Freed From Behind The Paywall - Essay: Shame, Success and The Trouble With Social Mobility
Upward movement through society is hard - even when you succeed.
As a former Grammar school boy ( possibly one of the least auspicious grammar schools in London) and son of a greengrocer, I have always been fascinated - no, compelled - by the idea of social mobility.
Compelled for a very simple reason. By the time I was a teenager, I was absolutely certain I wanted what ‘they’ had.
Who were ‘they’? It was hard to say, since my intro to the world of ‘they’ was confined to my visits inside their beautiful homes on a Saturday when I delivered their fruit and vegetables in prosperous Notting Hill Gate. Inside, the houses were full of books (there were only library books on the shelves in my suburban terrace in Southall, as well the AA Book of the Road). The objects in those houses were interesting and elegant. The decor was not in the universal magnolia favoured by my parents and friends. The furniture was minimalist and did not have floral prints all over it. And the people - they were enigmatic. Kind enough, a little condescending, but from an entirely different universe.
A sense of lack was there from the start of my awakening consciousness to the subject of class. But it wasn’t only money and taste that ‘they’ had. They had culture. This, I wanted more than anything.
I have a vivid memory of working in small shop my father was one of three employees in. A man and his son came in, and as I gathered their order of fruit and veg, they talked intensely about classical music in an engaged way, more or less as equals. The boy was younger then me - perhaps 12 - but he was articulate and engaged. And I knew that to him and his father - well, I was just the boy in the rough cotton coat putting their aubergines ( we never had aubergines at home) into bags. I might as well have not existed.
That sense of exclusion and unfairness hurt. And it continues to hurt in some faint, distant way, even though I am now, 50 years later one of ‘them’ - more or less.
It has been a very long and difficult journey. In my attempt to become one of ‘them’ I gave up the small business - it was doing well, but I knew money wasn’t enough to be one of ‘them’ - I had set up in my late 20’s and signed up for the London School of Economic ( despite my 2 poor ‘A’ levels) to study politics and history. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and the children of ‘them’ were everywhere - confident, well educated, smooth, smart. I had a reunion of some of my old UV friends quite recently. Nearly all of them had titles or medals from the queen. Lord this. An MBE here and OBE there.
I chose the LSE, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, purely because another working class boy I knew - the broadcaster Robert Elms - had gone there and enjoyed it and told me so. My parents and their friends knew nothing about the subject of universities. They were for ‘them’. I swear I am telling the truth that I barely even knew what a university was nearly up until I was admitted to one.
WHen I graduated after three years of blood, sweat, tears and clinical depression, I had a degree. So what? I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony I didn’t know what a graduation ceremony was. My parents weren’t interested although they had supported my academic efforts amiably enough.
I knew I still wasn’t ‘there’. I wasn’t close to being one of ‘them’ I was a vulgar, oikish working class lad, whose girlfriend, only a few years before, had won a wet T-shirt contest in Lloret del Mar (And I was thrilled when she did).
I had to go in further. I next applied for a job as editor the City Limits magazine - despite it’s egalitarian principles ( City Limits was woke before Woke) it was almost entirely populated by the educated middle classes. They made me the editor.
Breaking point had come. I could no longer fight the fight. I left the job after two weeks and had a massive nervous breakdown.
After I eventually recovered, a year later, in my early 30’s I got a job as a production assistant in TV. The woman who gave me the job was a Sackville-West ( yes one of THE Sackville-Wests). I lasted a year and a half before I realised I was never going to fit in. Instead I became a writer.
I married a woman from a similar background as me ( working class, family ran a market stall ). It didn’t work out. Of course the trouble was she was ‘us’, not ‘them’. Obviously that wasn’t the only reason for the failure of the marriage - there were very many of them - but it was an element. I winced when I went to my in-laws home and saw the same chintz furniture and fitted carpets that I grew up with and was trying to escape.
The thing was, proper middle class girls weren’t attracted to me. I was too rough at the edges and still unfamiliar with all the secret codes of the middle class ( who don’t even know that they are codes ).
