Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening. Good liberal parents teach their children to check their privilege – useful modern phrase – but it swells up like a bubo on the nose. There’s no hiding it.
I can summon up the childhood shame at class embarrassments. Aged seven like me, Maureen, with her hair pinned sideways in a pink slide, lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower. They were at the other end of Lindsey, more hamlet than village, half a mile down the road from my father’s pink thatched cottage set in the flat prairie lands of Suffolk, where I spent half my time, the other half in London, shuttling between divorced parents. I envied Maureen for what looked to me like a cheerful large family tumbling noisily in and out of their ever-open front door. They never asked me in, so I would hang about the door waiting for Maureen to come out and play.
Maureen and I played fairies in the cornfields, crept about scaring each other in St Peter’s churchyard next door, drew hopscotch squares on the road and threw five stones on and off our knuckles. One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, “Giddy-up,” and waving a stick as a mock whip.
It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. “Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!” Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. “You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!” Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough.
This is a story about English class, as divisive now as ever. Class-consciousness was deep-dyed in our veins, my family of liberal and leftist descent, social reformers, anti-colonialists, good internationalists, atheists, communists, socialists and social democrats. For as far as I can reach back to uncover, all sides of the family lived on the left, from my grandfather, the universal historian Arnold Toynbee, to his father who worked with Beatrice Webb on the poor laws. My great-grandfather Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, vegetarian, teetotaller and fierce anti-conservative, was in his turn following his father’s example, an Australian administrator campaigning for the rights of Indigenous Australians and against capital punishment and transportation. Gilbert’s wife followed the example of her mother, the ferocious “Red Countess” of Carlisle, keeper of Castle Howard, Irish home ruler, women’s rights campaigner, so strictly temperance she smashed all the wine bottles in the castle’s cellar.
In each generation my family were forever locked in combat with the perpetual old enemy, the forces of conservatism. But to live a well-heeled life on the left is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions always destined to fall short of ideals, social concern never enough, struggling to be good but inevitably never good enough. I hunted hard for any redeeming twig of a working-class branch of my family tree, without success. Confessing a background of privilege comes hard to the likes of us, who can claim no “merit”, no handy pulling-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps rugged path to our good professional jobs as writers, academics and teachers, set on our lucky way at a young age. Even when I idled my education away and sabotaged my chances, I still landed back on my well-shod Start-Rite feet. The shame of it is here, in my lifetime, social mobility has fallen into reverse. Birth and inheritance is destiny more certainly, the ladders up steeper and the inequality deeper than when I started out writing.
The older children grow, the more refined their social antennae become. You might think that at a middle-ranking girls’ boarding school, Badminton School in the dull Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym (nothing to do with the stately home of Badminton horse trials), every one of us belonged to the same social class. In the crude weighing scales of sociologists, that would be so, all “AB” demographic children with parents or grandparents able to stump up the middle-ranking fees. But from all of English literature, from your own life, you will know the importance of subtle gradations of social difference. This was not a school for the aristocracy, but everyone knew the significance of money, eyeing the cars and clothes each other’s parents arrived in. But the devilry of English class is that money is not the whole story. More important than wealth was parental occupation, status and education, with that great gulf between profession and trade.
From high to low, there can barely be a schoolroom in England where children can’t rank one another’s families fairly accurately. I have often reported on the misery of desperately poor children first arriving in school, branded from day one for the wrong uniform, cheap trainers, no lunch box, no lunch money, no PE kit, nothing to write in an essay on “My Summer Holidays” or “My Christmas”. The rule isn’t absolute: clever, talented, funny, interesting or just plain lucky children break free of low social origins. Dim and dull richer ones do sometimes slide down in their peers’ esteem. But class at my school was subtle and always unspoken: too flash parental Jaguars and fur coats were despised as vulgar. Nonetheless, the big picture of social class destiny was played out in microcosm even in my apparently homogeneous middle-class schoolroom.
