No one except the child. Each child instinctively knows where they come from, what their earliest memories are, which smells, which comforts, what their uncles and aunts were like, how they speak, how they eat. When they hear those voices again, wherever they are, however many years later, they will prick up their ears; hail, friend. (Though some of course are ashamed.)
So what class am I? I’m a novelist — middle-class profession — and went to Oxford — middle-class education — and am married to a man who went to public school and Oxford, and knows the names of his family back to the seventeenth century — middle-class man. I like expensive scent, Issey Miyake or Chanel No 5 or 19, or Jo Malone, and good wine; I have flown to Australia, over the curve of the earth where suddenly St Petersburg glittered below on the night like a hand-spread of stars, and worked in Berlin and Vienna, and trodden the stones of the Roman road to Carthage, at Leptis Magna, Libya. I saw lions in the pink early morning in Uganda; I have wandered through the Prado, and been moved to tears by the tender arches and vaults of a Gaudí building in Barcelona. Middle-class pleasures, middle-class tears; middle-class, I must be. Yet at the deepest level, am I?
John, Mum, Dad and me, five years before younger brother James was born
Not if the deepest level is the oldest, the thing-that-you-know-before-knowing-you-are-thinking, no, I am not just that.
Because I was born into those two families, the Gees and the Churches, both working-class through and through: and a grain of their toughness, an inherited sense of being an outsider looking slightly askance at what the privileged get up to, remains at the core of my adult self. True, my parents, Vic and Aileen, let their brains take them as far as they could from Bucks and outside plumbing and the narrowness of terraces.
Was it easy to move away? It must have been exciting, striking out on their own, going southwards, sunwards to Hazlemere and then Poole, where they knew nobody, to raise their young family. For my mother at first it was a liberation; in the final year of the war she had had to care for a baby, my brother John, living with the family of her absent husband in Wolverton, afraid that the baby’s crying would wake up her ‘cut above’ in-laws, the Gees. Once Vic was home from India, Aileen became entangled in the web of Gee-family over-sensitivity. She told me that every day she was afraid Dad might find his prone-to-tears mother crying, in which case he would come and find her and ask, ‘What have you been doing to upset Ma?’ The idea of their own place in the south, away from all this, was intoxicating.
I mustn’t think going so far was simple for them. Most Gees and Churches stayed put, keeping the habits and social links they were born with. It was easier for my parents to move than to arrive. There’s a grain of something concretely real in that unpleasantly snobbish term ‘arriviste’. Because arriving in a new class isn’t something you do and then forget; it can be a never-ending, restless state. You leave once, but always continue to look for a welcome, and follow clues how to behave.
New houses! That was what they wanted, new beginnings. ‘New build’. The thing that my generation avoids unless they can afford something edgy and architect-built. But Vic and Aileen both wanted to escape the dark and the fustiness. They had come through the war! Young marrieds on the cusp between their twenties and thirties. Both fiercely clever in different ways and recognising that quality in each other, they were eager for the future, but the first few houses they lived in — Hazlemere, Poole, Barnt Green, Bromsgrove, Watersfield, because my father was ambitious for promotions in teaching and they kept on the move — were all compromise, pre-war housing, one Edwardian, one 1940s, and so on.
How they loved the idea of their first all-new home. The Croft, Oaklands, Billingshurst, Sussex, where they moved in 1956, when I was seven, was a three-bed cross between a house and a bungalow, with two downstairs bedrooms for the children. My parents’ bedroom and loo, side by side with my father’s darkroom for photography, were perched on their own, upstairs. Built new for them! They fell in love (via the pencil drawings, which they proudly showed their children) with the big semi-circular bay window at the front, which took up half the width of the house. Both had their own sense of beauty, and a wish to be different, though my father’s was constrained by a streak of fearful conservatism he denied; between them they chose, to curtain that giant bay, a repeated small 1960s line-drawing of a man driving a donkey-cart, back view, which promised them holidays, relaxation, the country, all things which proved not so easy to find; but they bought it in three different pastel colours, giving a daring rainbow effect when the curtains were closed. In that window, in the blaze of sun, stood also my father’s ‘Stereomaster’, a radio-cum-record-player of monumental dimensions, with late 1950s splayed legs and a cabinet of pale wood (which my mother secretly disliked: ‘It’s like a coffin,’ she whispered to me, once its novelty wore off. No wonder she resented it when no one but Dad was allowed to touch it; he was extending his musical tastes, and liked to have female opera-singers, out of Radio 3, at breakfast; ‘that bloomin’ screaming’, Mum called it.)