Class

by Jilly Cooper

  Moving down a generation, Gideon is very enthusiastic, but a bit mainline—Playboys in the lavatory and a finger under his next-door neighbour’s roll-on at New Year’s Eve parties. He knows all about middle-class sophistication and de-furred satisfaction and longs for Samantha to shave her bush off. She did once but it was awfully itchy, and as the whole family have baths together, it might have put Zacharias off his O-levels. But she’s frightfully understanding about Gideon’s Playboys and allows him to do anything he likes to her in bed, shutting her eyes and thinking of Great Britain and the Common Market. She does her yoga every morning to keep herself young and attractive.

  The best lover of all is the upper-middle-class intellectual. Having been made to run round by his mother when he was young, he’s into role reversal and a woman having as much pleasure as a man. His already vivid imagination has been encouraged by voracious reading. He’s just as randy as the aristocrat, but he tempers it with finesse and humility. Lucky the girl that lays the golden egghead.

  A male stud who has done extensive field work agrees that middle-class intellectual women are also best in bed. The Guardian reader, he says, is the easiest lay of them all, because she feels she ought to be liberated and knows all about rejection and blows to the male ego. She always refers to coming as ‘a climax’, says ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ and talks about her friends having ‘lovely breasts’.

  The lower-middles tend to be too cautious. It’s all ‘nudge nudge’, prurience and not much pleasure. Jen Teale is also terribly difficult to get at because she wears such an armour-plating of full-length petticoats, which she calls ‘slips’, corselettes, five pairs of ‘punties’, tights with trousers, which she calls ‘punts’, and ‘punty girdles’. Dainty and fastidious, she would never make love while she has the curse (which she calls a ‘period’) and she is ‘revollted’ by anything slightly off-centre. Afterwards she says, ‘that was very pleasant, Bryan.’

  Mandy Rice-Davies, interviewed in a sex book, is a good example of lower-middle refinement: ‘Looking sexy is a very low-class turn-on . . . I’ve had brief affairs with Lord Astor and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. [here she displays parvenu boasting and lack of discretion] but none of those involved anything remotely kinky.’

  WORKING-CLASS SEX

  The working classes have a reputation for potency and being good in bed—a myth probably started by middle-class novelists and by graphologists who claim that anyone with loopy writing must be highly sexed. Randy they certainly seem to be. According to an Odhams Survey, the working-class couple makes love more than any other class, but the woman enjoys it less.

  ‘We don’t fight,’ said one builder’s wife, ‘only over money and sex, especially sex. He always wants it. He’d do it now if he came in and you weren’t here.’

  ‘Oh my Gawd!’

  Geoffrey Gorer maintains that the skilled worker (Class III) would appear to have more sexual energy than the other classes. But he says that there does not seem to be any factual basis for believing that the working classes in general are more sexually potent. He quotes an upholsterer who only had sex three or four times a month, and a welder who only had it once a month (perhaps he got stuck).

  Mrs D-D calls sex ‘having relations’ or ‘in-ercourse’. If there were any sexual problems, she would be far too embarrassed to discuss them. Mr D-D is not into foreplay; he uses that finger to read the racing results.

  A divorce lawyer told me that the working classes hardly ever see each other naked, probably because they often sleep in one room with the children, and if Mr D-D takes his clothes off Mrs D-D might see ‘Rosy’, ‘Mum’, ‘Nancy’ and ‘Doreen’ tattooed all over his body and get jealous. As he also imagines all women have retrousée tits, sopping wet hair and full make-up like page 3 of The Sun, Mrs D-D undressed might be a bit of a disappointment.

  MARRYING UP

  No one understood the nuances of class better than Chekhov. At the beginning of Three Sisters Natasha, Andrey’s fiancée, is seen as a lower-middle-class social outcast. Everyone laughs at her and the three sisters tell her her clothes are all wrong. Then she marries their brother and gradually she gains ascendancy. She starts bossing the sisters about, henpecking her husband and being beastly to the old servants (‘I don’t like having useless people about’). Soon she is cutting down trees on the estate and moving the sisters into smaller bedrooms, until by the end they are meekly taking criticism from her about their clothes.

