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-servatives and the tennis club to meet people. He buys a modern house and ages it up. It has a big garden with a perfect lawn and lots of shrubs. He despises anyone who hasn’t been to ‘public school’, and often goes into local government or politics for social advancement. He is a first-generation pony buyer, and would also use the Pony Club to meet the right sort of people. Eileen shops at Bentalls and thinks the upper-middles are terribly scruffy. They are both keen golfers, and pull strings to get their road made private. Their favourite radio programmes are Any Answers, These You Have Loved and Disgusted Tunbridge Wells. They are much smugger than the upper-middles.

     
    Bryan and Jen Teale
     
    Howard Weybridge’s father hasn’t a bill in the world and is on the golf club committee. He found bridge to be one of the most wonderful things in life; it’s a very easy way of entertaining. He has a sneaking liking for Enoch Powell: ‘We should have stopped the sambos coming here in the first place.’
    BRYAN AND JEN TEALE—
THE LOWER-MIDDLES
    The Teales are probably the most pushy, the most frugal and the most respectable of all the classes, because they are so anxious to escape from the working class. The successful ones iron out their accents and become middle like Mr Heath and Mrs Thatcher. The rest stay put as bank and insurance clerks, door-to-door salesmen, toast-masters, lower management, police sergeants and sergeant-majors. In the old days the lower-middles rose with the small business or the little shop, but the rise in rates, social security benefits and postage has scuppered all that.

     
    The Weybridges
     
    The lower-middles never had any servants, but as they are obsessed with cleanliness, and like everything nice, they buy a small modern house and fill it with modern units which are easy to keep clean. Jen and Bryan have two children, Wayne and Christine, and a very clean car.
    As Jen and Bryan didn’t go to boarding school, didn’t make friends outside the district, and don’t mix with the street, they have very few friends and keep themselves to themselves. They tend to be very inner-directed, doing everything together, decorating the house, furnishing the car, and coaching and playing football with the children. Jen reads knitting patterns, Woman’s Own and Reader’s Digest condensed books. To avoid any working-class stigma she puts up defensive barriers— privet hedges, net curtains—talks in a ‘refained’ accent, raising her little finger when she drinks. Her aim is to be dainty and wear six pairs of knickers. She admires Mary Whitehouse enormously, disapproves of long hair and puts money in the Woolwich every week. She sees herself as the ‘Woolwich girl’. The Teales don’t entertain much, only Bryan’s colleagues who might be useful, and occasionally Bryan’s boss.
    THE WORKING CLASSES
    One of the great class divides has always been ‘them’ and ‘us’ which, as a result of the egalitarian, working-class-is-beautiful revolution of the ’sixties, and early ’seventies, has polarized into the Guilty and the Cross. On the one side are the middle and upper classes, feeling guilty and riddled with social concern, although they often earn far less money than the workers, and on the other are the working classes who, having been totally brain-washed by television and images of the good life, feel cross because they aren’t getting a big enough slice of the cake.
    In a time of economic prosperity everyone tends to do well. Wages rise; the middle classes can afford a new car, or central heating; the working-class man buys a fridge for the missus. Man’s envy and rivalry is turned towards his neighbour—keeping up with the Joneses—rather than towards the classes above and below. But in times of economic stress, when people suddenly can’t get the things they want and prices and the cost of living outstrip wages, they start turning their envy against other classes.