Am I middle-class?
Not that it's a competition. Most of the time I forget about it, but it comes back sometimes in the form of an unwelcome accusation or short-hand label from others. I'm not trying to establish credentials here, really, I'm not - Just trying to nail something down.
I went to infant's school during the mid 60s, at the top of a steep hill. We didn't tend to go down and others didn't tend to come up. The hill was crowned with a council estate, built to replace (not altogether successfully) the demolished "slums" of the fishing and quarrying village below - a story in itself - and "The Board School" as it's huge granite lintel proclaimed, complete with the invariably warm, third of a pint bottles of free milk and regular slaps or slipperings from our teachers. The school's catchment area, covering maybe half a mile, had been lived in by the same families more or less, our families, for generations. Home for lunch every day. It was hyper-local. Without modern guile or heritage projects, we were steeped in "our place".
We were being conditioned to it even.
When not at school, which for a year or two I wasn't very much, once or twice a week, we'd have rides on Charlie North's horse and cart. He was the fruit and veg man, much of the muddy produce grown himself on a bit of land up The Coombe where he lived in a dirt floored cottage. Sometimes he'd give us a bag of crisps to share - plain salted of course - a big treat, sat two, sometimes three, in a row behind his old cart horse. Probably a few kids from Park Road remember when he started doing Corona fizzy pop, soon to be displaced by a rival pop delivery business with a van. Charlie had two flavours, lemonade or limeade. Neither of which contained anything vaguely resembling the juice of a citrus fruit. There was a deposit charged on each bottle and they were very much for birthdays and high days. Certainly not something that was just in the fridge. Mr Richards' corner shop (always "Mr Loit's", for insulting reasons I may explain elsewhere) at the bottom of Adit Lane by the orchard, was an occasional treat too, once a week I'd be allowed a half-penny ice cream for fetching mum's shopping, a banana flavoured item in the shape of a pole which, in the same lab-designed manner as the bottles of Corona, had never been anywhere near dairy products.
There were no domestic phones just a box at the end of the street. Mum and dad didn't have a car until I was 10, Dad went to work on a scooter until one morning, in the dark and wet, he hit a badger at top speed, I think that forced his hand and we became poshoes with an already rusting Austin A40.
Most homes had TVs. Watch with Mother at 1pm then the test card until a five minute animation preceding the news at 6. When I was ill, which I was a lot, I'd sit through feverish, curtained afternoons waiting for the schools programmes to come on. Watching the modern, scientific looking timer count down. There'd be a couple each day. They were never interesting, but the novelty of TV outside normal hours was irresistible.
Days were spent in the yards, streets and lanes. As we got older and began to spread our wings, we'd hang out around the harbour. Mucking about on the berthed fishing vessels, sometimes putting an optimistically baited line out ourselves, shrimping, learning to roll fags. Then, in time, onwards to Penlee Quarry, a massive scar in the landscape just outside the village, where dads, grandads and uncles worked, blasting out then prepping blue elvan rock for the autobahns of Germany and London's South Bank, making concrete blocks with the residue in a huge pressing tower. These were places the workmen would probably never visit themselves, but the coasters (white and yellow Brook boats), hungry for the stone under our feet, and their crews came and went from and to these foreign places, two or three a week.
One of the Brook boat seamen, a Langstaff from Whitehaven, met and married my gran here. He'd been a boxer in his youth and having run away to sea at 14 was easily settled with the natives. Apart from his thick Cumbrian accent which he never lost and his, for then quite outrageous, nautical tatoos, one thing marked him out; he had a fierce, almost psychopathic, commitment to unions and socialism. Anathema to our local work force, with their mix of Methodism and the unfathomably proud subservience peculiar to the Cornish, but his enduring legacy to me. Consequently he got through a lot of jobs and would often find himself out of work before packing his bags and returning to sea where they'd always have him.
In the evenings at the quarry the rock-crushing machinery and the tiny steam engine and trucks which, six days a week, dragged the stone to the waiting coasters, sat silent, willing us to play our dangerous war games and to find our feet in our unusual generation's pecking order.
I say "unusual" because some fundamental social engineering had been going on around us. Maybe even FOR us.
I have an early memory of walking to my gran's at the far end of the village with my aunt. A short cut would take us through a patch of gravelly scrub, what's now a car-park in Newlyn Town, by The Narrows if you've ever been. Set in to the top of this patch were bits of what had obviously been cob walls, with now pointless fire places and collapsing chimney-less breasts and, by one abandoned hearth, a small piece of yellow wall paper, just hanging on and flapping in the sun. I'd always imagined it a bomb site. "That was our living room, your mum's and mine, when we were little" my aunt said out of the blue, "That was our wallpaper" and she went on to tell me how as children they'd been moved to the new council estate at the top of the steep hill near my school. The government inspectors had decided their old homes were unfit, slums. So off they went to 'Homes Fit For Heroes' - Not how they're seen now, sadly. Besides our grand parents and great-grandparents mortification at being described "slum dwellers", what I didn't understand until much later was how that had changed their sense of community. They still 'belonged', but to what?