  People who marry up are more insistent than most on having their new status recognized. I’m sure that Cophetua’s beggar maid, despite her lovesome mien, made a perfect nuisance of herself queening it over everyone, and we have all seen how the middle-class Princess Grace became far more regal than royalty once she landed Prince Rainier.

  One woman who married a duke suddenly insisted on having a room to herself at the hairdressers, ‘because I’m not just anyone anymore.’ Often they can’t quite master the new vocabulary.

  ‘We’re spending the weekend at Bath’s seat,’ said a secretary who’d just landed a peer.

  Women who marry up also become frightfully strict about their children’s manners, because they’re terrified that any lapse in behaviour will be attributed to a mother who doesn’t know what’s what. In the same way, stupid women who marry clever men are pushy about their children’s education. Middle-class women who marry into the upper classes say ‘se-uper’ a lot, and become very good cooks to cope with picky aristocratic appetites.

  When men marry up, they usually move away from their home town, buy horses and farms and take up patrician pastimes like hunting and shooting. They also become totally bilingual, putting on very grand voices when they’re out hunting, and lapsing into their mother tongue when they’re talking to garage mechanics.

  If you marry someone who constantly tells you you’re pretty, you begin to think you are. In the same way if you marry someone who thinks you’re frightfully grand, you begin to believe him. As a result lots of middle-class women married to working-class men get very smug and think they’re far more upper-class than they really are. Men who marry up often put their wives on pedestals and then run around with other women. Parvenus, in fact, are invariably unfaithful. It’s a back-handed blow for the class war. John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter is a classic example, as was the late President Kennedy. Upper-class women, brought up to expect infidelity, can handle this; that’s why they build up that network of jolly nice gairlfriends to fall back on; and anyway they’re so busy sitting on committees, organizing charity balls and wondering what to wear at Ascot that they don’t miss sex much.

  The middle classes, like Eileen Weybridge and Samantha Upward, can’t cope at all.

  ‘Oh Keith,’ said one middle-class wife, ‘I can’t bear to think of your penis in Mrs Peacock.’

  Which brings us to . . .

  ADULTERY

  The way to helly is paved with bed intentions

  Harry Stow-Crat has never been faithful to Caroline, like the earl who made a good start to his marriage by asking all his old girlfriends to sleep with him as a wedding present. Traditionally, as was pointed out in Chapter 1, marriages were arranged to improve one’s cash situation and to increase one’s land; one got one’s fun elsewhere. Not all aristocrats are rich, of course, but it is much easier to play around if you don’t have a job, own several places, have a helicopter (chopper) to whisk your mistresses round the country, and plenty of cash to take her to smart restaurants and hotels. Upper-class males also tend to lead separate lives from their wives in any case.

  ‘Where’s Daphne,’ I remember asking one peer. ‘Oh, she’s stalking in Scotland,’ came the reply (the prey wasn’t specified).

  If ennobled, aristocrats also have a perfect alibi in the House of Lords. One’s wife never knows if one’s in the House or not. In fact a friend recently discovered a peer screwing a girl on the woolsack, but no one sneaked on them; there is honour among strawberry leaves. Location can also curb the libido. A girlfriend of min
e said her lover, who was an Hon, wouldn’t even hold her hand if they were walking across the Knightsbridge side of the Park, but would neck ferociously on the nonsmart Bayswater side (because he was unlikely to see any of his wife’s smart friends up there). And in the undergrowth of Wimbledon Common he would fornicate freely (‘because there’s not the slightest possibility of ever bumping into anyone I know in the suburbs’).

  An aristocrat who came up to London to take me out to lunch booked a table at a restaurant in Holland Park, which he also regarded as suburbia and quite safe. Alas, we couldn’t get a taxi afterwards, and to his extreme consternation had to walk all the way to Knightsbridge before we could find one.

  Upper-class wives can occasionally be just as unbridled sexually. One even has two telephone numbers, one for business and an ex-directory hot line for lovers. She was livid when one editor (who was an ex-lover) rang her about feature on the lovers’ telephone. When one peer’s daughter discovered her M.P. lover had ditched her and returned to his wife, she stuck a huge placard on his car, which was parked in the street outside his house, saying:

  ‘Do you really want to vote for an adulterer?’

