Class

When talking about class, there’s a great line by Billy Connolly (from ‘An Audience With...’) which I usually get wrong. It begins: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm thick...”’ Only, I always remember is as: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm poor...”’ But that’s the thing with class: where the middle and upper classes can be accused of snobbery, those of us at the other end of the social ladder can be equally accused of inverted snobbery. Class has always intrigued me because it seems to be as useless and it is helpful. Whilst the majority of people seem to conform to the definitions, individual cases don’t. To deliberately misquote Jonathan Swift: I can generalise about mankind but not about Tom, Dick, or Harry.

The problem with class is that it doesn’t totally convey people’s attitudes, and by ‘attitudes’ I probably mean their moral outlook. Some of the people I meet who profess to be middle class are, in my book, woeful human beings. They are duplicitous, conniving, arrogant, and cruel. They achieve much of what they achieve through the wilful abuse of others. When these qualities are seen in the working class, it rightly marks them out as crooks. They are the aspiring gangsters that hang around the gym I can see from my bedroom window. Yet when seen in the upper classes (I have only limited contact with the aristocracy), these low qualities apparently become virtues. Arrogance is assumed. It is not an option.

Perhaps class is only useful when looking at a social group from the outside. We see that ‘Chavs’ conform to stereotype because we don’t know them. The same might be true of university lecturers, journalists, members of the royal family. Class might be very useful when talking about common social types, yet the people that interest me – the people I am happy to call friends – tend not to fit into these stereotypes. Perhaps it’s just that I see something beyond the caricature. Perhaps what marks out a person as interesting to me is the degree to which they differ from their culture. They are square shapes in round holes.

I am from pure working class stock. My father’s side of the family fled from the revolution in Russia when my grandmother was just a girl. My father began work as a wheelwright but went to work in a mental hospital for the job security. My mother, like many women of her generation, became a housewife and a mother.

I attended a working class comprehensive school that did very little to give us hope. It was run down before people noticed that schools were being run down. It was there that literature, which had my love as a child, was ruined by English classes. It was perverted through Socialist ideals into a monstrous social science. We read ‘A Taste of Honey’ to introduce us to the themes of unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality, and race. Even ‘Hobson’s Choice’ (a film I now love) was taught as a way of talking about poverty. Over five years, I slid down the sets until I ended in the lowest, emerging with a grade 2 CSE.

We did our ‘O’ levels and then ‘A’ levels. The really bright kids did averagely well. Not being the brightest kid – and certainly far from committed to my studies – I did less well. It was only when I left school and began to follow my nose, so to speak, that I rediscovered the subjects I enjoyed. I went to the local college, sat an ‘A’ level in English in less than a year and was in a good University within eight months and went on to do postgraduate degrees.

So, now I’m still in a working class area, doing a very lowly job, but with these qualifications attached to my name. And I don’t think I would change any of it. In many respects, I feel classless.

I no longer enjoy cricket. I prefer football and foolishly support Liverpool in an office full of Mancunians.
The need to read pretentious literature was hammered out of me at University.
I love films, hate most art house, but enjoy foreign cinema.
I prefer to watch documentary channels than TV dramas.
I play the guitar fairly well but I hate English folk music and play only American: Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash.
I enjoy the puzzle of computer games and love technology.
I enjoy great comedy, despise bad.
Though I think I’m polite and believe in good manners, I’m often told off by my middle class bosses for being rude.
My politics are quite centrist. I love the writing of Edmund Burke ("Our patience will achieve more than our force") but despise the ideologues of modern Conservatism. I equally despise Socialism – living with a Socialist council saw to that – yet I see the bad that happens when workers have no rights.
I am extremely scruffy and wear mostly black.
I can’t drive and don’t drink.
I have always wanted to wear a hat.

So what class do you think I am?