The truth about leaving your social class behind
As Meghan Markle’s uncle accuses her of ‘trying to rise above her background’, two writers share their experiences of moving classes – not always for the better
‘I’VE TAKEN THE GREASY CHUTE DOWNWARDS’ KATE SPICER
When I was young we’d take our summer holidays at my grandmother’s cousin’s house. There was an indoor swimming pool, tennis courts and a huge garden, so huge, in fact that it was run by the National Trust. It wasn’t Blenheim Palace huge, but safe to say the whole set-up was pretty feudal. We stayed in the nursery wing. My grandmother’s cousin would invite us down for tea in the library or lunch in the dining room and we’d sit, on best behaviour, surrounded by wood panelling, good brown furniture, the odd Constable and a parade of gawping visitors to the garden looking through the windows.
If you could get candles called Big Old English House, I’d buy in bulk. Because that’s about as close as my generation will get to all that upper-class jazz of our ancestors. I’m downwardly mobile you see, and in all honesty, despite protestations that “You come from a very good family”, I never really understood how it applied to me.
In the game of society snakes and ladders, while Meghan Markle got a six first throw and landed on the gigantic ladder that takes you to three places from the top, it’s been some pretty easy rides down for me. Earlier this week Mike Markle, her father’s brother, told a magazine: “Meghan has climbed socially and left us behind – that’s how I feel.” Uncle Mike spoke from his trailer park home in Florida, a detail we are meant to relish as an indicator of how far she’s come.
“I think that’s what happens when you’re ‘underclass’ and trying to rise above the reality of your situation.
Coming from her background, she may have a chip on her shoulder,” he said.
The instinctive rituals and habits of one class are like a bizarre obstacle course for an outsider. As a child, I was met with a lot of telling awkward moments, like when a friend’s mother told me off for saying “what”, not “pardon”. Pardon, like toilet, was a word my mother told us we should never say. The worst words in the English language were settee and lounge. I stood in front of my friend’s mother, aged only 12, knowing she was wrong and quite incapable of saying it. Should I be rude, or should I utter a lower middle-class obscenity?
Something about all this, even as a child, made me feel a complicated mix of misplaced pride and immense sadness. I can’t help thinking that hanging on to all this family folklore actually disabled me from making my own progress. Meanwhile my friends who boast about being working class are now the ones with the biggest houses.
Social mobility is a huge topic of conversation in this country, but we very rarely talk about the greasy chutes downwards, it’s all about those who find it impossible to move upwards. I’m a hand-to-mouth freelance writer who lives in a twobedroom flat, but for all the big houses I will never own, I have an intellectual and cultural capital that makes me richer than my female forebears, who never had to make their own beds or knew how to boil an egg. I was one of the first women in my family to go to university instead of finishing school, thank God.
The other day I was in a pub and a DJ started ranting on about how he was descended directly from some viscount and my Plantagenet cousin and I laughed at him. You’re not special, mate.
They surround me these people, the skint with a signet ring brigade, the “Once upon a time … before the Lloyd’s crash” mob. I have one Austrian, one French and one Nigerian prince in my phone, and they are a weed dealer, a PR and banker respectively. I have a German count who is a chef, and a gipsy who has hundreds of millions. In truth I am lucky to even have a mortgage at all. In a study published earlier this year by the London School of Economics’s Centre for Economic Performance, the authors warned that the “dream of just doing better, let alone climbing the social ladder, is disappearing”.
Of course, Sloaney girls all live in Hoxton and are lesbians these days and only the oligarchy bother being demure or doing debutante-type things. Pie-crust collars are more likely to be worn by ironic hipsters, while all the royals are bathed in fake tan and wearing something by Victoria Beckham.
When the Spice Girls happened I remember thinking it was ridiculous that Posh Spice had that name as she was the daughter of a builder and clearly common. I think we know who got the last laugh on that count and it wasn’t the one who can trace her lineage back to some 17th-century duke. I’m over it all now, and consider myself classless – though I still wince when I use the word “toilet”.
‘MOVING UPWARDS LEFT ME LONELY’ ZOE BEATY
A few years ago my mum asked me what I would like for Christmas. “I don’t know, clothes,” I replied absently. “Not clothes,” she said. “I don’t know what you like any more.”
The conversation itself wasn’t particularly notable. But, ever so quietly, its connotations lingered. We had always been close. Back in Lincolnshire, our family was tiny but tight – Mum, a tenacious nurse, and my grandparents on the estate who valued nothing more than hard work, loyalty and togetherness. They’d worked to give me opportunities no one else in our little community had really been afforded: university education, travel and, underneath it all, I suppose, social mobility.
When I moved to London aged 23, I’d naively believed that my degree made me just as deserving to be there as everyone else. Quickly, I learnt that the class structures underpinning our society are much more insidious than that. I smiled politely when people asked me, “Do you ski?”, and “What school did you go to?” and, “Have you ever eaten crab, Zoë?”. Colleagues feigned shock that I enjoyed white bread (“disgusting”) or called me “poor” in front of my team. Comments were made about my clothes; my accent couldn’t settle.
But there’s another, more unspoken cost of social mobility and that is a very particular loneliness. Moving “upwards” means straddling two different classes, with different values and expectations, and fitting neatly into neither. And the shame of recognising that to be looking up to a more “aspirational” class, you are simultaneously appearing to look down on your own.
When Mum explained that she no longer knew what clothes to buy me, what she meant was that I’ve changed and while I still hold our family values dear, there are some parts of me that she no longer recognises. Like the way I hop on a plane on my own, or certain phrases that she’s not used to (like “misogyny”, which she translated to “chauvinist pigs”). She is proud I’m living the dream she had for me, which she was so determined to make happen. I don’t think either of us imagined how it might feel, for both of us, along the way.
‘The rituals of one class are like a bizarre obstacle course for an outsider’