Aged 12, we were divided into A streamers and B streamers; let’s call them sheep and goats. Sure enough, the daughters of doctors, academics, scientists, teachers, lawyers, diplomats, a Nigerian daughter of the governor of Kaduna, an Indian politician’s daughter, one bishop’s daughter and any similar children of highly educated professionals glided effortlessly up to the A stream. But the daughters of trade were more likely to be relegated to the B stream, often day-girl daughters of local Bristol businessmen or farmers from around the West Country. Maybe this was unconscious bias on the school’s part, or maybe they simply went by children’s results, or their perceived intelligence or intellectual interests. In this subtle grading, parents’ education predestined most of us either to the Latin set or to the domestic science stream. The Latins were headed, it was presumed, to university, the cooks to secretarial college. Since we were usually hungry, the Latins hung around outside the cookery room yearning for the pies and cakes the others carried out in silver tins – and yet we Latins knew perfectly well that we were glad to be designated A streamers. Since I hated Latin and failed it at O-level, I’d have had a better time with the domestic science stream, but of course I’d have been appalled at relegation to the B stream: social status trumps cakes.
I left Badminton with four bad O-levels, no maths, no science, no Latin, so the value for money was poor. Those marks were not, directly, the school’s fault: much of the teaching was conventionally good, but I was too rebellious to work, too angry to obey, too impatient to get out of there. Observing the many schools my four children have attended, the few schools that succeed concentrate first on happiness: learning is drudgery without it. And schools are undoubtedly happier places for my grandchildren than they were when my children experienced them, let alone back in the late 1950s when I was sent away.
At 16 I took myself out of that detested school and into the sixth form of Holland Park, the gleaming new first comprehensive in Notting Hill. There for the first time I found pleasure in education. As for the missing O-levels, I took them again my first term at Holland Park where I was steered through retakes with kindly persuasion, under the mentorship of Mr Stedman Jones, the scholarly head of the English department, devotee of Dr Johnson. This fine teacher, against all family expectation, guided me into winning an Oxford open scholarship too, by passing on to me his deep fascination with and knowledge of Jacobean drama, studying far beyond the ordinary curriculum, engrossing me in his literary obsessions.
But now when I think about it again, probably that extra help from a great comprehensive teacher wasn’t pure luck. What if I’d been a working-class O-level failure, who would have bothered to see if I was worth a second chance? Mr Stedman Jones may have picked on me for special coaching because he knew of my family’s literary and academic background and just assumed I must have an inherited talent hidden away somewhere, though I had nothing much to show for it. I was once told by an academic of an appealing education experiment conducted some years ago that alas I haven’t been able to trace: a group of teachers were picked and told they had been specially selected as the most highly skilled to teach some particularly brilliant children, children who were also told that secret tests had revealed they were exceptionally gifted. Both teachers and pupils did extraordinarily well, though all had been chosen at random. Expectation is everything.
The truth is, the Oxford scholarship exam of those days was designed to reward people of exactly my background and journalistic state of mind. Its general paper was one of the most enjoyable and encouraging exams ever devised, with scores of essay questions to choose from on every conceivable subject, open-ended, imaginative and even fantastical in their scope. Choose any question on any subject and show off to us! Intrigue us with a parade of ideas! It searched for what you could do best, while most exams aim to catch you out on what you know least. That should be the guiding spirit in all exams, I thought. But that’s because it best suits dilettantes already exposed to wide reading, precisely as encouraged by my background.
This heavily class-biased exam would disadvantage very clever applicants who had worked exceedingly hard at every subject at school but lacked the family or an Alan Bennett History Boys teacher or my Mr Stedman Jones to open their wings at this early stage in their life. This was the perfect exam to select future newspaper columnists.
