Class in the Novels of Barbara Pym II

Jacobean chintz

Wilmet Forsyth, the narrator of A Glass of Blessings (1958), is about 35, comfortably off, elegant, pretty, married and a bit aimless. She longs for romance, and though she has a sense of the ridiculous, she fails to notice some quite obvious aspects of her acquaintances. She is also a mild snob in a way typical of her background and times. But then so are most of her friends.

This is a very funny book, and Barbara Pym obviously enjoys wearing Wilmet's expensive clothes, colourful silk scarves and antique jewels by proxy. Like many Pym heroines, Wilmet relies on the local Anglo-Catholic church for a social circle. There is a lot of chat about tea. The parishioners drink strong Indian tea with sugar (tut!). Wilmet and her husband place themselves in the pecking order by preferring Earl Grey (though Lapsang is an option), and drinking it correctly without milk.

Wilmet has lunch out with her mother-in-law, Sybil, who stops at a self-service cafeteria. Wilmet thinks this is really rather downmarket. "We... now stopped outside an extremely unappetizing looking cafeteria, where a small queue had formed near the counter." She chooses "a cheese salad with a roll and butter, some stewed apple, and a cup of black coffee", but worries that the lettuce won't be clean, and is distressed by a scattering of chips on the floor.

Her middle-class friend Rowena collects "Chelsea, Dresden and Meissen" china and has photographs of her friends and family in silver frames on the grand piano. She lives in an "Elizabethan-style" house built in the 30s, with a monkey-puzzle tree on the lawn. All just a tiny bit naff.

They meet in London. "Even this restaurant," says Rowena, "in spite of its gay Italian paintings round the walls, has an air of Eastbourne about it. Look at the curtains - cream net and cretonne with a Jacobean design - that brings one down to earth all right!" (Jacobean crewel embroidery had a strange afterlife as a design on wallpaper, curtains and furnishing fabric.)

Wilmet meets her friend Piers, who sometimes behaves as if he is in love with her, in a city restaurant where "sausage toad" is on the menu. (This is toad-in-the-hole, an almost vanished British dish of sausages baked in batter.) What should they have for pudding? "Do you think you would like to eat Devonshire tart, whatever that may be?" asks Piers. "I'll eat whatever you suggest," she replies, "as long as it isn't pink blancmange." (Pink blancmange has probably disappeared for good - thank heavens. It was a sweetened cornflour "mould" – a distant and debased copy of a grand Victorian original probably made of double cream. Devonshire tart contains cream cheese and strawberries.)

Piers turns out to be living with a boyfriend called Keith, who gives them tea. "There was a check tablecloth on a low table, and plates of sandwiches and biscuits and a pink and white gateau arranged on plastic doilies. Each plate had a paper table napkin laid across it." In Keith's room there are few books, but: "A trailing plant of a kind which had lately become fashionable stood on another table, its pot in a white painted metal cover." Plastic doilies! Poor Keith. He even sometimes works as a knitting pattern model.

Her friend Mary (now engaged) confesses: "You see, I've never had any boyfriends." Thinks Wilmet: "What does one say, what word can one use, to describe what she meant? Lovers, admirers, suitors, followers - none seems to be quite right." Middle-class people still won't say "boyfriend".

She and her husband Rodney daringly visit Keith in the coffee bar where he works. Where's Piers? "He's just come in now," said Keith. "Look - in the doorway by that lady in the lemon jumper." Wilmet would never call a garment "lemon" - she only uses colour names, not the names of coloured things. It would have to be "pale yellow". Also to her, it's a "jersey" not a jumper. Oh, and she would never refer to a woman she didn't know as "a lady".

Though homosexuality was still illegal in the 50s, none of Wilmet's family are shocked when they find out about Piers and Keith, and after the initial surprise, neither is she. The reader, but not Wilmet, has already twigged that the local Anglo-Catholic priests and servers are all gay, too. Modern readers may find them a little caricatured.

More here.

More Decor Crimes

Cosy.

