Class

Jolly Sooper Jilly Cooper wrote Class a generation ago. Part of my fascination with it is in reading about my formative influences decades after they influenced me. Actually, most of what Cooper wrote remains true today. The middle classes still think it rude to say What? and good manners to say (I beg your) pardon?; while the upper classes say What? and consider Pardon? a mark of vulgarity. Cooper also spots patterns I'd never noticed.

It seems insane, by the way, that all the lower middle and lower-class girls who come from Epping and Romford and the East End work in the City with upper and upper-middle class men, who wouldn't dream of marrying them; while all the upper- and upper middle-class girls who live in Knightsbridge, Fulham and Chelsea, can't face going any farther east than Mayfair on the tube, and therefore work with all the middle- and lower-middle class spiralists in advertising, whom they wouldn't dream of marrying either. [Punctuated and hyphenated as the book. I know: it drives me nuts too.]

Cooper uses stereotypes such as Harry Stow-Crat to make her points, which makes for a facetious book. Still I'm repeatedly shocked to find aspects of my upbringing, such as engraved silver napkin rings given as christening presents, singled out as typical of my class. (Upper class children apparently get engraved tankards.) So many attitudes and aspirations I had supposed my own are revealed to me as merely absorbed from my background.

Ultimately, it's a liberating read, as Cooper describes and lampoons the tactics that serve the fundamental strategies of the various classes — the upper classes to exclude and conserve; the middle to rise; the lower to endure. As a boy from the lower middle class my education at public expense at an English public school occurred to me as but part of the natural rise in rank I projected for myself. My first great romance was accordingly with the daughter of landed minor nobility. What a comedy. (And what a priggish and mean-spirited poem.)

Still it shakes me to reflect on how much of my life has been spent recoiling from what I saw as my fall off that ladder. A decade and a half, for example, in Australia, the Great Offstage.

I tried to be sui generis,
to march along different streets.
It's a shock to discover
the Different Drummer
is merely playing backbeats.

Life marches on.