Class

by Jilly Cooper

  The tragedy is that the council-house tenant has no mobility. The man who owns his own house and who doesn’t fit into the bridge and golf club set can always move away, but the council tenant is stuck where he’s put and with whom he’s put. If he doesn’t like his next-door neighbour he can’t move out until the council says so and then he may be suddenly moved to an estate with higher rent and central heating which has to be paid for. He has no gift of the gab, so he can’t air his grievances, no clout and no Surrey Tenants’ Association to fight for his rights.

  Meanwhile the chasm between house-owner and council tenant grows wider. ‘The trouble with Surrey’, grumbled one of the foreigners who couldn’t get anyone to re-thatch his roof, ‘is that there are no real yokels left.’ Rather like the earnest woman who said that the trouble with the Third World was that there was no middle-class.

  In other parts of England, of course, the class division is much more hierarchical, the upper classes in rural areas getting on much better with the working classes than the middle-class professional man whom they both despise and regard as an upstart.

  In any hierarchy, in fact, you are likely to find each class trying to segregate itself from the class below. In Wolverhampton council tenants had to make a three-quarters-of-a-mile detour rather than walk two hundred yards through an owner-occupied estate. ‘I don’t want them coming through here,’ said one house owner, ‘playing their radios, dropping ice cream papers, pulling up tulips and our little willows. Someone even stole our pet rabbit.’

  Another example was in Dawlish, where the council planned a two-storey housing estate, but was subjected to such an outcry from nearby house owners that they turned them into bungalows. ‘I mean,’ protested one woman, ‘they would have been able to look into our large picture windows and seen us at our meals and in our private life.’

  At the bottom of the scale, when some Romney Marsh gypsies were re-housed in a council estate, all the council tenants got up a petition and had them thrown out.

  ‘These people are really not our class. We don’t think New Church is the right place for them.’

  11 GARDENS

  Climax into the patio, Maud.

  The Englishman traditionally loves his garden. It needs cherishing and tending, but doesn’t answer back. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that class distinction should be almost more rampant outside the house than in it. Once again garden centres—like furniture shops—do a roaring trade because of snobbery. People are constantly ripping up the plants and paving stones of previous owners—‘Too ghastly, my dear’. I remember being mystified once when a friend came to stay. We were having tea outside, enjoying the sunshine and the quiet (for once the aeroplanes were silent) when suddenly she fixed me with a beady eye and said,

  ‘You know, its frightfully common to have Peace in one’s garden.’

  It was a few minutes before I realized that she was referring to the beautiful pink and yellow rose next to the magnolia which flowers so gallantly and continually all summer. I can only suppose that she thought it was vulgar because it is so universally popular.

  In the same way Caroline Stow-Crat wouldn’t touch gladioli, begonias and chrysanthemums, or fuchsias— except in the conservatory. Also on the index would be gaudy bedding plants like petunias, French marigolds, calceolarias, cinerarias, calendulas, salvia, Californian poppies, zinnias, asters and yellow daisies, although Michaelmas daisies and white daisies are all right. Colour is also important: the white and green tobacco plants are much more upper-class than the red or mauve ones and dark red wallflowers better than yellow or mauve. Trails of pale blue lobelia are all right, but Oxford blue is very common, particularly when combined in military rows with white alyssum and scarlet geraniums. Caroline wouldn’t be keen on any flower of a different colour to that which nature intended—blue roses, brown irises, pink forget-me-nots or daffodils. Daffodils should be planted in long grass, not in flower beds. She hates regimented tulips. If she had rhododendrons she would have not individual ones, but great clumps lining the drive. A friend once asked a West Country peer how he achieved his magnificent multi-coloured display.

  ‘Oh, I move them around,’ said the peer. ‘When I want to change the colour scheme, I just get twenty men up from the factory.’

  ‘Yellow and green should never be seen’, so Caroline would soon rip out anything variegated such as laurels or, even worse, privet and mother-in-law’s tongue.

