Class

by Jilly Cooper

  In Harry Stow-Crat’s house an eternal battle rages between the cook, who keeps asking for tiny young carrots and potatoes because they’re more tender, and the gardener who wants them to grow to horticultural-show size.

  Conversely in street markets you can’t sell tiny potatoes, tomatoes or sprouts to Mrs Definitely-Disgusting because they appear to be a bad bargain. Many working-class eating habits are based on eking things out further. Sandwiches are left with the crusts on, lettuce is served with Heinz salad cream, so you need only use as much as you want, rather than wasting the whole thing by drenching it in French dressing. Mrs D-D’s cabbages always seem over-cooked because she uses everything and by the time the stalk and tough outer leaves are tender the inner leaves are overdone. Jen Teale calls them greens. As late as 1973 only 37 per cent of the working classes in Britain had refrigerators, which explains why they ate so much out of tins, and why so many things—beetroot, onions, herrings, cockles and whelks—are stored in vinegar to make them last.

  Because Mr Definitely-Disgusting likes frozen and marrow fat peas, Jen Teale would refer even to peas that came out of a field in Norfolk as ‘garden peas’. Mrs D-D in return would take the mickey out of Jen by saying he wouldn’t touch any of ‘them petty poys’. Jen would ask for ‘green’ beans, to distinguish them from the Cockney ‘biked’ beans, while Samantha Upward would say ‘French’ or ‘runner’ beans. Jen would talk about ‘creamed potatoes’ because it was one up on the working-class ‘mash’, not realizing that the upper- middles and uppers talk about mashed potatoes as well. She’d also call baked potatoes ‘jacket’ potatoes, which she’d cut in half horizontally, spread out like two halves of an Easter egg on a separate plate, and fill with sour cream. Jen thinks chips are very common. If she had to eat them she’d say ‘French fries’, but she’d rather have sauté potatoes, which Samantha calls ‘fried potatoes’.

  And so it goes on, the endless one-upping and upstaging between the classes. Another lower-middle expression, attempting to put down the Definitely-Disgustings, is ‘fresh fruit’ or ‘fresh cream’, to distinguish it from tinned fruit or cream. The classes above would just say fruit or cream; nor would they talk about ‘real coffee’ or ‘instant’, calling it just ‘coffee’ or ‘Nescaffi’—the Weybridge set say ‘Nescaff-ay’. Trying to disguise their lack of class by using transatlantic expressions, they would also talk about ‘burgers’, ‘crispbreads’ and ‘crackers’ instead of biscuits.

  Fish holds numerous pitfalls for the socially unwary. After John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to get on in Society’ received wide circulation when Noblesse Oblige was published in 1956, the antique shops were flooded with fish knives, and the upper-middle and some of the upper classes sat solemnly at breakfast trying to bone kippers with forks.

  Mr Definitely-Disgusting thinks fresh salmon is utterly tasteless and prefers it out of a tin. He likes pilchard salad too, and cockles, roll mops, eels either jellied or in a pie which he calls pie and mash, and eats with a viscous green sauce. Other favourites include rock salmon, skate, coley and chips, and ’ollibut and ’addick. But the working-class Northerner wouldn’t touch mackerel, regarding it as the scavenger of the seas. ‘If my missus gave me mackerel for tea,’ said one fishmonger, ‘I’d go to a Marriage Guidance Council.’

  If Mr Definitely-Disgusting went to a ‘resteront’ he’d probably start off with prawn cocktail, as an acceptable way to eat neat tomato ketchup mixed with salad cream with a few bits of rubber thrown in. Jen Teale talks about tuna instead of tunny fish; she rhymes the first syllable of scallops with ‘pal’ (Samantha rhymes it with ‘doll’) and stresses the second syllable of anchovy, while Caroline Stow-Crat emphasizes the first. The Weybridge set are particularly fond of scampi in the basket, which they think is both dainty and ollde-fashioned, but which is really a corruption of it being deep-fried like chicken in a wire basket.

  Another fashion that has moved downwards is the quiche, which was once called bacon-and-egg pie, until it got tarted up with peppers, onions, mushrooms and corrugated pastry, and was produced every time Caroline Stow-Crat had to provide something for a charity luncheon or Samantha had a buffet party. The merrytocracy also found it much cheaper than china to hurl at each other at the end of drunken evenings: ‘And then I shut her wild, wild eyes with quiches four.’ The Weybridges produce it for rugger and cricket teas, and the trend has finally filtered down to Mrs Definitely-Disgusting who calls it a ‘qwitch’.

