I sat in a class that discussed feminism and social class this week and nearly lost my cool at assumptions about the idea that we were all somehow middle class. Is there any use at all for such a label?
I would like to tell you about the event that is the highlight of my summer. It’s going to the Royal Albert Hall to the Proms, the definitively British musical festival, to see the Hallé’s prom concert. I go to the Hallé prom because my sister’s in the orchestra; last year we also saw my nephew, who’s in the Halle Youth Choir. We don’t pay for a ticket, because we sit on seats which have owned by my children’s paternal relatives ever since their forebears invested in the building of the Royal Albert Hall; at that time, their family was amongst the richest in Britain, and well-connected politically and socially. Now the family has two free seats at every concert. After the prom, we walk through the familiar glories of the South Kensington streets to meet my sister and collected friends at the pub she went to while she was a student at the Royal College of Music, nicknamed ‘Room 99’ (because at the time there were 98 rooms at the RCM). The very picture of British cultural, social and financial privilege.
Except. One reason why we use the free tickets is because we could not otherwise afford a seat – my children and I live below the UK poverty line. Of course, we could prom, but even shelling out a fiver to stand is something to be thought about. And another reason why this is such a highlight is because it’s really hard for me to afford to take my children on any kind of holiday.
Of course that does not cancel everything about class in Britain. The vestiges of my children’s privileged paternal forebears can easily be found with the use of Google. There you can find us in lists of people directly descended from William the Conqueror, there you can find us listed in Burke’s Peerage and in Debretts. That’s how I found out, not long ago, that my son is listed in the line of succession for an Earldom. But think about it – we found this out (and laughed and laughed) through the internet, precisely because I am not in sufficiently close contact with anyone who really wields any of the real social and economic power to have ever mentioned this to us in person.
But how did my sister get to live a life of such privileged high culture as an orchestral musician? Surely this is the consequence of socially segmented privilege, to have the means to achieve this, and to have the taste for high culture in the first place? But that would be wrong too. My sister went to a state school, had to pay no fees to study at music college, and was given a student grant to do so. The idea that some sorts of culture are somehow out of the world picture of certain classes also ignores reality. My parents both came from Wales, and it was just normal to be interested in music. My mother came from a family where just everybody played an instrument, and where everybody in the generation above played; her parents both played piano at the silent pictures; people sang in the street, for goodness sake. But they were hardly privileged. Her father was a skilled manual worker; her mother killed herself during the depression, while he was unemployed. And my mother’s mother had herself won a place at the Royal Academy of Music, but had been unable to afford to study there.
And how did my sister get to play music? It was when we first got a piano, when my aunt moved and could no longer house my grandfather’s old piano, so it came to us. My sister sat down at it straight away and immediately started picking out tunes by ear – she was rushed pronto to a family friend who gave her lessons.
And the piano itself? It has tales to tell. It had sat in the house silent and unplayed while my grandmother lay dead with her head in the oven. And it had survived an attempted coup. After my grandfather returned from the First World War, his family had split up, and during the depression, his sister, my great aunt Kitty, was living in one room, looking after his piano for him. In those days if you claimed dole money, you had first to sell anything you had of any value. The social security official came round and said to her, ‘You’ve got a piano, you can sell that’. She told them in no uncertain terms: ‘That’s not my piano, that’s my brother’s piano, and he fought five years in the trenches for this country, and you’re not getting it’. She then picked up an axe and chased the official down the road. They never got the piano. My grandfather kept it. After his death my aunt got it; then we got it; my sister played it; and ended up at music college, unlike her unlucky grandmother.
And that, dear reader, is how come we ended up sitting on free seats in the Royal Albert Hall, basking in the undoubted wild, wild luck of being able to feel at home in this fantastic cultural festival, waving proudly at my sister on the stage.
Only, please think before you open you gob and tell people what class they are in.