I made a promise to write about class but obviously i’ve been going over and over in my brain all day not knowing exactly what to write.
I guess I just want to say that class isn’t simple. It’s taken me a while to understand that. I’ve been a snob towards the “chav” class in the past, only where I’m from they were called Bedmes, or Meaders, and some other names (all after areas of my city, unsurprisingly poor areas). Vicky Pollard (the Little Britain character) is based on girls from the Southmead (i think) area of my home city (the Meders), i think the two middle class white guys who do Little Britain went to Uni in Bristol or something. Anyway, I did used to look down on these kids, although never the elder generations - I think it’s because I felt excluded.
Class is complicated. Family History: I was born to working class parents. My parents met as kids in Gibraltar, got married, and moved to the UK. So there was already that difference there between me and other kids, my parents had ‘foreign’ accents, especially my dad, and there were all sorts of cultural differences between my home and my friends - our foods, our rules, our habits. We weren’t like other families that I knew. And it was the eighties so even though my parents were working class, trying to buy their council house, they voted Tory and were very right wing, they were racist (at a level i only have begun to remember and think about in the past few years - i didn’t understand what it meant back then), had very traditional ideas about children’s place and women’s place and yes men’s place too. My dad comes from some sort of harsh background that he never really talks about, and the best way to describe our home is to refer to a movie - you seen Sleeping With the Enemy? You know how everything has to be just right, facing the right way, everything has to match up and be level and if it isnt he just goes fucking mental? That is my dad, my childhood home, absolutely, and in the most frightening detail.
So anyway, even though we were working class we weren’t like other working class English kids. My mum and dad used to tell us not to talk in an accent (we still did but maybe less so than other kids, we were forbidden to call my mum Ma for example, which is what Bristol accented kids would do - my mum thought it was ‘common’ and ugly). I don’t know how I know it but I do - my parents did think they were different to other working class people, despite neither having gone to Uni or anything like that - I think it’s the Gibraltar connection because it’s a very tiny and insulated community and they do have very odd ideas about Britain and about the British people. I don’t remember them having any Brit working class friends, for example, although they both made friends easily they didnt really maintain any close friendships with other couples or anything, except for other people who had moved here from Gib.
BUT I did go to my local primary school, and my friends were mostly normal wc kids, and I did develop a local accent and was part of it all. And then I was a smart kid with a lot up top, and I passed an entrance exam to go to a local public school, which was paid for (fully!) by the then Tory government on the Assisted Places scheme (set up so that smart poor kids could go to schools that charged a fee). Years later when I slagged off the Tories my dad would tell me that I should support them and be grateful because without them I wouldnt have gone to the school I did.
SO. I got into this ‘good’ school and noone I knew was going there and what I wanted more than anything else at age eleven was to stay with my friends and go to my local comp. But it wasnt my choice. My parents had already split up by this point. My dad was buying a house in the suburbs and my mum was on the dole and working part time cash in hand jobs wherever she could get them, having spent something like 19 years out of work and unqualified since school work wasnt easy to find, especially after the abusive marriage and her own breakdowns. She wasn’t coping at all. Her own edumacation story is that her mother refused to let her go to art college after her o levels (she wanted to do something with dressmaking or perhaps professional window dressing) because my nan said my mum should get married. So that was pretty much that for my mum and she did indeed go and get married. 
Please bear with me! I know I’m skipping around a bit.
So noone from my comp primary had been to a public school for years so everyone was well proud of me, but I was unhappy with the decision. My parents bought me a briefcase as my school bag because they were proud and I was going to be the one from our family who went to University one day (my brothers are talented in arts and all sorts of other things that I am not, but they are not academic. Academia is pretty much the only thing, however, i dont suck at. Until, recently anyway, when Ive been getting crafty ;)). So anyway, there I go to my new posh school with a briefcase and all the other kids just have regular sports bags and satchels like normal people do. And although maybe in my comp I might have had less of a local accent, in my new one I really stood out - I was proper Brizzle and almost noone else was, they all spoke what i suppose you’ld call Middle English. I was one of The Poor Kids in my year, which had it’s ups and it’s downs, people looked down on me and I felt like shit on Mufty day (you pay 50p and dont wear uniform for the day, no idea why, its just some sort of tradition). I mean I had handmedowns from my aunts and my mum and even my nan. I had jeans that were several inches short of my ankles and nothing that was fashionable at all. We were skint! And then my mum was also neglecting us entirely as part of some sort of bid to discover the youth she hadnt had, young boyfriends, going out clubbing, people staying round a lot. We just ceased to exist unless she was hitting us or screaming at us. So I had one school shirt that I used to wash every night and iron every morning. And all that. I don’t want to relive every moment here.
The good part about being The Poor Kid is that everybody already thought I was a bit rough, and I had done a lot of physical fighting already in my life, so I shouted at a few people and enough of them were scared of me that I didnt get picked on as much as I otherwise might have. And I was a friendly and bright kid so I did make friends although I guess I was always the oddish one and even back then my friends all thought I was a bit crazy and unpredictable.