"You can't go wrong with mid-oak-coloured cabinets and a dark grey granite worktop." (thepropertymermaid.com)

"Net curtains, a trampoline in the garden and mirrored wardrobe doors." (Daily Express)

"Your red wall looks cool and striking, but not everyone will appreciate it." (www.brisbanere.com.au)

“with a show-home feel” (Zoopla)


single-aspect flats and houses: no light or too much, no ventilation

shoebox rooms with a window one end, furnished with a long sofa down the long side, opposite a wall-mounted TV

barrel roof added to brutalist flats (known as a “Blair hat”)

expensive hotel has a refurb and replaces shabby repro tat with new, rather more “richly” coloured repro tat

vertical blinds (Are they 80s retro, or do they make a house look like an office?)

ship’s wheel as decor

pale green onyx (especially a pale green onyx tissue box)

palatial bungalow modelled on an orangery (nice to live in, though, with lots of natural light)

ding-dong doorbell (or one that plays tunes)

stone, brick or wood-effect wallpaper (not seen for decades – but you can now get a very upmarket version imitating distressed or recycled wood)

shoes, coats and bicycles stored in the hallway (is there no room for a coat cupboard, a boot locker and a bike shed?)

“doggy odour” (Anne Maurice)

Garden crimes
a mound of earth and rock with water cascading down it trying to mimic the hanging gardens of Babylon (www.periodproperty.co.uk)
weird garden plants (apparently potential buyers think they’re all Japanese knotweed) (Guardian)

60s crimes
not exactly décor, but the 60s policy of removing gravestones and turning graveyard into a lawn or park (Like “church-scraping” in the 1850s. And it went with the fitted carpet in the church - those have all gone now. I wonder why.)

In the 60s, many classical plaster ceilings were either hidden by suspended ceilings or painted in pink and green.

Fireplace crimes
wood burning stove in a “Georgian” fireplace in a 30s house
Tudor fireplace in a 50s bungalow
gas effect fireplace with pine surround (www.periodproperty.co.uk)
fake fire in a faux chimney breast (after fireplaces and chimneys have been ripped out)
keeping all the Victorian fireplaces that will never be used again

In a Victorian terrace house
a kitchen diner with yards of granite
ending up "stripped down too far"

More money than sense
Apparently oligarchs now buy huge period houses and enucleate them – they knock down all interior walls and strip out all “features”.

kitchen designed to look slick and never be used in a Central London investment flat (They've had an unfortunate knock-on effect on kitchens people are actually going to cook in.)

huge living room containing nothing but leather sofas and a wall-mounted telly - in a house with a kitchen the size of a football pitch, and a garden that is one huge lawn stretching to the horizon. Apparently these are “light, airy living areas” (Escape to the Country). Yes, light and space and lack of clutter are good, but this is ridiculous. You could get the same effect by buying an old chapel and just removing the altar, the organ and all the pews. (What are they going to do in all that space? Yoga? Ballroom dancing?)

More here.

Class and Elizabeth Jane Howard

From a review in the London Review of Books by Tessa Hadley of All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard (and Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles family saga). The unreflecting, self-denying Cazalets are middle class.

[Mrs Cazalet] encourages [her daughter] to think she is clumsy and ugly, because it’s good for her; and, besides, the family ‘did not mention, let alone discuss, people’s appearance’.

No one talks serious politics, and the older generation share an unexamined conservatism.

An aura of art hovers round the family, conferring its high-mindedness… But at their core the Cazalets are fairly philistine and definitely unintellectual.

Howard can give flat utterance to things which were more or less understood between her protagonists, but which they didn’t have a language for.

No doubt there’s something to be said for not making a fuss, doing your duty, getting on with things, not indulging yourself, pouring a stiff drink instead of moping.

[They’re not religious but] there’s a strongly self-sacrificial inflection in their way of thinking and the standards they set themselves. Some of Mrs C’s preferences are fairly frightening: tepid baths – they’re not ‘meant to be pleasant’ – and hard toilet paper; boiled mutton and blancmange.

[The mother and daughter] are a mostly vanished English middle-class type: girlish into old age, unsexual… disciplined, conscientious, narrow… always putting their own interests last.


More here.

Classy Schools and Careers

Only desperate pleading won Shirley Williams six months at the local primary school and a brief reprieve from boarding school. (LRB Dec 2013)

A world of nurseries and pinafores which felt like "the snuffing out of every spontaneous impulse". (Architect Alison Smithson on her Edwardian-style upbringing)

When he appointed me in 1988 John Major said me, him and the filing clerks were the only non-Oxbridge Treasury staff. (@PeterWanless)

Writer Tim Lott’s daughter doesn’t quite understand “that one only goes to a faith school in order to get better exam results, not to actually sign up for a medieval worldview.”

If anyone in the news went to public school, journalists are determined to make something of it. OK, with the government they’ve got a point, but David Walliams? Interviewer Robert Crampton of the Times marvelled that Matt Lucas, from a “deprived” background, was sunny and relaxed, while Walliams – who had been to a public school – admitted that his childhood hadn’t always been happy and he suffered from nerves and angst.


