Baboons and class

Richard
Baboons and class
Starbucks, July 17, 2007

Thinking about my place in the English class system, I’m like the primatologists who recast their notions of baboon troupe culture. At first they saw it as a rigid hierarchy in which every member knows its place. Growing up, I, too, saw class as a grid of cubbyholes, and by an accident of birth you found yourself slotted into a niche that determined your life’s chances of wealth, status, and power. It was as if the system were an entity rather than a group of people. In college I met a man who explained that if individuals saw the system as liquid then the system became liquid; it might even be possible to abolish the system altogether. The man’s name was Brian, and he’d recently left his wife of many years to declare himself gay and frequent sex clubs in Denmark. This was during the heady days before AIDS.

In his view, you could change cubby holes and hang out in a new one for a time, but getting back to baboons, primatologists saw there was no hanging out for the animals at all. The naked baboon, without clothes and belongings to secure its privilege, has constantly to work out and defend its position. When I read this, I was glad not to be a baby baboon, although in some sense, being English, I had been one. Individual baboons battle constantly to know where they stand, and that had been my challenge from the start. Where was I in the emergent class system? Where could I fit in?

My mother, informed by a prewar understanding of rank, shared none of my bewilderment. In 1959, when I was nine and we moved from Lancashire—where everyone I knew was solidly working class—to Syston, in Leicestershire, this village was still a mix of railway junction and semi-rural outpost. All layers of society, from gentry to gypsy, were represented. The gradations were subtly delineated, at least by my mother, through the markers of education, income, housing, clothes, and manners. Even our own Sandford Road was a habitat of cultural layers, my mother explained.

It was a cul-de-sac, at the end of which were a scruffy, low-cost set of postwar council row houses that looked dismally across at each other. Here resided the working, respectable poor as well as the non-working, disrespectable poor. My brother, sisters and I were not allowed to play with the Nugent children, for example, the Nugents being the most blatantly nonworking of the poor and notorious for having used their staircase as fire wood during a cold winter when Mr. Nugent, the family’s main non-bread-winner, was in prison. I was excited by their lawlessness and imagined stripping out our stairs as well, although the violence remained in fantasy—a function of personality or the belief that I didn't descend from doers of violence? In any case, we were, allowed to play with the Croft children, who lived next door to the Nugents, because widowed Ruby Croft worked in the local shoe factory and was, therefore, respectable.

There was the issue of whether you owned or rented your property. In the middle of the street stood a group of late Nineteenth Century, red-brick terraced houses with small bay windows and bucolic sounding names like “Ferndale” and “Foxgrove” inscribed above front doors that opened directly onto the street. These were occupied by older couples who rented from landlords and were respectable. Next came Edwardian, semi-detached homes with modest front gardens. They were mainly owner-occupied and so virtually all their inhabitants were very respectable. There were anomalies. For instance, the retired spinsters who lived next door to us rented from the church but were the highest in rank on the street, due to their education, refined manners, and diction redolent of BBC period dramas. They made my mother, with her splintery Lancashire accent unsanded by years further south, feel envious and self-conscious, but she could get hers back in the satisfaction of being married and in watching, as the day wore on, their thin whisps of silvery hair slip further and further from the ebony clasps that held them.

I remained confused by our status. We owned our house, yes, but my dad’s business—what we called “the shop”—was installed in the front room. A large black-and-white sign over the front bay, approximating my father’s signature, read, “E. G. Toon, Tailor.” We weren‘t working class, my mother pointed out, or even shop keeper class exactly, lifting a finger and turning her cheek slightly as if weighing her own belief. My father was a skilled, bespoke tailor, employing an assistant, Grace Toon (not a relation) who had been inherited from my grandfather Horace, rather like a horse left behind in a stable. We didn’t sell goods made by others, my mother continued splitting hairs, but rather supplied handmade garments cut from my father’s original patterns. I carried a sense of not knowing where to fit in and at the same time my mother’s acute awareness of the gradations of power and status out of childhood into adult life. Her snobbery was partly a reaction to being snubbed by the Toons, who looked down on her background of northern mill workers, thinking themselves, midlands villagers, a better sort. In my murky understanding, it was a great relief coming across the term petty-bourgeois to describe us, although my mother was better at making petty distinctions than at actually living the bourgeois life.