  Some trees are more upper-class than others: one thinks of great flat-bottomed oaks, beeches, limes and chestnuts, that look, as Taine said, as though they’d been tended for hundreds of years like the children of rich parents.

  If you discount the cedars planted by Capability Brown, indigenous trees are considered much smarter than foreign ones, which is why the white double cherry scores over the imported pink one, and why the Stow-Crats tend to despise the silver birches and conifers of Surrey. Willow trees are all right growing naturally by a lake or stream, but would be considered the height of vulgarity in the middle of a suburban lawn, particularly if planted in a circle of earth.

  The suburbs in spring, with their candy-floss mass of pink and white cherry, dark pink crab-apple, almond, laburnum and lilac, are quite beyond the pale. Pink hawthorn, although considered much more common by the upper classes than white, is for some reason more acceptable in the suburbs.

  The names of buildings in the garden are also pronounced differently. Harry Stow-Crat says ‘garidge’; Samantha Upward, wanting to show off her French pronunciation, says ‘gar-azh; the Weybridges say ‘gar-arge’ in order to upstage the lower-middles who say ‘garidge’ like Harry Stow-Crat. Mrs Nouveau-Richards has a carport. Harry has a ‘gaz-ee-bo’ in his garden. Samantha calls it a ‘summerhouse’, while Mrs. Nouveau-Richards reclines in her ‘gayze-bow’. Harry pronounces ‘loggia’ ‘lodger’, but the Weybridges call it a ‘lowjea’, in case there is any confusion about paying guests when someone says Howard is relaxing on the loggia. A friend says that his very grand grandmother used to refer to ants as ‘aunts’, saying, ‘There’s an aunt-heap in the garden’, which sounds like a great fleshy pyramid of maiden ladies.

  The point about the upper-class garden is that it should look as ‘natural’ as possible—great sweeps of mown grass leading down to the lake, huge trees with new little saplings always being planted and nurtured, trout streams, parks full of deer, and cows swishing their tales knee deep in the buttercups. Away from the house there might be a series of flower gardens, divided by walls, or hedges of box or yew, a conservatory full of nectarines, peaches and the oldest vine in Europe, a herb garden and a huge vegetable garden. Around the house, plants will grow in genuine Versailles pots, which are made of wood, are square and topped with balls. ‘Everything to do with balls is very U,’ says Harry Stow-Crat.

  But everything would be mellowed and weather-beaten, the walls and roof of the house ‘stained by time and many-coloured lichens, and overgrown with creeper to a richly variegated greyish red’. The drive would be made of stone chippings or gravel—not black tarmac or concrete like the M.1.

  The Stow-Crats are very keen on vistas (Mr Nouveau-Richards thinks they’re something to do with chicken curries). Through a gap in a wood you might see a temple of Flora, a folly or a bend in the river. But it must look natural.

  The great gardens, in fact, show the ideal blending of classic and romantic. At Sissinghurst, Nigel Nicolson attributes the firm perspective of the vistas, the careful siting of an urn of a statue, the division of the garden into a series of small separate gardens to his father’s classical influence.

  But, in the overflowing clematis (Howard Weybridge would call it clematis) figs, vines and wistaria, in the rejection of violent colours or anything too tame and orderly, one discovered his mother’s romanticism: ‘Wild flowers were allowed to invade the garden. If plants strayed over the path they must not be cut back. Rhododendrons must be banished in favour of their tender cousin the azalea, roses must not electrify, they m
ust seduce.’

  Once again the secret is sweet disorder and faded Beatrix Potter colours. Weeds in moderation don’t matter, because the plants are so closely massed they don’t show the earth beneath. A dearth of earth is very upper class.

  Sissinghurst, too, is the elder sister of the cottage garden—a law unto itself with all the flowers the Stow-Crats love jockeying for position: rosemary, drifts of lavender, ramparts of honeysuckle, an ancient wistaria, sweet peas, hollyhocks, lupins, delphiniums, pinks and mignonettes, love-in-the-mist and cornflowers, clove carnations, pansies, sweet william, white stocks and phlox, Canterbury bells and lilies; moss and plants instead of cement fill the cracks in the flagstones.