Some started to redefine themselves through their aspirations instead. Ideas that once would have been considered above their station - How my dad became a teacher. Mum, having been a seamstress before marriage, of course remained at home. Not everybody wanted to move, they were being taken away from their places of work, homes where you could pop your head out of the door to make sure the boat or gear were OK, corner shops, shops in peoples front rooms, all torn down as they were ripped from their neighbours (as they saw it). The demolitions stopped after protestors and the second world war intervened, but the shattering had been done. Homes that survived are now sought after "fishermens cottages" and reach inflated London prices as second homes, investments and the like. We're the ones selling them.
But I digress. For whatever reason, that bit of wallpaper blew my infant mind. I would look at it every time I passed and one day took a bit of it home with me, like a precious thing, treasure. "That was our wallpaper" mum said, but made nothing more of it. She had moved on, or even up.
Here I was, growing up in and being shaped, atleast in the psychogeography, by a place where age old social mores and attendant heirarchies still pertained. Still mattered, but the host community was un-moored.
So far so good, not really middle-class at all.
At eleven things took a turn which, I think, makes me ask the question at the beginning of this. My health had settled and I was attending school regularly for a change. We sat the eleven plus. I wasn't worried about it, so don't know why I remember that silent hall so clearly. I and a hand full of my friends passed, were duly declared to be "in the top ten percent" and sent to the local, all boys grammar school.
I didn't recognise it, you make the best when you're eleven, but this is when the "class" thing started. The grammar school had a mix of young, modern teachers and a lot of old dudes from before the war with the attendant approach to discipline. There was a strict uniform policy, blazers and caps and a house system which took a bit of getting used to. I wasn't prepared for being labelled because of a random house allocation system. But here we were, with prefects, head boys, a prefects common room that I'm not sure I ever saw the inside of. They weren't allowed to hand out punishments like Tom Brown's School Days any more, but they still did. I took a few whacks and had a number of pages ripped out of my school hymn book before I learned who to avoid and who to be obsequious around. As for the masters, some teachers had actual weapons for "disciplinary uses", I remember in particular a long metal bar with a wooden ball on the end, which would get you arrested these days.
There were rich farmers sons, dentists and doctors sons, posh sounding kids whose parents knew the local MP. A middle-eastern lad called Pervaiz was always a source of fascination to me. These were people whose parents listened to classical music and understood poetry, maybe some of them did themselves. I'm sure most of them wouldn't consider themselves anything special in the poshness stakes, it was intensely provincial, but everything's relative. I mean, I didn't come from a cultureless background, but ours was male voice choirs and the random bookshelves of self-starting readers. These people had big houses and understood the rules of rugby and cricket for God's sake. Above all they had an ease and confidence with things that was different to mine. Being surrounded as I was at home by an unchanging, solid "community" I kind of already knew my place, I'd been given my identity, I'd had no need to fight for it or to establish one until now.
I never did fit in there, I complied and learnt to walk the walk, but never felt part of the whole. There are many, many things I'm grateful to the grammar school for, not all of them their intended lessons though. I found my tribe, like you always do and instead of academic or sporting achievement found solace and an outlet for rebellion in music. Towards the end of my school days - I was told not to come back as they had "nothing to offer you Williams and you CERTAINLY have nothing to offer us" as one master put it - I suppose I had become some sort of cool amongst my peers, we were the ones playing in bands, putting on gigs and so forth. All of it happening without the school, independent of it.
Meanwhile, the grammar school had busied itself educating me for opportunities that didn't exist here. If I was to go on to the professions I would need to leave Cornwall. If I stayed I was educated a bit beyond what Lands End could offer and had lost the deep connection with a lot of my mates who had gone to the secondary modern.
I ended up drifting in to clerical work, kidding myself that was to enable my real job as a musician and generally not being too sure about what I am.
If all of this sounds self-pitying or ungrateful nothing could be further from how I feel. It's just how it is, we were kind of half-lifted and left, dangling in mid-air. Not unlike my mum being moved to the estate. They were trying to be kind.
So, there's quite the rambling blog post. Am I middle class? I don't feel it because I don't understand my middle-class peers aspirations. We share scraps of background, but I was never included in. I am not one of them.
Am I working class? Depends who I'm talking to.
I think the honest answer is I'm neither fish nor fowl. Sometimes I'm glad of that and others I resent it to hell.