  I think the popularity of quiche may be explained by the fact that people no longer feel easy about using the word ‘tart’. Treacle tart and apple tart sound all right, but expressions like savoury tartlets, or ‘My son says I make a good tart,’ usually get a snigger. ‘Queer’ and ‘gay’ have gone the same way. Only Mrs Definitely-Disgusting could still get away with saying:

  ‘I turned queer in the night. It must have been the prawns.’

  Mrs Definitely-Disgusting tends to buy meat from the less attractive part of a pig or a cow because it’s cheaper: black pudding, tripe and onions, pigs’ trotters, belly of pork and faggots. Then she drenches everything in tomato ketchup and H.P. sauce to take the taste away. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting’s mother, being a widow and an old-age pensioner, (or, as Jen Teale would say, a ‘senior citizen’) is so poor that when she goes to the butcher she asks for bones for the dog. She has no dog, but at least the bones will make soup. Sometimes she asks the fishmonger for pussies’ pieces, even though she has no cat. As some compensation, if she lives in the Borough of Camden on her own she is entitled to a free budgerigar. Mr D-D, who is not very keen on his mother-in-law, says the old cow will probably boil that for soup as well.

  As one moves through the day the class indicators come thick and fast. The upper classes have coffee or China tea for breakfast, the lower classes Indian tea, which they drink very strong and very sweet. Jen Teale says she doesn’t ‘favour’ a ‘cooked breakfast’ or a ‘continental breakfast’, and instead has ‘just a drink in the morning’, meaning tea. (When Gideon or Harry use the word drink they mean alcohol.) Jen sometimes has ‘segments’ instead of ‘cereal’, which means tinned grapefruit pigs. Caroline Stow-Crat has Oxford marmalade on her toast. So does Samantha; she doesn’t like it very much but she read somewhere that Golden Shred was common. Mr Definitely-Disgusting has ‘two a drip, a chuck a bubble, and a cup of bug,’ which, when translated, means two slices of bread and dripping, a plate of bubble and squeak and a cup of tea (which rhymes with flea, hence bug). Jen thinks the word chuck has a nasty derivation so she says ‘portion’, Samantha says ‘helping’.

  On to luncheon, at which no gentleman, according to Harry Stow-Crat, has soup—presumably because the upper classes were always out slaughtering wildlife, and soup is difficult to eat when crawling through bracken or sitting on a horse. Jen Teale, knowing the importance of eating a proper lunch, has frozen cod in cheese sauce boiled in a cellophane bag, which is indistinguishable from the dishcloths and tea towels she is always simmering on the hob. ‘On the weekend’ she and Bryan sometimes have ‘an assorted platter of cold meats followed by the cheese board’. As a first-generation ‘restront’ goer, Bryan has picked up some of the ghastly terminology—‘bill o’fare’, ‘sweet n’ sour’ and ‘turkey and all the trimmings’ (which means a teaspoon of cardboard stuffing and one burnt chipolata). He’s very partial, too, to duck ‘allaronge’ which is a piece of burnt duck covered with mandarin segments with a spoonful of sugar in the gravy. Jen, being a great reader of women’s magazines, is fond of adjectives like tasty, beefy, crusty, crispy, garlicky and chewy. Along with the vast majority of her class, she is slowly poisoning her family with convenience foods, television dinners, Vesta beef birianis, cake mixes and instant whips—a sort of national Chemi-kazi.

  On to tea, which for the unwary is also full of pitfalls. It is very common to call it ‘afternoon tea’ to distinguish it from ‘high tea’. Now that people of all classes use tea bags, everyone puts the milk in second, so this is no longer
an upper-class indicator. The upper classes drink China tea out of china teacups, ‘but it’s awfully difficult drinking out of hand-painted cups,’ said one spiralist’s wife, ‘so we have mugs when we’re alone, and porc-ell-aine when we have guests.’ (Caroline Stow-Crat calls it ‘porsl’n’.)