  The upper-middle classes used to concentrate on their careers to keep sin at bay. But all that changed with the advent of the country cottage. With Samantha in the country and Gideon at his little flat in the Barbican, the fun is unconfined, although Gideon’s frolics are slightly inhibited when Thalia decides to leave Wycombe Abbey early, take a secretarial course in London and live with Daddy.

  The seven-year itch often finds some basis for truth among the middle classes. Samantha marries at twenty-four, has Zacharias at twenty-six and Thalia at twenty-eight. Three years later, when she’s been married exactly seven years, Zacharias starts full-time school and Thalia goes to play group. For the first time in years she has the house free; she also has a feeling of nagging inadequacy—that the children are no longer a full-time job, justifying her being just a housewife. Hey Presto, in moves the lover.

  The upper-middles, not having living-in servants, often have a sexual renaissance when the children go to boarding school and they have the house to themselves for the first time in years. On the debit side, one friend said it was very difficult to keep lovers at arm’s length when one no longer had the excuse after a liquid lunch that one must rush away and pick up the children from school at four o’clock.

  All adultery grinds to a halt during the school hols, which is the main reason—not tiredness—why mothers get so bad-tempered. The lower-middles tend to be far too cautious to commit adultery; it might upset the extra bright children. Instead they go to wife-swapping parties and pool all the children with what they call a ‘sitter’. Sometimes Bryan Teale, when he’s not working out the commission he’s made that morning, makes love in the back of his car on the edge of the common in the lunch-hour, which is why he equips his car with cushions, and coat-hangers so that his cheap suit won’t crease.

  Working-class adultery, however, is much harder to achieve. No telephone to arrange appointments, possibly no car to draw up in lay-bys. Because of shift work and overtime, the lover never knows if the husband will be there or not . . . when the coast is clear the wife puts a packet of OMO in the front window, which stands for ‘Old Man Out’.

  The upper- and upper-middle classes talk about ‘having an affair’ with someone. The media and the trendy middle-class call it ‘having a relationship’. The working classes say ‘going with’; ‘I think he’s going with another woman.’

  IN-LAWS AND PARENTS

  Many working-class couples, unable to afford a place of their own, are forced to live with one set of parents after they are married, often with the wife’s mother bringing up the children. This is why the mother-in-law problem is more acute among the lower echelons, and is the basis for so many music hall jokes. In the past, when the mortality rate was very high and husbands were likely to desert or be put out of work, the wife had to fend for herself, so she clung to her own family, particularly her mother. As has been pointed out, many working-class men visit their mothers every day and, if their wives are working, go home for lunch. Although the old matriarchies are breaking down now that most couples can afford cars, and move to jobs away from home, working-class mothers tend to be far more possessive. At Christmas and birthdays they have truces and send each other large, spangled ‘Dearest Mother-in-Law’ or ‘Daughter-in-Law’ cards.

  Among the middle classes the social gradations are so complex that you often get both sets of parents thinking their offspring have married beneath them.

  ‘Oh, Tom has got a nice, little wife,’ a mother will say. ‘We’re getting used to her saying “garridge” and “Port-rait”.’ (‘Little’, as in ‘little shopgirls’, is a euphemism for ‘common’).

  If, however, the ‘nice, little wife’ looks after her husband well and produces a son fairly quickly, she will soon be forgiven her low caste. Heirs are a daughter-in-law’s crowning glory. In many ways, too, a slightly common daughter-in-law is preferable as long as she’s respectful, because it makes the mother-in-law feel superior. One girlfriend said she didn’t speak to her husband for three days after a weekend with her in-laws. In the middle of dinner her mother-in-law asked her to pass the cruet, and her son, half-jokingly said,

  ‘Oh, Angie thinks the word “cruet” is common.’

