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middle-middles wear an old school tie to show they’ve been to boarding school, the lower-middles give their house a name instead of a number to prove it isn’t council and the working classes bring back plastic bulls from Majorca to show they’ve travelled.
    Gideon and Samantha have two children called Zacharias and Thalia, who they might start off sending to a state school, and trying not to wince at the first ‘pardon’, but would be more likely to send to a private school. They love their English setter, Blucher, and feel frightfully guilty about loving it almost more than their children. Harry Stow-Crat would have no such scruples. Gideon plays tennis and rugger at a club, but he wouldn’t use the club to make friends, and he and Samantha wouldn’t go near the Country Club which, to them, reeks of surburbia. They prefer to entertain in their own house, which is large and Victorian, and being restored to its original state rather faster than they’d like. Samantha is into good works with a slightly self-interested motive: pollution, conservation, the P.T.A.
    As they can’t be the most upper class in the land, Samantha is determined that they shall be the most ‘cultured’. She and Gideon go to the theatre, the ballet and the movies, as they rather self-consciously call the cinema, and try and read at least two books a week.
    In the last fifteen years, the upper-middles have aimed at a standard of living they can’t afford, taking on many of the pastimes of the upper classes. Gideon goes shooting quite often; they have two cars, which are falling to pieces, and for which they have to pay a fortune every time they take their M.O.T.; they used to have a country cottage, holidays abroad, and a boat. Now they have two children at boarding school. Since the advent of the permissive society Gideon is playing at adultery like Harry Stow-Crat. As a result he spends a fortune on lunches, and another fortune on guilt presents for Samantha afterwards. They are both so worried about trying to make ends meet, they’re drinking themselves absolutely silly—hence the sub-title ‘The Merrytocracy’.
    Virginia Woolf once wrote an unfinished novel about an upper-middle-class family called the Pargeters. ‘Parget’ is an English dialect word meaning to smooth over cracks in plastered surfaces: the Pargeters gloss over the deep sexual and emotional fissures of life. In the same way Samantha doesn’t particularly like her mother-in-law, or several of her neighbours; but she tries to get on with them because she feels guilty about her dislike. In the same way she feels guilty about telling someone she employs that they are not doing the job properly. Caroline Stow-Crat would never have that problem. If she hired a gardener even for two hours, she wouldn’t flaunt him as a status symbol, she’d keep quiet about him, because she feels it’s more creative to do the garden herself.
    She and Gideon call each other ‘darling’ rather than ‘dear’, and try to remember to say ‘orf’. Gideon’s parents, Colonel and Mrs Upward, living on a rapidly dwindling fixed income, are much more thrifty than Samantha and Gideon. As they’re not drinking themselves silly, they don’t smash everything and still have the same glasses and china as they did when they were married.
    HOWARD AND EILEEN WEYBRIDGE —
THE MIDDLE-MIDDLES
     
    Howard Weybridge lives in Surrey or some smart dormitory town. He works as an accountant, stockbroker, surveyor or higher technician. He probably went to a minor public school or a grammar school. He never misses the nine o’clock news and says ‘Cheerio’. He wears paisley scarves with scarf rings and has no bottoms to his spectacles. He calls his wife, Eileen, ‘dear’ and when you ask him how he is says, ‘Very fit, thank you’. He is very straight and very patriotic, his haw-haw voice is a synthetic approximation to the uppers; he talks about ‘Ham-shar’. His children join the young Con