  Jen Teale’s tea is a symphony of doilies under pastries and gâteaux, cake forks and scones (with a long ‘o’). She provides paper napkins and a knife even if you’re only eating sandwiches, which she pronounces ‘sand-witch’ like ‘spin-itch’. Caroline Stow-Crat says ‘samwidge’ and ‘spin-idge’.

  Mrs Definitely-Disgusting says ‘butty’ or ‘booty’ if she lives in the north.

  Jen would be shocked by Mrs D-D’s milk bottle and bloater paste on the table, by the way she holds the bread in the palm of her left hand and spreads it with the right, and dips her biscuit in her tea because of her sore teeth. Caroline has Earl Grey or China tea the colour of washing-up water (just the colour Mr D-D likes his coffee), home-made cake and cucumber sandwiches. White sliced bread is particularly lower-middle because of its lack of roughage.

  A fellow journalist tells a wicked story of the time he interviewed a famous romantic novelist who was also a passionate health food freak. During the interview he was subjected to a long lecture on the merits of wholemeal home-made bread. Just as he was leaving, a little Sunblest van came jauntily up the drive.

  ‘Surely,’ said the journalist in mock horror, ‘you’re not buying sliced bread?’

  ‘That, darling,’ said the lady novelist airily, ‘is for the servants.’

  ‘Don’t! It must be decanted!’

  13 DRINK

  Say ‘Cheers’ to me only with thy peepholes.

  I was talking to a man in a pub the other day who’d done very well for himself, and we got on to the subject of class. ‘I was born working-class,’ he said, ‘but I must be middle-class now because I’m drinking wine.’

  This is reminiscent of the working-class father who sneered at his son-in-law every time he produced a bottle of wine for lunch. But if drinking wine has come to be a middle-class indicator, it wasn’t always so.

  Angus Wilson says that at Oxford just before the war only the richest of his middle-class friends were used to drinking wine regularly at home, and goes on:

  ‘I think this lack of regular wine drinking was much more common in middle-class homes in the inter-war years, not only now but than it had been in late Victorian times.’

  Certainly my own mother, being a vicar’s daughter, remembers the horrors of having a completely dry wedding in the ’twenties; and right up to the end of the ’fifties I remember that my parents hardly ever drank wine at home. They sometimes had dry martinis before dinner, and, if they were having a dinner party, occasionally a bottle of claret between eight guests. Then there would be whisky and soda at the end of the evening to tell the guests it was time to go home. There was a set in Ilkley who drank a lot whom I regarded as rather exciting, but whom my mother considered fast and very jumped-up.

  The wine-drinking habit seems to have caught on in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties when bistros started replacing coffee bars, and the middle classes went to Spain, Italy and France, and discovered, along with all those ideas for their dinner parties, the pleasure of drinking the local wine. Soon the husbands were enjoying Sauternes with watery sprouts at cricket dinners, and showing off in restaurants— ‘Let it breathe, Luigi’.

  Wine-drinking spread rapidly, particularly in the ’seventies when the middle-classes, believing they were being slowly squeezed out of existence, started drinking themselves insensible. During the austerity years of the middle ’seventies, the merrytocracy gave up their foreign holidays, but not their booze.

  The middle classes also have totally dislocated values about drink. Every time a T.U.C. leader entertains a few foreign union leaders in a smart restaurant there is a sanctimonious uproar in the popular Tory press over the price of every item on the bill. No wonder Wedgwood-Benn and Jim Callaghan are teetotal.

  The Stow-Crats have had cellars filled with excellent wine for generations, so Harry’s always drunk it, but not to excess. Because it’s there he doesn’t feel the need to swill it round the clock. Before dinner he would probably offer guests a glass of dry sherry or white wine —nothing to rot up the palate, unless he were an alcoholic whereupon he would keep topping up everyone’s drinks, to the frenzy of his wife who is longing to go in to dinner.

  Harry doesn’t taste wines in restaurants to see if it’s all right; he just swings his nose back and forth over the glass to make sure it’s not corked. He tends to drink at home rather than in pubs, because if he goes into the local all the tenants want to buy him a drink. Mr Nouveau-Richards finds himself picking up the bill far more often, both in ‘resteronts’ and bars. Tightness with drink isn’t entirely to do with class, although the working classes are invariably generous. So too are the merrytocracy because they want an excuse to fill their own glasses.