Upwards all think they should be a writer, artist, actor or musician. As talent is rare, they work “in the arts” or the media. If they can’t get a media job, and decide making their own chutney will never pay, they want to lead informative walks around London.

Without capital there was no means of making a start [as a novelist]. (Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Magic of My Youth, writing about the early 30s.)

Middle-class Upward parents are furious that after all their piano lessons, activities and private tutors their children are "obsessed by” pop culture heroes and heroines – who are working class kids who have achieved instant fame on a chav talent show. The pop culture heroines have probably put in gruelling years at stage school, or are naturally talented. But the Upward parents want to push the line that their kids must work hard 24/7 if they want to achieve anything.

Gap years are now too expensive (higher uni fees), also middle-class kids can’t afford to waste time. Instead they are going on mini-gaps of three months (as we used to before it all got so competitive).

Relatives will always ask young people at university “And what job does that qualify you for?”, but the Upwards still send their kids to uni to get a general education, while lower-middle-class Teales train as dog groomers and fantasy artists, or set up their own interior design practice. Working-class Definitelies become tattooists and nail technicians. Middle class kids become ballerinas, not dancers in musicals; conceptual artists, not fashion illustrators. In the 50s, they were never allowed to learn to tap dance.

Writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s husband got a job “issuing train tickets for the Lunn Poly travel agency. It was low-paid and menial, far below what either had expected: ‘I’m not going to pretend anything about my job,’ Edward says in [her novel] Offshore, as his wife realises ‘in terror’ that he will ‘never get anywhere’.” LRB Jan 2014

James Hawes’ typical character realizes that working hard and playing by the rules will never get him the family home in a nice area the middle-class children of the 70s took to be their due… the children of the rich he thought of as friends at university are from a world whose admission price he cannot afford. “You have to go and be an accountant or a schoolteacher.” [Now this character is as likely to be a young woman with] a degree that was next to worthless because so many of her contemporaries had one too. [If she wants to work in the media, she has to do work experience:] a refined version of slavery. (Waiting for the Etonians by Nick Cohen)

More careers here.
More schools here.

Classy Quotes 15

Novelist Nina Bawden was born in 1925 and raised in Ilford, Essex, in "a rather nasty housing estate that [her] mother despised". (Wikipedia)

They preached the lessons of moderation, cleanliness, simplicity, self-denial and humility with an admirable thoroughness, low-church to the core… There was no need for place mats as the meal was to be cold, but place mats were invariably laid. (Jerusalem the Golden, Margaret Drabble)

WASPs took pride in "good posture, genteel manners, personal hygiene, pointless discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods of time" (Wikipedia on WASPs)

My three best girlfriends were daughters of earls… but their upbringings had been even colder and lonelier than mine… I didn’t know how out of touch I was. I thought that I was worldly and sophisticated, but I had no idea what the world was like. I became aware of how oddly sheltered and yet at the same time unprotected I had been. (aristocratic Ivana Lowell, Why Not Say What Happened?)

"Ah," Roland cried delightedly, "I see we have a new class now. There used to be those who had the tele and those who were above it. Now we have those who have the tele and are still above it." (A Bit off the Map and Other Stories, Angus Wilson)

In a really nice hotel or restaurant, things like old fraying stained suitcases and terrible clothes equal terrible rooms, uninterested service, and bad tables. (Stephanie Pierson, Males, Nails, Sample Sales (She also says that good clothes will win you the job, but warns that in Europe you get what you pay for – smart clothes and luggage won’t get you an upgrade to first class, or a better hotel room.)

One Facebook user, Jennifer Huggins, wrote on Waitrose's Facebook page: "Please stop the free coffee at Barry Waitrose, it is putting me off shopping in the store. People are coming with two cards two free coffee no shopping, with their Tesco bags." (Telegraph Dec 2013

It was a strange time in Prague. The city was awash with young Westerners, mostly Americans, and the Americans … were all setting up small businesses. There was great snobbery, with those who'd been there for eighteen months greatly despising those who'd been there for a mere six. (JP)

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
(T.S. Eliot The “area” was a small courtyard at basement level, below the street. Steps led up to a gate in the railings.)

