BOUDICCA FOX-LEONARD

Senior Lifestyle Writer

Aged 14 I was smacked in the face by a girl in the PE changing room. She had called me posh. My retort: “How can I be posh if I have to go to school with people like you?” Mean, yes, but she had just set fire to another girl’s hair.

Class, I learnt, is in the eye of the beholder.

Whenever I asked Mum (the Leonard in my name) what class we were, she would say “professional working class”.

At weekends my dad would don oily overalls and fix whatever was ailing the family car. The neighbours in our leafy Stockport suburb assumed he was a mechanic. Had that been the whole truth, then I would have met the BBC’s definition of working class.

Dad (the Fox) was the son of a lorry driver, he left school in north London without any qualifications to become an apprentice toolmaker on the Caledonian Road.

Yet he dreamt of something bigger. Night school, followed by the University of Manchester as a mature student, and he eventually became a chartered engineer.

Mum’s cursus honorum reads: council house, grammar school, mature graduate, Civil Service and then teaching.

I’m middle class today because grants meant my working-class parents could become graduates.

But no one ever expects to find Boudicca Fox-Leonard with a distinct northern twang.

Yes, I went to state school, but my home life was culturally rich, if not always financially. There were books and conversation, but no TV (or licence). It was an eccentric upbringing that defied class categorisation. And that, I’ve learnt, frustrates the type of people who work for the BBC.