The Posh Child at Pontins

On being well-spoken, working class, and the question of privilege

I often wonder how many people believe me when I say I grew up working class. I certainly don’t sound it, and these days I am ‘upwardly socially mobile’, the embodiment of the New Labour dream, so I guess I don’t ‘look’ it either, whatever that might mean. But, my dad works in a warehouse (and has done for 30 years), my mum in a shop. We lived in a council house, and we never had much money.

Recently, I’ve been fascinated by my own obsession with how others perceive my class status, particularly because of my voice. I’ve been told to sound well-spoken is a privilege, but somehow, it’s never felt that way. I guess it feels inauthentic somehow, that how I sound hides the difficulties and struggles of my childhood. Perhaps I worry people will assume I’ve had privileges I have not. Maybe, I worry that when I tell people about my working class background, they’ll assume I’m one of those middle class people who choose to cosplay the working classes, like the girl Jarvis Cocker met at St. Martin’s College. Regardless, there’s a real cognitive dissonance between the privilege I’m told my accent holds, and the reality of the privilege I’ve had.

When I was a child, my mum was insistent that we “spoke properly”. We absolutely had to say our ‘t’s, the word ‘ain’t’ was completely banned, and the absolute worst thing people could possibly perceive of us was that we were ‘common’. Which given we lived on a council estate, was an interesting endeavour (although one I’ve come across frequently in working class narratives). I took this advice on board in the way only a neurodivergent person can - wholly and completely - and, perhaps helped by the fact we lived in Hertfordshire, I developed an accent more appropriate for Radio 4 than my home surrounds. We lived in Herts, but not the posh bit. In fact, I once told someone from the same county where I lived and they’d never heard of it. Ever got the train from London to Cambridge? Well, you’ve probably been through it.

My school was an odd social mix. It was seen as the best comprehensive in the area, I think mostly because we wore blazers and ties long before anyone else. There were huge numbers of kids from the villages, bussed in every day on double deckers from their seemingly enormous houses, and the rest of us came from the town. As I was mostly in the higher sets, I saw a lot of the village kids. One of my former best friends had been to private school for primary school. I’m not sure this is why I sound like Corrie Caulfield and my sisters sound like they’re on TOWIE, but I suspect it had something to do with it.

The way I spoke, however, didn’t shield me from the difficulties of simply having little money. At first, it didn’t occur to me to be ashamed about this. It was often the subject of discussion at home, the reason we couldn’t do the things our peers were doing, the reason we had 5 days in a caravan whilst others swam with Dolphins or went to Lanzarote. One day at Brownies, the pack was asked as to why only one girl had signed up for the Pack Holiday. I raised my hand and said “Mum said we can’t afford it”. On reporting this to my mother on the way home, she was horrified. I couldn’t grasp why. We couldn’t afford it, why hide that?

You see, although we had little money, in part due to my parents’ service class jobs, and in part due to my father’s liking for the pub, my mum was determined we would still develop cultural knowledge. My grandparents were working class, but the ‘respectable’ kind, with a level of social mobility particular to the end of the 20th century. Both had worked hard, my grandad as a Draughtsman, my grandmother in various factories and supermarkets, and this had paid dividends. They owned a house, they had a good retirement, they took full advantage of the package holiday boom. My parents worked hard too, but politics (and addiction) meant such dividends were not ours for the taking.

There’s a part in Fern Brady’s excellent Strong Female Character where she talks about how her childhood was working class, but didn’t match the cartoonish image most people have of the working classes, a disappointment when it came to panel shows, where a stereotype is the best thing you can be. In the final chapter, she goes out for dinner with her mum, and they talk about her piano lessons, how regardless of financial circumstances, she always learned the piano. This had brought Brady immeasurable comfort and joy over her life, and she acknowledges that in less than ideal circumstances, her mother did her best.

This chapter was striking for me. My own mum’s insistence on a cultural education has been my biggest advantage in climbing the class ladder. You see, museums were free, and libraries (as long as you remembered to take the books back), and there was nothing which cost less and tired out fractious children than a countryside walk. I read voraciously as a child. I knew the local museum as well as any curator, each time I visited lying down next to my favourite exhibit, a bronze age skeleton, to see if I was as tall as her. We were always learning, about the birds, and the landscape, even when flying kites and watching the gliders taking off at Dunstable Down. Our Sun newspaper holidays were packed with days out, our Blue Peter badges the vital passport to all the most interesting UK attractions.