  Percy Lubbock, writing about the easy abundance of a particular upper-class garden, realizes that it’s not the plants themselves but the way they are planted that matters: ‘Lobelia stripes, for example, and those marigold patches, which might have looked harsh and hard, (one knows how smartly odious they can look in a well-kept garden) all rejoiced together, rambling and crowding in liberal exuberance. The gardener might wreak his worst will, but the free soul of the garden escaped him and bloomed tumultuously.’

  A garden like that, however, requires not just money and genius (‘Planted 400 bulbs in the orchard this afternoon,’ wrote Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson) but also gardeners you can bully.

  In the old days gardeners used to wash all the vegetables and take the thorns off the roses before they were sent up to the house. An eighteenth-century handbook advised them to look clean and neat: ‘Your employer will not wish to look on a dirty, ragged, uncouth, grinning or conceited bi-ped in his garden.’ They were also instructed to ‘put the manure on the flower beds early in the morning, so the putrescent vapours may not prove offensive to the owner of the garden and his friends.’

  But as costs get higher and gardeners get scarcer, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up a large and beautiful garden. In the country, gardens tend to get smaller and smaller, and the orchards bigger and bigger. Donkeys are becoming increasingly popular for keeping the lawn down. That mixture of concern and self-interest which always colours the master-servant relationship was neatly summed up by a woman I met at a party the other day who said:

  ‘Our darling old gardener died last week—isn’t it maddening!’

  In Harry Stow-Crat’s London garden you find a few bulbs in window boxes, followed by pink geraniums and ivy, followed by irises and Albertine, a pale pink rose which stops flowering in June. After that the upper classes are always out of London so it doesn’t matter what their gardens look like.

  In the country the upper-middles tend to have beautiful gardens, with shrubberies and herbaceous borders more related to the house and not set aside in separate gardens, although the vegetable garden will be separate. Plants and flowers grow round the house and on the terrace you might see imitation plaster Versailles pots by Julian Jenkinson, an Old Etonian who copied them very successfully from genuine pots at Lord Harcourt’s house. The lawn will be well tended, but there will be more brown patches on the lawn because upper-middle-class dogs are less likely to pee in the house than upper-class dogs. As manure is seldom available all the time, there will also be greater interest in compost. The roses and dahlias will be very fine and the colours slightly brighter than in the upper-class garden. As we go down the social scale gardens tend to become neater and gaudier.

  Samantha Upward is very proud of her green fingers, particularly as she lives in London. She reads Wordsworth to her potted plants, rushes out with a shovel every time the police horses go by and, by feeding Zacharias’ daffodil with John Innes and Liquinure, she won him first prize in his form’s flower-growing competition. But, alas, the herb garden she planted so she could have all the ingredients in Elizabeth David’s recipes has been turned into a cats’ lavatory by visiting toms. She knows, too, that plastic flower pots and plastic hanging baskets are frightfully common, but such is the greenness of her fingers that she couldn’t possibly afford pottery flower pots for all her plants. She’s also far too soft-hearted to rip out that variegated horror donated by a neighbour that time she had shingles, or the rose that looked the palest pink in the catalogue, but turned out bright crimson and clashes horribly with the da-glo orange rose beside it. She knows, too, that dear funny Sir John Betjeman said that every time he looked at a rhododendron he thought of a stock-broker, so she moved her two mauve ones under the catalpa, but, alas, they’re doing terribly well. At least she hasn’t descended to crocuses in a wheelbarrow, or a plastic Venus de Milo like the one on the patio next door which melted at their last barbecue party.

  Her garden would really be quite lovely if only she could stop the gardener, who comes two hours a week, planting tulip bulbs in serried ranks like the ones outside Buckingham Palace. But if she checks him she’s terrified he’ll take offence and not turn up next week.

  Gideon and Samantha sit in their garden on a Sunday morning, swilling back the chilled wine saying, ‘This is the life!’ and watching the half-leg of lamb rotating jerkily on the barbecue, wafting intimations of garlic, rosemary and envy into the nearby council estate.

