The posh test
As the working-class son of a steelworker and a pub pianist from south Wales, going up to Oxford in the mid-1970s was a bit of a shock to the system. I was about as far away from posh as it was possible to be. I recall that tipping the “scout” – the man who cleaned my room and made my bed – was a source of particular concern. I suddenly had a servant, but how much was I supposed to give him at the end of term? I’m sure the pathetic amount I coughed up soured our always uneasy relationship.
The combination of not having taken a year off – most of the students from public schools did the Oxbridge entrance exam in their post-A-level year – and being from a background that was the antithesis of posh made it hard to adjust. I tended to hang around with sporty types who talked mainly about cricket averages.
Nobody ever told me it would be a good idea to go to lectures, not just in modern history – the subject I was studying – but ancient history, art, philosophy and politics, too. The difference between comprehensives and public schools is that the latter give you the space to develop as a rounded person early. They encourage free thinking. For me, the jump from A-level spoonfeeding to self-directed learning was huge and, by the time I was getting to grips with it, the course was more or less over. Education really is wasted on the young, at least on this young person.
I must have been conscious of my lowly social origins because I changed my accent more or less overnight, abandoning my Welsh lilt in favour of a form of received pronunciation so extreme that, when years later I met a theatrical voice coach, she said it was redolent of Oxford in the 50s rather than the 70s. I make Prince Charles sound common, though, if you listen closely, you can tell it’s not the genuine article. Some people think I’m South African, so clipped are my vowels. The literary editor Karl Miller thought I’d been to Sandhurst.
The disguise sort of worked. I did a passable posh accent (for a while the Welshness used to reassert itself when I was tired), got a first because I was very good at passing exams, and got a job in publishing. I was a moderately successful ersatz posh person.
Except you never really become posh. For all the carapace of poshness, you remain what you are. Or rather, you end up not fitting anywhere: too posh for the working class, too working-class to be truly posh. This is why I ended up being a journalist: an observer, an outsider, restless and self-doubting.
Those who are born posh enjoy the benefits of a social capital in early life that can never be replicated later. You just can’t manufacture that ease, that assumption that the world exists for your benefit. We had a “buttery” at Oxford where students, almost invariably the posh ones, would gather with dons for pre-dinner drinks. I never dared go in there. Even though we were all supposed to be equal, somehow it didn’t seem that way.
I’ve been re-reading Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time recently. Powell (he pronounced it “Pole”) is the archetypal posh Englishman: Etonian, military family, steeped in art and literature from a very early age, certain in his judgments, critical of error and fuzzy thinking, alert to the many shades of social class, preoccupied by lineages and hierarchies, and – in the character of his narrator Nicholas Jenkins – all-seeing, all-knowing and in complete control.
The sympathetic characters in Dance are doomed posh romantics – Charles Stringham and Hugh Moreland, especially. The arch-villain is Widmerpool, another Etonian, but one whose father made his money selling liquid manure. Widmerpool is a parvenu who devotes his life to climbing the greasy pole, imposing his will. Powell dislikes the imposition of will, the out-and-out triers. He admires easy talent and selfless service; he identifies with people who punt their way through life.
Being unposh, I have spent my life trying to be Stringham – to have his style and ease, his contempt for the worldly and workaday – but I know that my autodidactical destiny is to be Widmerpool. The dance is an ungainly one.
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