  The lower-middles, who enjoy dressing up in hired dinner jackets and ‘taking wane’ with each other at Rotarian ladies nights, are given to euphemisms like ‘partaking of liquid refreshment’, ‘imbibing potations’ and ‘just a wee dram’. Howard Weybridge is very up on bar terminology, he has ‘snorters’, ‘snifters’, ‘ones for the road’, and ‘a few jars’.

  The Weybridges are also very keen on barbecue parties. Samantha tried them and gave up. It just meant midge bites, charred pork chops in the flower beds, everyone losing their glasses in the dark when they were half-full and wanting new full ones, so she had to spend the evening frenziedly washing up, and her face got so covered in smuts from the barbecue that she looked like a token black.

  Among the working classes, the great divide between the rough and respectable is summed up in two words: the drink. One of the reasons for the heavy drinking of the poor was that drink took away the misery and the appetite, and gin and beer were much cheaper than food. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s opinion that the poor in England could only maintain their animal heat by means of alcohol, without which the harsh climate would destroy them. The great struggle for the wives was to get their husbands out of the pub before they drank all the wages.

  Today, gin being so prohibitively expensive, Mr Definitely-Disgusting drinks beer because television advertisements, extolling the male cameraderie and virility that will stem from it, tell him to.

  14 APPEARANCE

  CLOTHES

  Whenas in Crimplene my Julia says cheerio.

  In the past fifteen years we’ve been through a complete sartorial revolution. There was the self-expressionism of the late ’sixties when everyone did their own thing, followed by unisex and jeans for all classes and all sexes, followed by the punk revolt of the late ’seventies. And now, as Christopher Sykes has pointed out, after the age of turmoil an age of conservative consolidation has set in. As a result it is almost impossible to tell what class the young are from their appearance.

  On the one hand you have the tear-away from Eton wearing polyester trousers and shirts with key motifs to irritate the establishment, on the other the working-class undergraduate, determined to identify himself with the establishment, who smothers himself in college regalia. The hacking jacket has just about filtered down the class system to Sharon Definitely-Disgusting, while Fiona Stow-Crat turns up at a party with bright purple hair, wearing a leopardskin rayon jump suit and gold stiletto-heeled boots. Although the upper classes usually settle down sartorially with marriage, I did meet an extremely grand, much divorced old lady recently wearing orange satin drainpipes and a white T-shirt with ‘I AM A VIRGIN’ printed across the bust. Meanwhile the majority of parvenu Tory ladies in Weybridge, terrified of betraying their origins by putting a foot wrong, dress exactly like the Queen.

  Recently I went to a lunch party in a middle-class house where some Americans had been invited to meet a duke’s daughter. The daughter of the house, herself apprehensive about meeting a member of the aristocracy
, wore a tweed coat and skirt, flat shoes, a pale blue cashmere jersey and pearls. The duke’s daughter roared up on a motor bike wearing a leather skirt, fishnet stockings, a tight black sweater and punk eye make-up. The Americans, who arrived just after her, made a justifiable mistake.

  One comfort is that even the grandest people worry about what to wear. That scourge of the middle classes, Nancy Mitford, was thrown into total panic by a last-minute invitation to dine with Edward VIII.

  I was told a rather touching story by one of the Queen’s dressmakers. The Queen was visiting his shop and admired a very beautiful evening dress, glittering with crystal and rhinestones. When both the dressmaker and her lady-in-waiting urged her to buy it, she shook her head wistfully saying, wasn’t it a pity, but really she hadn’t got anywhere smart enough to wear it.

  What she probably meant was that it was too ostentatious.

  Traditionally the aristocracy survived because they were the wiliest of the tribe and knew when to lie low. Let the nouveau riche swagger around in their finery, showing off their wealth and getting their heads chopped off by royalty, or later by revolutionaries. Harry Stow-Crat’s ancestors were prepared to dress up in their robes when the King commanded it; otherwise they camouflaged themselves and blended in with their surroundings. Thus today Harry is only copying his forebears when he wears a dark suit in the grey of London, and green, dung-coloured or brown clothes in the country. There was an additional reason for this. Harry’s ancestors lived on what they shot, hunted and fished. It is easier to land your prey, whether it be a girl in London or a salmon on the Tay, if you blend with your background.