  In the same way, if Thalia Upward were to marry Dive Definitely-Disgusting, she would start making Mrs D-D feel that her anti-black and generally zenophobic attitudes were uncouth. Mrs D-D, in retaliation, would disapprove of the way Thalia made Dive do the housework, get his own supper when she went to maths workshops, and even went out to work when she needn’t.

  The middle classes, disliking friction, try to keep a superficial peace with their in-laws, even if they disapprove. The upper classes don’t bother. A middle-class friend of mine was pointedly told by her very grand old mother-in-law, ‘Divorce is considered perfectly respectable now.’

  On the middle-class front, one often gets antagonism between two sets of in-laws if the wife is working. Samantha’s parents say, ‘You must be getting so tired. Gideon really ought to be able to support you, darling.’ Colonel and Mrs Upward, nettled by such disapproval, retaliate with ‘Poor Gideon being hampered in his career by having to help with the housework and cook dinner when he gets home in the evening’.

  Parents whose children marry and move away often complain that young people today are selfish and ungrateful. ‘He’s become like that Greta Thingamy;’ grumbles Mrs D-D. ‘He wants to be alone.’

  One girl who married a man in the R.A.F. said it was a nightmare everytime her working-class parents came to stay.

  ‘Dad sneers every time Don brings out a bottle of wine at meals, and says, “We are pushing the boat out, aren’t we?” Then he expects Don to take him for a drink at the Officers’ Mess. If only they’d behave like the jolly kind of people they normally are.’

  ‘My daughter goes to sherry parties now,’ said another working-class mother sadly, ‘and has a little car of her own. She asks me to go and stay but I don’t go. I might show her up.’ Stay in your own world, you’re OK. Move up and you’re out of step.

  As Tracey Nouveau-Richards says,

  ‘If Dad wasn’t my dad, I’d laugh at him myself.’

  One lower-middle girl I know describes a horribly embarrassing occasion when she got engaged to a peer’s son and his father came for a drink to meet her parents.

  Her mother’s first words were,

  ‘We’re all of a flutter. We don’t know whether to call you “Your Grace” or “Dad”.’

  DIVORCE

  As you go down the social scale, the more rigid and unforgiving you find the attitude towards infidelity . . . The upper-middle-class couple, according to Geoffrey Gorer, believe in talking over the situation if they discover one of them is having an affair. The lower-middles would try and reconcile their differences, and get over what they hope will be a passing fancy. The
skilled worker might advocate separation but not divorce. But Classes IV and V would be all for punitive action: clobber the missus and clobber the bloke, and after that the only answer is divorce.

  Of all social classes, in fact, Class V clocks up the most divorces. This is probably because they marry so young, often having to get married, and because they find it impossible to discuss their problems when things go wrong. The husband can’t cope with the pressure of so many children, and as he often takes casual labouring jobs in other parts of the country, the temptation to shack up with another woman is very strong. He can sometimes get legal aid, and doesn’t have to pay for a divorce, and, finally, because the parental bond is so strong, it is quite easy for both husband and wife to go home and live with their own parents, whereas the middle-class wife, having achieved a measure of independence, would find this far more difficult.

  What else wrecks a marriage? The middle classes mind most about selfishness, conflicting personalities and sexual incompatibility, while the working-class wife objects to drinking, gambling and untidyness, and the husband going out on his own with his mates.

  Despite all the country cottages, Class I (engineers and oculists) has the fewest divorces, probably because they can’t afford two mortgages and two sets of school fees if they marry again, because no one’s going to give them legal aid, and because they think divorce would be bad for their careers.

  According to Ivan Reid’s Social Class in Britain, the lower-middles get divorced more frequently than the skilled workers. Maybe this is because the lower-middles, working together in offices, have more opportunity to meet the opposite sex on a long-term basis, while the skilled worker is stuck on the factory floor assembling tools. Maybe, too, the skilled worker has enough potency to keep both girlfriend and wife happy, and has no particular desire for a divorce.

  The aristocracy, statistically negligible though they may be, tot up more divorces even than Class V. Since the turn of the century, thirty-three per cent of all marquesses and earls have been married twice, twenty-four per cent of viscounts and twenty per cent of barons. That’s why Debrett’s is such a fat book, listing all the marriages.