ABF                     Do you know what class you are in?

Corrected minor error   22/09/2008

My mother was very class-conscience, and I have inherited that bit of her.  When my mother was a child, they used to occasionally have la-di-dah middle or upper class women come round to the house and offer advice as to how to economise.  Advice would be such as how to economise with the coal by putting clods of turf on each side of the grate without explaining where the turf should come from,  With several boys in the family the back yard (you couldn't call it a garden) was worn down to bare earth.  And if you dug up turf from Bushey Park and got caught, you'd be in real trouble.  In those days they knew how to deter criminals.  Probably a month's Penal Servitude if it was a first offence.

My mother told me of such an incident when Lady Muck was most offended when her mother pointed out the impossibility of doing what she suggested and asked her if she had any other ideas.  When Lady Muck offered a religious tract and was told that "We need bread, not religion" she stormed out of the house in a huff with the words "ungrateful wretch".  My mother's father was a cringing lickspittle when it came to anybody wearing a good suit, so "class" was always on the agenda at home.

When I came home on leave from India I wanted to visit a girl who I had been corresponding with.  The lass was a Land Girl and I assume now that these lasses were generally from Middle or Upper Middle Class families.  Anyway, my mother persuaded me to forego a visit on the basis that "she will be above our class".  It seemed later that Mum was right, for when I came home after demob, I wrote to the girl and had a letter back from her father who made it clear that our correspondence was over.

Since that time I have deduced that there are essentially nine classes within Britain.  Each of the three basic classes: Working Class, Middle Class, and Upper Class, may be divided into three sub-divisions each.  I reckon that I was was born into Upper Working Class, but have since moved up one into Lower Middle Class.

My mother's mother sounds to have married below her own mother's status, as my mother explained that she always seemed to be rather above her husband (my mother's father) who, as I said above was a grovelling creep.  None of his large family had any time for him as they were all hard-working and progressive people.  The husband was finally abandoned when one of the grown-up sons took his mother away after a tawdry affair when the old man wanted to have sex with his sick wife and the son intervened when he heard his mother protesting loudly in the bedroom. According to my mother, her brother literally dragged the old man off of my mother's mother.

When I worked as an electrician in Notting Hill at the Nurse's Home of a Private Clinic, I met Jeanne Bamford, and we eventually got married and have three fine daughters.  But looking back, I reckon I married up a class.  When she was born Jeanne was probably a class lower than mine, as her father was a pit labourer.  But as she told me on one occasion: "I couldn't see myself marrying one of the local pit lads and having a string of kids like so many girls around me did."  Jeanne's elder sister had a fall and banged her head while playing in a local rail yard and ended up being cared for by Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul in Sheffield as an epileptic.  On leaving school Jeanne worked for that Order and later transferred to a Children's Nursery in Mill Hill, north London.  It was there that Jeanne got a Nursery Nursing Diploma and mixed with a lot of people above her previous station.  How Jeanne moved to Notting Hill, I don't know, but she became a Staff Nurse at St Vincent's Clinic in Notting Hill before I met her.

Looking back on our meeting I am honoured to have been chosen by Jeanne.  I know that I was a bit of an Adonis with auburn hair and blue eyes, but knowing Jeanne, I think there must have been a bit more than that that attracted her to me.

It was at St Vincent's in Sheffield that Jeanne converted to Catholicism.  But I have to give Jeanne her due, she never tried to convert any of my family.  Her religion was for her.  And I saw no problem having my three girls baptised as Catholics.  They all have since lapsed (to use the Church language).

Getting back to the subject of 'Class',  Jeanne's life before she met me was among people of substance.  Most Nuns are not from the Working Classes, but from families who are of a higher position in life.   One such woman was Sister Pauline; she was the senior sister at St Vincent's.  I've got a story somewhere on my website of when Sister Pauling confronted a surgeon in the operating theatre threatening to call the police if the operation was not to be called off.

But back to Jeanne.  It's supposed to be humiliating for a man to admit that his wife wore the trousers.  This was not totally the case with Jeanne and I, but she certainly made her opinions known to me and if she had the initiative, she didn't bother to consult me.  I think that had Jeanne gone into the order, she would have become as much of a dragoon as sister Pauline was.

Jeanne's honesty was to the point of foolishness.  On one occasion she went to Kingston shopping in Bentall's.  This store was the biggest in Kingston, and a bit like Harrods in its business.  Jeanne returned home after buying what she wanted and realised that she had been given ten shillings too much change.  It was a ten-mile return journey to go back  to Kingston to return the money.  It wasn't until I pointed out to her that she would probably get the assistant into trouble.  Bentall's would not know they had lost the money unless the till was examined at the end of the day, and even then it is unlikely that the particular assistant would be identified.  Jeanne finally relented and kept the ten bob.  I suspect it troubled her conscience, though.

But on another occasion, Jeanne had received ten shillings too much from the post office when she collected her family allowance.  She returned to the counter only to be snapped at "We don't correct errors once you have left the counter".  "Oh, thank you very much, you gave me ten shillings too much", and she turned on her heel and strode out of the shop.  The call from the counter-clerk was ignored.

You see why I respected my late darling wife.  Yes, Jeanne was definitely a class above me, but she was a wonderful wife in bed as well.