Virginia Woolf found “ordinary people… repulsive in the mass”. In 1915 she  describes train journeys taken with “shabby clerks and dressmakers” and women with string bags. Buying her own food is a “degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously.” In one of her novels (Night and Day), an upper-middle-class man meets a lower-middle-class woman and joins his suburban family for “an unpleasant meal under a very bright light”. Leonard Woolf loathed “cheap humanity” in “red villas”. Virginia thought Leonard’s “uneasiness in the presence of the lower classes; always suspects them, is never genial with them” could be explained by the fact that he was not a “gentleman”. Does anybody read her novels any more? (Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants)

A character in a novel by Enid Bagnold dismisses an applicant for the post of cook as “a born lavatory attendant”. (The Duchess of Denver in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison talks of the victims of a poisoner being “born murderees”.)

Councils aren't against non-chainstore spaces as long as they conform to a Farrow & Ball model of middle-class individuality. (Guardian Nov 2013)

You could tell, though, even in my day, that you were living in a culture that simply wasn’t going to survive. This was an environment balanced weirdly between antiquity and modernity. (Hugo Rifkind on public schools, Times Nov 2 2013)

Research suggests the upper classes are less cognizant of others, worse at reading other people's emotions and less altruistic than individuals in lower social classes. "If you occupy these higher echelons, you start to see yourself as more entitled, and develop a heightened self-focus," [researcher Paul] Piff told the Guardian. "Your social environment is likely more buffered against the impact of your actions, and you might not perceive the risks of your behaviour because you are better resourced, you have the money for lawyers and so on." (Feb 27 2012)

Who are you calling an average Joe you two up two down 2.4 children Just for Men mediocre tea and digestive swilling Punto driving middle England Harvester frequenting Mail reading saturday lawn mowing non-entity you? (Commenter on lions-tour-extra.com, 2007 The riposte: Black poloneck man is having a hormone imbalance. Quick get some sushi or latte or something!!!)

The idea of being stuck in some concrete complex surrounded by sunburnt, overweight, Daily Mail reading, Harvester-frequenting, Chelsea supporters piling their plates high with a full English and “free” cocktail at 9.30am, is not an experience I’d pay for. (Letter to the Guardian, 2013-05-26)

More here, and links to the rest.

Come into the Garden

Walter Fish wanted paths, lawns and a symmetrical line-up of dahlias. Margery wanted Jekyll-like drifts, wild flowers and informality. Walter laid his lawn with a very narrow strip of earth down one side where he said she could have flowers as long as they didn’t encroach on the grass. He banished wisteria… London Review of Books Dec 2013 on gardening writer Margery Fish. When Walter died, she got her garden.

My father sneered at next door’s garden because they had crescent-shaped beds with sharp edges, as in a park. He also forbade orange nasturtiums. “Half of us get upset if next door’s garden is a jungle”, says the Daily Mail. The other half get upset if next door’s garden is too neat. (June 2012) Or if someone in the street goes all Zen.

Vita Sackville-West (of Sissinghurst fame) sneered at writer Leonard Woolf for putting statuary and a water garden next to a cottage, like a mini-Versailles. Virginia Woolf was caustic about his “leaden cupids”.

The Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia has some hilariously snobbish gardening advice: A crazy paving path does not go with an 18th century cottage; “informal” planting should all be the same colour. And “...make sure the furnishings do not ruin the effect. A wrought-iron bench, for instance, might be too elaborate for many gardens, whereas a simple wooden one would rarely jar… A decorated Italian urn is probably too grand for an informal, suburban garden, even if planted with humble daisies… Slight deviations [from original concept] will create a sense of clutter and all your planning will have been in vain…. Avoid crowding the basic pattern with a 'liquorice allsorts' sprinkling of plants.”

Very trendy Rowena Upward has a genuine cast iron “rustic twig” Victorian garden bench, circa 1850.

Granset’s advice on moving to a village warns against immediately cutting down your trees or putting up a two-car garage.  And don’t try to join everything – but do turn up to all the events.

Upper-middle-class Samantha Upward encourages spiders to keep down flies, middle-middle Eileen Weybridge runs screaming, lower-middle Jen Teale thinks spiderwebs are so untidy, Sharon Definitely sprays bugs with Insectrol – which Sam could never do because a) it’s cruel b) it damages the environment and c) CFCs are destroying the ozone layer.

Rockeries and dahlias are beyond the pale (though dahlias may be making a comeback as some gentleman is growing rare varieties). People grow them on allotments, says gardener Alan Titchmarsh, adding “don’t spurn the dahlia – it’s worth a second look”.

