I heard on Radio Four this morning about a rapper songwriter called Plan B, announcing that if Sexism and Racism is not accepted publicly why not Classism also? Interesting question. When I was a kid I got a beating from my father for speaking with a West country accent that I acquired to avoid a beating from the kids on the street! Indeed a few years ago I found I was victim to blatant classism in a technical college where I was teaching that ultimately cost me my job (I swore at a student when the culture amongst the staff was to use four letter language!) and I was informed there was no CURRENT legislation in place to argue a case. I was teaching carpentry part-time and both students and staff clearly discriminated against me because I was 'posh' and stood out like a sore thumb in the building site arena.
After all I must be posh to listen to Radio Four but actualy I have argued for years that classism is rampant in Britain and just because it is subtle does not mean it is not still very powerful and it also works both ways.
I would suggest that actually it can be an advantage to have a strong working class accent (television is full of it) and the one thing the British Working Class has in common with the Aristocracy is a strong and proud sense of social identity. On that basis one could almost argue that class is a good thing! The more 'mobile' middle class is the victim of consumersim as it trades on insecurity and dissatisfaction! However, the radio discussion prompted me to dig out a chapter from my book 'Missing Jean' (originally titled 'Glass Wall') and a chapter called 'Class War' going back to when I was about nine years old:
Trevor Lang lived in a terraced council house a few streets away from our big house in Marlborough. He was small, mean and tough. He was both my best friend and worst enemy. It was class war really. I was the ‘posh’ upper middle class kid who spoke proper and he was the working class tyke who was leader of the pack. His right hand man Mervyn cycled past me one day and shouted that Trevor was going to beat me up. I told Mervyn to tell Trevor I would take him on any day of the week. Well, Trevor chose a good day as I returned from Scouts dressed in my short trousers and tassels on my socks as he confronted me with his gang all dressed in long trousers. Funny how important trousers were in my youth. Long trousers were so grown up and streetwise but father insisted I wore short trousers even when I went to Grammar School and the other boys wore long trousers.
Trevor jumped out of the bushes with his gang and said “What's this Mervyn tells me you're going to do to me?” I managed to stall him by agreeing that Mervyn had got it right as I walked nearer the side gate to our house. I knew the latch of the gate was on the inside and the gate was high so I would need to time things perfectly and make a jump for it. But the talking was running out and Trevor was getting impatient. Curiously there must have been a gentlemanly side to Trevor's character as he refrained from delivering the first blow. He had every opportunity but maybe he would have lost face in front of his gang if he hit me first. He would be a bigger hero if I hit him and then he could finish me off to their cheers. After all, he was challenging me to stand to my word.
I wasn't afraid of the gang as Trevor was tough enough to settle matters one to one, the gang were hangers-on really. He was itching to engage and my heart was racing faster and faster as we got nearer the side gate of our house. The green painted gate was high and sturdily built and my attention was on the hidden latch behind it and how to get to it quickly. “Right Trevor” and in a flash I turned round and caught him on the jaw. It knocked him off his feet, it was so sudden. I then scrambled up over the gate as Trevor groaned, got up and lunged at me grabbing my Boy Scout legs with the stupid tassels on my socks. I managed to kick him off. I rushed over to the house where the coal shed was and began hurling large chunks of coal at the gate as he tried to climb over. I probably emptied the entire coal bin in a matter of seconds. My hands were oily, black and sore.
Amidst all the rumpus the back door was suddenly thrown open and father stood sternly on the doorstep powering over me, silhouetted by the bare dangling electric kitchen lamp behind. The smell of Dana's cooking scones for tomorrow’s high tea wafted out. “What the hell's going on?” I immediately burst into tears at the relief of refuge but instead my father roared “Fight him like a man” and slammed the door on me. I hid crouching in the coal shed interrniitedly slinging last chunks of coal towards the green gate fearing Trevor would climb over. I probably got the beating from Trevor on another day but strangely time would pass and Trevor and I would be mates again.
One day Trevor was pushing me in a pram up the high street while I was firing my cap gun. “Blimey, that's my stepmother coming” I said to Trevor. He quickly pulled a mackintosh over me as Dana approached on the same pavement. “Hello Trevor, what are you doing out of school at this time of day?” I had blown my school dinner money on caps for my cap gun. Had Dana spotted me under the raincoat and this matter been reported back to my father a few more garden canes would have been broken for sure. I invited Trevor to my ninth birthday party. While the washing up was being done after tea he was busy beating me up in the garden because I had not given him a big slice of the cake. Veronica (my older sister) hurled open an upstairs window and screamed “Get off him Trevor” in a deliberate West country accent.
So there it was, ducking and diving between beatings from my father and kids on the street, when I eventually got an all important place at the grammar school - we wore green uniform and were called 'the grammar grubs' by the blue uniformed secondary Modern school kids who waited at the school gates to engage in fights with us. British Class war at its finest!
Has much changed actually in Britain since my childhood? I chose to design and make really innovative modern wood furniture as an adult trying over decades to make my furniture accessible to anybody interested in good modern design only to find I have been engulfed in a class/social game for all these years where high expense and exclusivity defines the field! Not my choosing and not my philosophy and it is probably because of classism that my furniture designs are not really acknowledged in the way they were in the Seventies when for a brief period cash flowed more easily across the social class system! Now if your work is too cheap it is looked down upon!
