John Denham, the Communities Secretary, was right to point out last week that class is now a bigger problem in Britain than race. It makes no sense to talk about ethnic minorities as intrinsically disadvantaged in a world where “black” Somali and “black” Nigerian immigrants to the UK have wildly differing socioeconomic profiles, where 58 per cent of boys from families of “Asian” Indian origin make it to university, whereas only 29 per cent of their peer group from “Asian” Bangladeshi families do so, and where Britain’s Chinese community is wealthier than the white population.
In my experience too ethnicity is much less of a stumbling block than class. Whereas I could count the number of serious racial incidents I’ve endured in my life on the fingers of my hands, class causes problems all the time. Whenever I begin thinking I’m finally middle class — having benefited from a grammar school education, which taught me the importance of pretending you have no bodily functions, having been to Cambridge, which taught me which way to pass the port, and having a career in Fleet Street, which has taught me, among other things, about the importance of placing awards in the loo — something happens to remind me that I’m the child of factory workers.
Take the knife-and-fork thing, for example. Admittedly, I was a late developer, given that I didn’t start using British cutlery until I started having free meals at school. At home, we used hands and/or spoons, but knives and forks, along with drinking Baileys are, I’m glad to say, something I’ve mastered in subsequent decades. Or at least, I thought I had until I was castigated the other day for eating peas incorrectly.
Apparently —and this was news to me — you are not meant to turn a fork over and push the peas on to the concave side of the utensil and into your gob, as if you were using a spoon. To be properly middle class you are meant to skewer a couple of peas with the prongs of your fork and then push a couple more on to the back, convex side, of the fork with the knife, using the skewered peas as a kind of shelf to stop them rolling off and scoff them that way, even though doing so is highly inefficient and feels about as natural as rubbing your head and tummy at the same time. What the hell is all that about?
Another thing that I don’t understand: the role that John Lewis plays in middle-class life. In my experience, the store is badly stocked, the service lethargic and, despite its claim that it is never knowingly undersold, wildly overpriced. An opinion I had confirmed when I was given a quote from John Lewis for having blinds fitted in my flat that was three times the amount from an internet company, which also offered to do the work four times more quickly. And yet, the middle classes continue to drift there like moths to a lamp. What is the appeal? Nor do I understand the obsession of the middle class with Marks & Spencer: like John Lewis, it is overpriced and badly stocked, Sainsbury’s and Tesco are much cheaper and more efficient, and all the middle classes do is moan about M&S anyway.
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Yet they keep returning. Why?
Other things I don’t understand: hiding the TV set you’ve bought at vast expense (from John Lewis) in a cabinet; concealing copies of the Radio Times inside a folder made of Moroccan leather; phony apologetic self-denigration (the second home in Umbria is “just a little hovel”); large smelly moulting dogs; lavatory roll holders/bog seat covers (less hygienic than the alternative); slippers (why not just wear shoes or socks?); theatre (a dead art form); occasionally lapsing into French (“Je reste mon valise”, etc); putting milk in a jug instead of pouring it from the bottle; pointless self-denigration (about one’s self-built house: “Oh it’s just something I cobbled together”); mock-denigration of one’s children (about trainee surgeon son: “Oh, he just prods people for a living”); fish knives; warming plates for dinner; country walks in the wind and rain; ski holidays (freezing cold, high risk of serious injury); smelly cheeses; never talking directly about how much you paid for your house; sandwiches with the crusts cut off; lapsang souchong black tea; green wellies; referring to your bank manager by his or her first name; wanting your daughter to marry a bank manager; scented drawer liners; sharing chips (when it is not permissible to share any other English food).
But by far the most bewildering thing about the middle classes, the thing that makes me think that it’s a club to which I may never fully belong, is the attitude towards the upper classes. I grew up, and I think this is a common working-class attitude, regarding the upper classes as braying and utterly ludicrous and would no more want to be one of them than wish to contract TB. But it transpires the middle classes have a more reverential attitude.
I guess this should have been obvious from the fuss the English make over U and non-U English usage, in which the question of whether you say “vegetables” or “greens”, “ill” or “sick”, “looking-glass” or “mirror”, “napkin” or “serviette”, “lavatory” or “toilet”, “what?” or “pardon?”, “master” or “teacher” supposedly betrays whether you are middle or upper class. But I never took any of this stuff seriously and for me the penny dropped only when I read Thinly Disguised Autobiography, a novel/memoir by James Delingpole, in which the narrator, a middle-class boy from the Midlands, whose father buys suits from M&S, whose mother drives an XR3i, and who grows up in a house where the door bell goes “bing bong”, spends the mid-Eighties, having been influenced by the TV dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited and the Sloane Ranger Handbook, trying to be upper class.
So he goes to Oxford and tries to belong to the Grom, “the pointless, asinine, drinking society which meets after hall on Mondays to consume the regulation five pints of bitter in the Buttery, followed by the regulation death kebab and regulation five tequila slammers in George’s wine bar”. He looks up to people called Rufus who can “carry off a silk dressing gown” and have titled ancestors. And — get this — he actually tries to sound like a toff, slurring his speech ( “abslymaarvlous”, “nicetoseeyoulookingsowell”, “a’solutely”) and practising other waf-waf-waf, I’m-so-frightfully-grand nonsense.
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Frankly, this discovery that the middle classes look up to the social grouping above them, has been a’solutely shocking. And it makes me suspect that I’ll never be entirely middle class, in the way that I’ll never entirely enjoy Baileys or be John Denham.