But then there was family drama and my mum kicked me out and I spent a few years wandering between homes, anyones really, various family members and a week here a week there with friends and their families. At this point I became totally isolated from my brothers and I also threw off my accent to fit in better. So when I very rarely did see my brothers they would take the piss out of me for being Very Posh because of the lack of accent and the fact I was in a relatively posh school (they went to the comp I would have liked to). And obviously the change of school and then moving out of the neighbourhood meant I lost contact with every single one of my childhood friends.
So I floated in limbo, neither working class or middle, generally looked down on by both. And in response (because Im not good with rejection, and Ive had a lot of it) I became snobby to the left and snobby to the right. And that continued at some level until very recently, and has been fading out as I explore feminism and anarchism and try to find me.
But I still don’t quite fit. I have basic qualifications, I left school (and my dads house, where I had been from 15-16, barely) at 16 and went between bouts of unemployment and full time work. I’ve spent a lot of time homeless, in squats, had a lot of different bedsits and rooms in shared houses, but I’ve never had my own council place or lived in a block of flats. I don’t really like hip hop or dance music or the other things that are generally percieved as being in fashion working class-wise, i like rock and metal and especially indie shoegazey stuff. I never really had time or money to get into all that properly, so I know what I like but I don’t necessarily know the name of the song or the artist. I do know a lot about movies and games coz I geek out on that sort of stuff instead. But anyway, the point is that I don’t wear the right clothes or listen to the right music or am into the right ‘culture’ to be really considered part of the working class community properly by my peers within and without it. Plus now I live in a reasonably sized house (due really to my partner(ish) being from a middle class family but thats a whole ‘nother story - his family are originally Polish refugees here after the War but now his mum is the middle class mil from the depths ;)) and thats the crime of the century really - I don’t live in the right way to be truly considered part of the wc community. It’s all to do with stereotypes, isn’t it.
But clearly I’m not middle class, and it’s true that i don’t share my values with either group really. I’ve been described as a Bleeding Heart Liberal (I have an american uncle ;)) which is just so not what I am. I don’t know many radical feminist offline and neither do I know many anarchists, it’s something I explore pretty much on my own tbh. So I guess I just float around like I always have, not fitting in anywhere, and generally being looked down on by everyone.
But what I have come to realise is that it is all romantic notions anyway. The working class do not exist as the stereotype they are portrayed as. Certainly not in older generations, but I think with Tha Kids it’s a bit harder to argue, because many have kind of bought this idea of their culture that is sold to them 24/7 in the capitalist west. Of course most of them will grow out of it but they are constantly bombarded with these images and messages. I’m alway surprised just how closely so many identify with American culture, the whole gangsta thing, which just doesnt really fit here at all. But obviously as more of them identify with that it does creep in, it’s a self fulfilling thing, buy the brand become the brand. It’s very sad because I feel like to some extent we are losing British culture, and i don’t mean from the new people that move here and live here because that is part of British culture, always has been, always will be and we’re better for it. No, what is stealing away our culture is the total Americanisation of everything, the way that US history and culture is kind of becoming the history and culture everywhere. Like schools do American History but they dont do womens history or normal working peoples history, they just learn about the various Empires and Rulers, from the Imperial point of view of course, and the only modern history is American (white, male, goes without saying I guess).
I do hear a lot of discontent about this, friends I have that write ’street’ (yes i hate that word, it’s so fucking yeurgh) music and lyrics (hey I said I didnt like that sort of stuff but many of my friends do and some are quite good at producing it) do complain about how people they know rap in American accents and pretend they’re all gangsta. And there is a flourishing underground of working/under class youth/young adults/whatever here that are writing and creating art about their own culture, but it’s not the sort of stuff that gets bought and sold commercially because it’s honest and made by honest people - and their stuff gets fairly regularly stolen/appropriated and watered down and sold on while they themselves are pretty much left invisible. I guess thats how it always works though.
So I don’t know. This has been a long ramble through my brain but the end really is that class isnt what we think it is. We live in a world of easy stereotypes. Nothing is really that simple. Least of all class. There are bums and heroes and villains at every level of our society, and i think maybe we are all these things at different times. And there arent just three levels of society - the upper, lower, and middle. I thought there were a few sub levels for a while, notably Upper Middle, Lower Middle, Upper Working, and Underclass. I’ve given up that thinking although I still consider there to be an Underclass, which I think of myself as part as. I think of us as the ones who dont fit in anywhere, who have mostly just been surviving while the rest of society, at whatever level, carried on as normal. So many homeless people and mentally/emotionally ill people, and drug addicts, etc, people noone wants to see but we all exist here right next to you. We live here too! Sometimes i call us the invisibles, like the comic title (not content).
I hope that this made sense and many thanks to pippi for suggesting doing this. I’m written out now and it’s quarter to one so I’m gonna go read some other entries before I go to bed.
In sisterhood,
V