I moved to the area where my father’s greengrocer’s shop was, Notting Hill, and thence northward to Kensal Rise where I still live. I married again - another woman from a working class/lower middle class background. She was super smart, and high achieving. But it didn’t work out again. This is probably nothing to do with class - writers are notoriously difficult to form long term relationships with - but it was no coincidence that I was drawn to someone from the same background.
By then I was a successful author - not only reasonably wealthy but part of one of the poshest, most high-status industries. And yet insecurity still plagued me. I knew for certain that I was far, far less schooled in literature than any of the men and women who worked in the publishing houses, who mostly seemed to have done English at Oxbridge. But I ploughed on doing all that I was able to do - write, and in this case, write about People Like Me - ordinary ,people going about ordinary lives. It was good enough for Anne Tyler and John Updike - so why not for me?
In the early days I was critically acclaimed as a ‘working class’ writer - as well as someone who wrote a ‘Lad Lit’ classic, ‘White City Blue’. But in my imagination I still wasn’t one of ‘them’. I was a working class writer , a novelty - not a real ‘writer’.
Am I sound insecure or resentful? Probably, and I am a bit, but I’m also grateful for all the luck I’ve had to get this far. But to come to my point - getting to here, ten novels and an memoir later, and an entry in Who’s Who - I’m still not one of ‘them’. In the little social club I have with my male friends in Kensal Rise, I am the only one of them who has not been to private school. To them it’s no big deal. To me - well, I notice it.
So what? So, I am the prime example of social mobility in action. I have gone from someone with no money and no status to survive and even prosper in one of the poshest industries in Britain. I am happy and fulfilled. I am Almost- Them ( although I wouldn’t really want to be fully Them).
But the price I have paid to get here has been enormous in terms of effort, pain, setback and above all, shame. Shame that I have left ‘my’ culture and community for another. Working class pride, which I once possessed, has gone.
I do have working class shame though. I remember once having a lunch with some ‘proper’ intellectuals - AN Wilson, Simon Jenkins, Will Self, a newspaper editor. Feeling somewhat out of my depth, I asked AN Wilson how many books he read in a week. He answered ‘a dozen or so.’ I laughed incredulously and said I would be pushed to get through one book in a fortnight. He didn’t seem to find it funny. In fact I swear I saw his lip curl. Neither did the other intellectuals at the table. My default defense of being simply honest about my ignorance failed. I felt ashamed. And there are many other examples I could mention, but won’t.
I want to emphasise I’m not here to play the martyr. I am very, very lucky that I’ve got to where I’ve got in life. I am not a victim. I am grateful for so much of my life. And I am not resentful of the middle and upper classes. In many ways, I admire them - at least the ones who value culture and art.
I am just pointing out that when politicians talks about ‘upward mobility’, they think it’s all candy - once you put in the effort, you magically move up a notch or two on the social ladder. It’s not like that. You’re distressed to leave where you came from. You’re uncertain in the presence of those you have arrived to join. It can make you snippy, but that is simply insecurity. Above all, you never feel you quite fit in anywhere.
I consider myself more or less classless nowadays, but to the outside world I am probably dyed in the wool middle class. My voice sounds middle class, I eat in fancy restaurants, I like good wine, I play tennis rather than watch football and I have bookshelves with books I actually own.
But somehwere, deep inside, I am still the puzzled, envious kid serving aubergines to the posh boy and his father in the greengrocer shop. And I always will be, for good or ill.
I read this to my East London husband (and I from a similar class of growing up in New York State. He was the first in his family to go to university. I was one of the first women to go to what was an all-male university in the States. Both of us recognised the we-they. What my husband added is that rather than climbing a rung of the ladder, it is more like a millefeuille (or a Napolean, as we know it in the States). If you are aiming to be more like "them", there seem to be thousands of layers to move up. As an American, I can be classless here. It has helped navigate my career choices as we are forgiven when we get the conventions wrong. My compatriots aren't as forgiving as they feel I have abandoned my background. (I defend this by saying I am their ambassador abroad as no one lets me forget I am American.) I laughed when one of my husband's colleagues introduced me as "Martin's American wife." I replied with "and are there English, Greek, French wives hidden about?" Only my husband got the joke initially. To spend an adult life as a foreigner in an adopted country is a daily exercise in knowing I will never fully be a them. Life, eh?!
Thanks for this truly insightful piece.