An "Educated" Person

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Level: C1

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(Names have been changed)

If you haven't lived in the UK, it is very difficult to understand how pervasive and enduring is the notion of social class.  With immigration, travel, the internet, technology and a changing natural environment, the lines between the classes are now much more blurred than they used to be.  Nevertheless, class sensitivity remains deeply rooted in UK life. I have often appreciated a kind of “honest naturalness”  in people who think of themselves as "working class."

I’ll explain what I mean by this by recounting a story about my neighbors in Oxford in the house my family bought in 1985. We used to rent it to visiting academics during the school year and stay in it ourselves during our summer visits from Japan.

All the houses in Southdale Road were typical  of the semi-detached houses that appeared all over England in the 1930s.  Being what might be called “lower middle class” housing, they were similar in atmosphere and size to — but less modern than — the Dursleys’ house in the Harry Potter movies. The Dursleys' house is differs also in that it is "detached," meaning that it does not share a wall as ours did with another house.

Our neighbors on one side, with whom we shared a wall, were a retired couple called Mr and Mrs Brown. On the other side lived Mrs Hughes, an elderly widow who had lost her husband during World War II. 

Mrs Hughes was from a higher social class than the Browns, both of whom had left school at the age of fourteen. Mr Brown had done well at a traditional local company that had been manufacturing metal boxes since Victorian times .  He had become a factory foreman there, and had learned many engineering skills.  They had brought up a family, and over the years had been careful saving money.  They now had a house and garden, as well as a car and caravan — or "trailer" as Americans say — and lovingly took care of everything they had. 

Mr Brown had built a shed, at the end of the rear garden. It was his quiet space in which he could pursue his hobby of building steam engines.  He belonged to a miniature railway club that operated real steam engines on a railway set up at the nearby Cutteslowe Park every summer, giving rides to children.  

I was amazed to hear from him that, when he built a steam engine, he didn’t just buy the different parts and put them together.  He made every single piece himself, including all the screws!  The only thing he bought was the blueprint for the engine itself. 

I always enjoyed talking with David Brown and his wife Maureen. He was a very intelligent, self-educated man, and I appreciated their straightforward and honest way of expressing themselves.  When we first met, I told her that  I  had been divorced and she quickly responded with the words, “Oh, we don’t allow divorce in our church.”  Despite this apparent prejudice, she was always very warm with my children and friendly with my wife and me. 

Once she and her husband took the adventurous step of taking a two-week holiday in Croatia, part of what was then called Yugoslavia. We didn't usually hear anything through our shared wall, but on the day after their return I heard her vacuum cleaning and singing "God save the Queen."

I failed, when I knocked on her door in 2006 to hurriedly say goodbye — I had a plane to catch — to let her know that the new owners were a gay couple.  In my mind I can hear her voice as she shared her shock with the neighbors and her always patient and kindly-disposed husband. But I would bet on her having got used to it and being generous with her new neighbor. With all the royal scandals that have taken place, I'm not sure though, if she would be singing "God save the King" now.

Mrs Hughes was more distant with us, and so was her son, who was reluctant to engage in conversation when he occasionally visited.   It was obvious from her upper middle class accent that she was living in a more modest house than she would have done had she not lost her husband in the war.  She had to bring up their son on her own.  He went to Oxford University, and had a prestigious job in London working as a civil servant in charge of the taxes of Members of Parliament.  That meant that he had a close knowledge of the personal lives of all the members of the government. 

Once, when she was asking me to have a cherry tree cut because  it was blocking out sunlight from her garden, I was a little hesitant to do it right away because  of the cost. 

“What, a rich American like you can’t afford it?” she said. 

The “rich American” was very much a stereotype of the 1950s, when many British people used to look enviously at the relative prosperity of Americans – particularly those who could afford to travel to Europe – while at the same time considering Americans to be rough and unsophisticated, and I was shocked to be looked at in this way.

One day, when I was chatting with Maureen Brown over tea in her house, she told me a story that I have often shared with students. It points to the question of what it means to be “well educated.” 

Mrs Hughes' son was one of the guests at a garden party that the Browns were giving one summer.  He confessed to Maureen that he was unhappy in his job, but that he felt unable to leave it.  Maureen found this shocking.  Her response to him, she said, was, “

What? How can an educated man like you be doing a job that you don't enjoy doing?