In Victorian days, stately homes had acres of greenhouses for raising bedding plants: these were planted in geometric, brightly coloured arrangements by teams of gardeners. The plants were replaced as soon as they were “over”. The bright colours are somewhat out of date (though this kind of planting can still be seen in the centre of roundabouts, at the seaside and in some London parks). Unfortunately, the suburbs copied, and by the early 20th century bedding plants were flourishing in Metroland, the Arts and Crafts suburbs beloved of John Betjeman. These days, bedding plants are bought at garden centres, not raised in your own greenhouses, and are thrown out when they cease flowering. Samantha finds the whole process unnatural. She likes the new style of planting, with tightly packed alchemillas, Chinese grasses, purple loosestrife and herbs.

Upwards can’t have a garden that’s “overlooked”, and Sam turns up her nose at those who turn an entire small back garden into a deck, trampoline, swimming pool or carp pond.

What gadgets can you have in your garden? Is a Kadai fire bowl posh, but a pizza oven nouveau? An outside area with Flintstone walls, an outside hearth and a hot tub is very vulgar indeed.

More here.

The Middle Classes in the 80s

Anti-glamour

The middle-class Upwards loved the 80s. Socialism and feminism were a club they could join. Everyone else was a Sloane Ranger, a Yuppie or on the dole. Thatcher was in power, destroying industry and starting wars. The world had got to change. The Upwards thought they were spearheading a revolution, and soon everybody in the world would copy their earnestness, drab clothes and woolly thinking. They had a lovely time bossing everybody about and telling them off for being ideologically unsound. Like any cult, they were keen to recruit you, and then persuade you to give up your personal life and spend all your spare time working for the cause.

Unfortunately they were the last group you’d want running the world – they couldn’t even run a women’s centre. They got funding for enterprises that did nothing but hold meetings (probably about “this group’s attitude to Nicaragua”).

Some time in the 80s a working-class woman wrote an article in the Guardian urging us to “go for what’s winnable”. Upwards were puzzled. It was a totally new idea. Their plan was to go for nothing less than complete equality, worldwide. This excused them from actually achieving anything, like deciding where to keep the stapler. More silly ideas: they thought science was “hubristic”, logic a male conspiracy, and knitting anti-feminist. Show them a party line and they toed it. Instead of science, they believed in magic – they loved Freud and Jung.

They couldn’t say someone was pretty – it was “conventionally good-looking”. They chose plain girl/boyfriends as a political statement. Female pop stars wore long baggy overcoats and danced clumsily to prevent women being seen as “sex objects”.

We couldn’t be girly. Upwards always like being puritanical and ascetic: they enjoyed banning hairstyles, fashion, makeup – and sex with men. They wore cheap, practical, hardwearing dungarees and parrot earrings, and cut each other’s hair. They didn’t read chicklit but Virago reissues of women novelists, or books of boring essays. We couldn’t go to the movies but had to go to political cabaret, pretentious French “cirques” and miners’ benefits. We listened to U2 and Mary Black (PC messages), not Duran Duran or Gary Numan (tunes).

Stoke Newington used to be a hangout for girls with white legs and short hair who wore summer dresses made out of 50s curtains (and were accompanied by stooping, weedy boyfriends). Stokeys have become much more normal, but maybe that’s because many of their obsessions have become mainstream and commercialised (health food, modern antiques, vintage clothes, cappuccino, sitting in cafes, baby slings, massage, yoga, visiting the third world).

They gave sons dolls and daughters plumbing sets. A writer in The Independent (May 12, 2004) calls the idea that gender is a product of nurture, not nature, “an idea that was briefly fashionable in the 60s and 70s”. It was all a fashion? Unthinkable!

Being Upwards, they worked the system like mad, getting a grant to do up a five-bedroom house in Hackney, or blagging a council flat in Westminster, living on the dole and getting their mortgage paid but still making money at a creative skill that they didn't “declare” (ie you lied or kept quiet about it). They then boasted about their cleverness and creativity in a quiet way. And their friends flourished them in front of their other friends to make them feel small.

The wider world paid them little attention, and 20 years on, high streets are full of tanning salons, nail bars and waxing parlours. Female pop stars went back to being sexy and glamorous in a few years. (OK, some important laws were passed, and society became less authoritarian and unfair. The liberal project is still going – we may get women bishops soon!)

When the party was over, people who had wasted years of their lives in a travelling circus with a political message dusted themselves down, got a teaching qualification and ended up running something, buying a house and joining a pension scheme. They were never much bothered by contradictions.