two peers of the most ancient lineage who have electric log fires. One even has bright blue water in his lavatory—the upper classes do what they want.

Nevertheless, the house that you live in, like the education you receive and the accent you speak with, is one of the determining factors that indicate the class you belong to. A girl I know was terribly keen on a tall, thin, very aristocratic-looking young man until she discovered that he lived with his mother in a bungalow in East Sheen.

In Putney, where I live, the people in the big Victorian houses on the Common look down slightly, albeit unconsciously, on the people in the large semi-detached houses in the next road who in turn look down on people in similar houses in a street with slightly heavier traffic, who in turn look down on the people in the neoGeorgian houses on the edge on the common, who in turn despise the people in the terrace houses behind them who won’t have anything to do with the Council estate beside the river.

In
Voices from the Middle Classes
by Jane Deverson and Katherine Lindsay, a journalist is quoted as saying:

‘A house is a complex thing; it represents a social position. We found living where we were (a smartish London suburb) without meaning till we had acquired several friends who see themselves as the same sort of people as we were because they live in the same sort of house. Painting and decorating is a middle-class thing,’ he went on. ‘You say you’ve been decorating and you get an immediate response.’

Harry Stow-Crat wouldn’t dream of painting his own house or putting up shelves and would regard any such activity as distinctly working-class. Equally, Mr Definitely-Disgusting wouldn’t bother to do up his house either because he considers it the council’s responsibility. The moment he buys his own house, however, he crosses one of the great class divides from Council Tenant to Owner Occupier and starts to become bourgeois. He’ll immediately drop the word ‘mortgage’ in the public bar, and begin building a new porch or slapping paint on the front of the house to distinguish it from the houses on either side and to show he’s not Council anymore.

The expression ‘they live in a bought house’ would be a term of admiration among the working classes, but of contempt from the upper classes who have usually lived in their own house for generations, inheriting it as they inherit their furniture and silver. (One of the upper-class definitions of the middle classes is the sort of people who buy their own silver—particularly when they call it ‘cutlery’.)

Another crucial point to remember is that the Stow-Crats of today were the Nouveau-Richards of a few hundred years ago. ‘How often have I wondered,’ wrote Lord David Cecil, ‘at the difference between the stately beauty of a great house, so exalting and tranquillizing, and the fierce restless unscrupulous character of the men who were so often responsible for its original building. Perhaps a gentler, more contented spirit would not have felt the urge and vitality to create such buildings.’

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the very rich Yorkshire baronet, Sir John Smithson, married Elizabeth, sole heiress of the rich and ancient family of Percy. So great was the extent of their joint estate that Sir John was able to persuade George III to grant him the dukedom of Northumberland. Anxious to establish his new status, the first Duke set about transforming Alnwick, the neglected castle of the Percys. Capability Brown (who’d been such a success at Warwick Castle) was called in to rebuild the towers and add seven turrets and a complete new garrison of stone warriors was stationed on the battlements. At the same time Robert Adam arrived to re-gothicize the interior. Everything was done to make the castle as luxurious and self-consciously picturesque as possible. And no doubt the old aristocracy, who regarded any peer created after the Middle Ages as an upstart, thought the whole thing both phoney and vulgar.

So it was that generations of new noblemen harnessed the best talents of their time, as today David Mlinaric and David Hicks move around forming the tastes of the uncertain and the newly rich.

In the same way the pop star who makes it big immediately buys a large house in the Thames Valley with high walls and installs burglar alarms and vigilante systems as daunting as any medieval drawbridge to keep out the fans. He will decorate it to the nines to impress other rising pop stars, and in his spare time take up market gardening, breeding race horses and farming. The Rolls is replaced by a Range Rover. The Showaddy Waddy even hunt with the Quorn.

What is regarded as the height of vulgarity today—the huge oval bed humming with dials or the onyx and marble double bath with 22-carat gold-plated mixer taps—will probably be considered exquisitely beautiful when it is unearthed from the rubble in the year 2500. Certainly the furniture and building trades would grind to a halt if it weren’t for people erecting monuments to new splendour or ripping out the taste of previous owners because they consider it too grandiose or too vulgar.

Although they may have originally been built, to quote Ivy Compton-Burnett, ‘as huge monuments to showing off, few buildings quicken the pulses more than the great English country house, with its ‘towers and battlements . . . bosom’d high in tufted trees’, its sneering stone lions at the gate, and long avenue of chestnuts leading up to the russet walls rising gently from soft billowing green lawns which eventually melt into the park.

Harry Stow-Crat does not refer to his house as a stately home but as an ‘’istoric hice’. Perhaps he pronounces ‘house’ as ‘hice’, because he usually has more than one, like mouse and mice. The word ‘home’ except for putting ‘At Home’ on an invitation or saying ‘I’m going home’ is very common. It has been taken up by the media, so now you have the awful ‘stately home’, ‘family home’, or, even worse, ‘they live in a lovely home’. Other horrors include ‘homebuying’ instead of ‘buying a house’ or ‘home improvements’ instead of ‘painting ones house’.