How narrowly I escaped teen motherhood and an end to any educational expectations. I was bowled over in love with a clever and cerebral boy, son of a high Catholic convert mother but humanist father, sent to Ampleforth, though by then he had thoroughly shaken off all that. His breadth of cultural and intellectual interest was beyond anything I had come across among friends of my age. I was awe-struck not just by him, his avid reading, zeal for jazz, poetry and left-wing politics, but also by his cool and detached air of grace. His father was a wise and humorous international human rights lawyer, who reminded me of Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. As for his older sister, who became a good painter, I looked up to her with a kind of hero-worship for her wild and funny exuberance.
But as he was about to go to Oxford, I was appalled to find I was pregnant and even more appalled at his anti-abortion mother pressing us to marry. She suggested we would live in an Oxford flat, where I would bring up the baby while he studied: the end of my own future worried her not at all. We paid a visit to his newly married sister, who was living in Oxford’s Summertown, up the road from my great-aunts. I was pleased to see her, this lively, funny and magnetic character. But she was living, as far as I could see, the life their mother expected me to live, married and cooped up in an Oxford flat with a baby. Though she was herself a student, wifedom and life with a baby looked to me like a brutal curtailment of studenthood, locked in at home. There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn’t find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy. I shuddered at the prospect of this motherly existence, threatening an end to my life before it had even begun.
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Afterwards, as we both contemplated this scene, looking at his sister and at the vision of our future stretching out ahead of us, he broke off with me. His mother was plainly glad, but she called me many times to insist that I have the baby and give it away to a Catholic adoption agency. I was aghast that anyone could suggest anything so cruel. This was still before abortion was finally legalised in 1967. But I was lucky, again. My family’s GP was a disreputable and amenable practitioner, who we always thought made extra money on the side by dispensing more or less anything anyone wanted, and so he prescribed what were then illegal abortion-inducing pills: after two days of great pain, to my immense relief, that was the end of the pregnancy. But I didn’t know if my boyfriend’s mother might investigate and report me, and I feared she might. The end of that relationship left me heartbroken and bereft, taking revenge by writing him into my (not very good) first novel. That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same.
As for my former lover, he is a serious writer and thinker and a remote friend: odd how impossible it is to recapture old passions. I simply recall the fact of the agony of unrequited love, but look at him now as an interesting but distant person, all passion spent. As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked.
Ultimately, I threw my education away, abandoning university midway through second year, and I regret it. Why? It’s far too long ago to summon up an honest answer. I could say arriving mid disastrous affair with a married roué TV presenter the same age as my mother, a famously seductive character, notorious (I didn’t know) for a succession of young girls discarded in turn, until a few years later he killed himself. I could say that having my first novel published in my first term was an act of such presumption that it set me up for a crash landing at Oxford. I could say it was the scholarship’s unbearable pressure to get a first, with my two great-aunts, one a professor, one a don, walking their dog down to visit my tutors regularly to enquire after my latest essays. Maybe it was taking up with Jeremy Sandford, screenwriter of Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home, and living part-time on his ramshackle Brecon Beacons farm looking after ragged sheep and ponies. In truth, I can’t recapture the blend of woe and impatience that propelled me out. My shocked tutor, Jenifer Hart, said, “You will regret this for the rest of your days. Everyone who leaves here tries to come back and we never, ever take them.”
It must have taken the cocky self-assurance of a secure middle-class background that I never doubted I would earn my living. It was 1968, drop-out era, jobs were plentiful and no one worried. It was another universe for my luckiest of generations, compared with my pressured grandchildren who will emerge into a land of ferocious competition for fewer chances. But I did feel a fundamental distaste for Oxford and all its ways, its conceits and arrogances, its denizens’ obnoxious certainty of their superior merit. Whatever the reason, I threw it all away recklessly. Because everything is preserved for ever by the recording angels of the internet, those on the right who detest what I write in my Guardian columns sometimes dredge up my lack of a degree as ammunition to prove my stupidity and evidence that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Insofar as there was a plan, this was it: I had to pay back my scholarship money, and I would earn my living by working all day with my hands, leaving my mind free to roam over the next section of the second novel that I would sit down and write in the evenings. I was not intending to write about work or factories, just to earn enough to get by while I wrote my modern Middlemarch. I took a job on the production line of the Tate & Lyle sugar-packing factory, beside a trickling remnant of the River Wandle in south London, where it was easy to walk up and straight into work.