  THE SUBURBS

  ‘Ewbank’d inside and Atco’d out, the English suburban residence and the garden which is an integral part of it stand trim and lovingly cared for in the mild sunshine. Everything is in it’s place. The leaves of the Virginia creeper which climbs the rough-cast wall just below the best bedroom hardly stir.

  J.M. Richards

  The Castles on the Ground

  Nothing has really changed in the suburbs. When we lived in a working-class part of Fulham no one minded that we never bothered with our garden. A few neighbours grew vegetables and fought a losing battle with visiting torn cats, but the rest of us let the weeds flourish and chucked our beer cans and spare-rib bones over each other’s fences when we ran out of dustbin space. Only when we moved to Putney, a Madam Butterfly land of cherry trees and flowering shrubs, and inherited a beautifully kept garden which we promptly let go to rack and ruin, did we discover that gardening here was taken very seriously indeed. Soon the whole street were clicking their tongues over our hayfield of a lawn and making cracks about calling in the Forestry Commission to deal with the weeds. Finally a kindly neighbour could bear it no longer and found a gardener to come in three hours a week and sort us out.

  More recently the local Conservation Association, which howls with protest if so much as a harebell is touched on the common, produced stern proposals, which were circularized round the district, for tidying up the garden of the only house along the common that happened to be owned by the council. This, they felt, was letting down the tone of the road by the number of weeds. At any minute one expected the dandelion detector van to be policing the streets bleeping noisily outside offending gardens. My husband suggested it would be far cheaper to declare the garden in question an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty; then the weeds and wild flowers could riot unimpeded.

  Though Putney is more upper-middle than suburban, the idea of not letting down the street is shared by the suburbs further out. Few people there are dedicated gardeners in the winter. Unlike the upper classes, they stay inside in bad weather. But, come the first temperate weekend, suburban man peers out of his window at his colourless plot and thunders off to the garden centre to load up the Volvo with bags of John Innes, bedding plants, do-it-yourself cucumber kits, and a plaster fig-leafless cherub to upstage the plastic Dolphin regurgitating blue water on the patio next door.

  For the suburban gardener is deeply competitive: he doesn’t want anyone else to let down the street, so that his own glory may be greater when his garden is the best. Rivalry is particularly fierce over roses. Hybrid teas and floribundas mass in clashing colours above a totally weedless flower bed. You can’t get a lie-in at weekends either; it’s like the pits at Silverstone with the roar of all the mowers revving up, interspersed by the excruciating, teeth-grating rattle as they drive over the crazy pavement
.

  The patio is also a focal point, a mosaic of Italian titles, covered with plastic urns filled with striped petunias, deckchairs with foot-rests, canopies and seed-packet upholstery, and sun umbrellas bought with Green Shield stamps.

  The Weybridged house has a circular gravel drive bordered by ‘rhodos’, ‘in’ and ‘out’ entrances with no gates, an up-and-over garage door, a swimming pool which, despite its barrage balloon cover, is filled in winter with dead leaves and sparrows, and a dog yard for the terriers to dry off in. Having gone one step up from the suburban garden with its high laurel hedges, Weybridged houses are often open-plan with no dividing fences at all, although there might be a hedge of conifers to shelter the roses from the wind, or interlaced larch fencing around the vegetable garden. Here Howard and Eileen sit in their summer house admiring the well-tended lawn with its crazy-paving stepping stones, the conifers and golden willow in their little circles of earth, the beautifully kept shrubberies full of pampas grass and bamboo, and the thrushes pecking at the rack-of-lamb bone, which hangs from the dovecote (pronounced dovecoat: Harry Stow-Crat says dovec’t). A heavily ferned stream flows under a wooden, willow-pattern bridge and over a waterfall by the heaths in the rock garden. Heather, except on the moors, is considered very vulgar by Harry Stow-Crat. Even its Latin name, erica, sounds frightfully common.