joked as children about how we could mastermind a Kind Hearts and Coronets style plot to leap up the social ladder. How many murders and poisons before we got our hands on the prize? Yes, it is possible to have an inferiority complex as an Honourable. In fact, it is probably a prerequisite.
So my father, without the prospect of land and peerage, became the first Wallop in the twentieth century to seek regular employment and – gasp – one in trade too. This may have been a blow to his ego, but he did what all shabbistocrats do when low on income and prospects: marry well. Of course, I would say that because she’s my mother. But he went down the classic route of finding a bride with money and beauty. My mother was the granddaughter of Sir Montague Burton, a man who arrived in Britain in the first year of the twentieth century from modern-day Lithuania as a penniless Jew. He started off peddling shoe laces around the slums of Leeds and ended up with a tailoring business that clothed much of the British Empire. In doing so he accumulated, and gave away, mountains of cash, much of it to good causes. And a small but meaningful amount ended up in our household. I was acutely aware that all of the comforts in my life as a child – holidays, a private education – were not because of the posh lot from Hampshire but thanks to the enterprise and chutzpah of a Jewish immigrant. If in any doubt, it would be drummed into me every September, when I went to get school uniform from Debenhams (then part of the Burton empire), and I’d suffer the embarrassment of my mother whipping out a staff discount card and the check-out girl invariably asking which branch she worked in. She would quietly, but politely, tell the white lie: ‘head office’. I would squirm. Why couldn’t we just go to John Lewis, like all my classmates?
My childhood in 1970s and 1980s west London was utterly unremarkable to me at the time, as it always is for children. I knew, because I was told so and because I sensed it clearly, that I was very lucky. But we were far from grand. We had a live-in nanny – but so did many of our friends – and a ‘daily’, but no other staff. There were occasional shafts of light that illuminated the slightly abnormal privilege – the Christmas drinks parties at St James’s Palace, where my aunt and uncle lived in a grace-and-favour flat; the play dates at Kensington Palace, where a school friend, the heir to a Royal Dukedom, lived; the knowledge from an early age of how to tip a gamekeeper correctly (note folded up small, passed over with a firm handshake and with no reference at all to the money, but a hearty quip about the crosswinds on the final drive); the black tie dinner parties my parents would hold where the women really would retire to let the men smoke cigars and discuss affairs of state. Even at a young age, I knew this was not what most children did. But they were rare moments, and for most of the time it was a quotidian cycle of normality: The Times and the Daily Express, the Beano, homework, Saturday Morning Swapshop, Sunday School, walking the dog (a golden retriever, of course) in Hyde Park, Wagon Wheels and Findus Crispy Pancakes, Action Man and Lego, dread of Wednesday afternoon swimming, washing the Ford Granada, perfecting a John McEnroe impression, waiting for Abba on Top of the Pops, filling in Royal Wedding scrapbooks.
I always knew exactly where I fitted in. I always have done. I am not sure how this was achieved. But I knew exactly how ‘smart’ we were, and I knew, as a result, that despite the flashes of proper, undiluted privilege, many of my classmates and cousins were considerably grander. I knew that we were ‘smart’, mostly on account of my father’s side, and that we were ‘comfortable’, thanks to my mother’s side. In short, I knew we were upper class. Just. Hanging on to the coat-tails of aristocracy by our fingertips, though hoping we didn’t look too desperate as we got caught up in the slipstream.
My children have been born middle class. Or, if we are being more accurate, Class A in the National Readership Survey category: born to a share-owning, broadsheet-reading professional in the 40 per cent tax bracket. Or, if we are being more up-to-date, using the Office for National Statistics’ most recent classifications for socio-economic groups, introduced in 2000, they live in an L3.1 household, fourth placed in a list of 17 different gradings. I am a traditional employee in a professional organisation. Or, if we are being even more specific, in category 18 of 56 Acorn socio-economic classifications: ‘multi-ethnic, young, converted flats’, where the Guardian is likely to be the newspaper of choice, and the householders visit the cinema far more regularly than most people, while having a strong propensity to buy their groceries online, but an above-average experience of having had their mobile phone stolen.
Confused? Trying to be specific about your class is like trying to nail jelly to a fast-moving Mondeo Man.
My children are not aristocrats, certainly. Neither are they Rockabillies with a tendency towards the scruffy and occasionally expensive country tastes and habits of old Britain. That’s because I have spent most of my adult life, indeed from adolescence onwards, trying – not always successfully – to edge away from the class I was born into, while retaining some of its habits and even maintaining a quiet affection for it. Indeed, I am probably onto at least my third class, even though I am (I hope) less than half way through my life. The process has been accelerated by marrying out of my class.
And this is where I need to explain my father-in-law’s class. He was born resolutely in the working classes but ended up assuredly in the middle classes. He, indeed, is a triumphant member of the Middleton classes, because for every Carole there are many millions of others who in the space of one lifetime climbed up from the bottom of the ladder to pretty much the top. Money is important but not really the key. What matters is assimilation – the ability innately, or through careful consideration, to make the right choices in order to furnish themselves with the lifestyle and habits of the class above them. And to then feel comfortable, confident even, to continue upwards.
He was born in Workington, now a sad and depressing town on the wrong side of the Lake District. His actual father was a ‘wrong ’un’ who never featured in his life, so he was brought up by his mother and grandparents. His grandfather, whom he always referred to as ‘Dad’, was a blast furnaceman at the Oldside iron works, a dirty, dangerous and physically demanding job. His grandmother was a maid in service, though not for a grand family. It was a home financed by and in the shadow of the great factory. In the days before the Welfare State and the widespread building of council houses, there were many millions who lived in a factory or pit house on a peppercorn rent. It was a proudly working-class household, and a respectable one at that. The man he called Dad was a union man and a member of the Co-operative; bills were paid from the jar of savings, the New Gresham Encyclopaedia was on the bookshelf, the Daily Herald on the kitchen table.
He passed the 11-plus exam, unimaginable to ‘Dad’ who’d started work at the iron works at the age of 13, and this was the first rung up the ladder, as it was for countless members of the Middleton class. University, however, was denied to him by lack of money. To escape national service, he opted to join the merchant navy. Caked in oil and sweat in the engine room, it might have looked as though he’d done no better than his own father, but it was skilled labour of a kind that only an engineer who’d trained as an apprentice could undertake. In the evening he’d wear his white mess uniform and host a table in first class, and it made him realise that the luxury the passengers at his table were enjoying was something worth aiming for. Back on land, he used his savings to open a ten-room hotel in Workington designed for travelling salesmen; his mother did the cooking in the kitchen. It was a success, and was expanded. Eventually he built the biggest hotel in town, with crêpes Suzette on the menu and Rotary club dances in the ballroom. Golf was learnt, the Telegraph was taken, and savings were used to send the children to private school. Holidays were initially in Bournemouth, but as the years rolled on they ventured first to the Costa Brava, later to Normandy, eventually to Tuscany. In 1980 the Queen visited the hotel, where she was served roast saddle of Lamb Henry IV (with artichokes, a bewildering array of tubers: Parisienne Potatoes & Bernaise Sauce, Delmonico Potatoes, New Potatoes, and Bouquetière of Vegetables). It was his Carole Middleton-on-Buckingham-Palace-balcony moment. ‘It was a huge thing, huge,’ he remembers.
Whether or not your family ends up defining you until the day you die has to do with the choices made along the way. Not all of them are