Inside the great vaulted works, issued with overalls, hairnet and cap, the shattering, clattering and clanking battered the ears, while deep vibrations sent clouds of sugar dust up into the air. I’d been working as a waitress in a Wimpy and then in a Golden Egg, but I preferred the drama of a factory, the sheer ingenuity of what these machines could do. Besides, factory work paid more into the weekly brown paper pay packets of notes and coins, because it was well unionised with everyone a member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.
“Sitting next to Nellie” was the only induction, training or safety instruction in manual jobs back then (so is it still in many jobs, I later found). The sugar came cascading in a torrent down chutes into the waiting blue and white Tate & Lyle paper bags that whirled round the conveyor belt at high speed as metal levers shot out and folded down one paper flap after another, adding a dollop of glue before scooting the bags down the line. There were two basic jobs: one was standing under the chute by the metal levers to pull out bags fast if any misfired, split or failed to seal. The other, less skilled, was heaving in turn first six then eight bags off the line to stack into boxes on a slower conveyor line behind.
I would get home exhausted and aching, but beyond that, deadened in the brain by the noise and the transfixing monotony of the same action repeated 10,000 times over. So how was that second novel coming along? How was all that working with my hands to keep my brain free for higher things? It was a sharp lesson in why factories, construction sites, laundries, cleaning agencies, warehouses and catering kitchens don’t seem to produce their fair quota of literary output. I stuck it out for a couple of months, as a matter of pride, to prove to myself I wasn’t a middle-class weakling, too soft and spoilt to do an ordinary job. But I lasted no longer. Not a word emerged on paper of an evening on to my old black Remington typewriter.
What finally propelled me out of the factory was a growing bloom of a rash, all up my arms and then legs and face, itching like fury, unhelped by Pond’s or Nivea. The other women laughed: they all got it, they said, the sugar rash, but it usually wore off after six months as your body got used to it. I didn’t wait to see.
Why would you, if you had a choice? And I was born with choices. At university after my novel was published I was commissioned to write sometimes for the New Statesman, including an ill-advised attack on Oxford that caused a measure of outrage. Asking around for any writing work, by luck I discovered the Observer needed a temp for a week or two to cover for someone away ill on the Pendennis column, a miscellany of short pieces. When Anne Chisholm, the page editor, came back, she said she’d been wanting an assistant so she kept me on, no one apparently noticing an extra job added to the payroll. When I talk to young aspiring journalists now, all with not only a degree but an MA from a good postgraduate journalism course, they are amazed it was so easy to slide into newspapers, but 1968 was a lotus time of plenty.
I never meant to be a journalist. But once I was there, sent out with notebook and Biro, I was gripped by reporting. I gravitated to the news desk where, whenever possible, I pushed to report on work and labour. Industrial stories, strikes, strife and unions were staple news, and I was drawn to reporting on the nature of work and its conditions, eager to puncture the myths of all that “dignity of work” extolled by those not doing it.
Feeling ignorant of the world beyond my upbringing, I took time off to set out around the country, taking jobs in different towns and industries to try to understand work and a working-class world a planet away from my South Kensington background. Often the middle-class writer’s eye is instinctively drawn to extremes, to the romance of the gutter, to homeless people on the streets, to the near-starving and desperate cases. Instead, I wanted to report on the ordinary, the everyday work it took to keep a family’s head above water. That’s where the great class divide yawns, right there, the grand canyon in education, life chances, surroundings, sense of security, expectations, presumptions – there in the nature of work itself.
This is an edited extract from An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals by Polly Toynbee, published by Atlantic Books on 1 June (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Polly Toynbee will talk about her new book at a Guardian Live online event on Wednesday 31 May. Book tickets here