(This isn’t to say that we didn’t moan, especially about the country walks. Particularly when we had to walk or cycle to the next town instead of drive. We moaned like hell.)

Along with the way we were to speak, the educational nature of our days out was proof of one thing: we might have been poor, but we weren’t like those poor people. Not like the kids up the street who never left the neighbourhood, and especially not like the adults who took their disagreements to the street, yelling for everybody to hear. No, we were ‘different’. When I became old enough to understand the class system, I asked which class we belonged to “upper working class”, apparently.

We couldn’t afford anything though. Our meals were small, and the only takeaway we ever had was chip shop chips. We fell somewhere between qualifying for free school meals and being able to afford them, and so I hid the crusts of my pappy bread sandwiches up my sleeves to avoid being told off for wasting food in the lunch hall. And we missed a lot of school trips, a lot of days out with friends, and we were permanently unfashionable. In year 6 I, ever the trade unionist in the making, complained that I was having to do work whilst everybody else was at an outward bounds centre. “Tough” said the teacher “you should have gone on the trip”.

My parents argued about money; my mum often cried over a calculator. We lost a house - at 7 I wasn’t allowed to answer the door in case it was a bailiff. Insensitive as all children are, we lamented loudly about being the “have nots”.

I mention all this as there are too few accounts of working class childhoods, and I am passionate that those of us who grew up working class share our stories. I was luckier than most, I am aware, although there are horrors which for the privacy of my family I have not outlined.

There are other disadvantages to being working class, and there’s nowhere where this becomes more apparent than at university. It starts with choosing A levels. Proudly, I am a member of the first generation of my family ever to have attended university. I hope to be the first to gain a PhD. But it’s hard to choose good A levels when nobody else has taken them. When you’re family is just proud you’re going to sixth form, they don’t really mind which subjects you take. And so my list of random, unimpressive, and apparently unrigorous subjects adorns my academic record. Although it should be said, my university choice wasn’t especially limited by these poor choices. It was my own poor choice not to attend the bulk of sixth form which limited me to the ex-polytechnics (something I am endlessly glad about, mostly because ex-polys understand working class students in a way more prestigious universities do not).

Even at my low-ranked (but popular) university, my class status marked me out to my peers. The day I realised that practically everybody else’s parents were paying their rent was the day something changed for me. I’d known we were poor, but I hadn’t realised how different that made me. It meant I couldn’t live with friends, as I couldn’t afford the rent for a room in their chosen houses. I didn’t have a guarantor, so a huge amount of the housing market was closed off to me. In third year I ended up in a decidedly dodgy, but very cheap, house share, and even then I’d had to go to my grandparents for a loan for the deposit.

When I went on to Bristol to do my masters some years later, something I could never have dreamed would happen, my lack of safety net became increasingly pertinent. Finding myself without stable employment and a maxed out overdraft, I queued up at Citizens Advice to be told I wasn’t eligible for anything except a small amount of housing benefit and a food bank voucher. My mum sent me a loan of £50. University loaned me the money for rent several months in a row. When you don’t have a financial safety net, your debts soon mount. Unable to cope with the stress of it all, I ignored the red letters my credit card company sent me for 3 months, and thus ruined my credit rating for the next 6 years.

I think when people hear me speak, and assume that maybe I was private schooled, or at least have a comfortable background, it makes me feel inauthentic. I’m not sure whether it’s the EDI work I do, or the persistent reverse snobbery of my youth (we couldn’t be seen as common, but we also despised the rich), but sounding posh makes me feel like a fake. It doesn’t feel like a privilege to be seen as something I’m not, in fact I become suspicious that people are less likely to listen to me speaking on class and inequality, because they assume I have a level of privilege I don’t. And it’s controversial to say that, because I do have privilege, quite a bit of it. I’m white, I’m well-spoken, my mum gave a crap about my knowledge of the world. But equally, I lack the safety net, the more subtle cultural contexts (the refinement, I suppose) of others with my accent. I will always be a little bit less privileged because of my working class roots. And I guess sometimes it feels important for people to understand that, even if sound like I could present a concert at Wigmore Hall.