"Common people"

Something a friend said, sparked me into thinking about being "Middle Class". Specifically, the teachers at his boy's school assumed that the parents weren't middle class because they lived in what was then deemed to be a working class area. ( Those teachers were quite unaware of the middle class' penchant for buying up housing in cheap but shortly to be up and coming areas).

Am I middle class? I immediately looked up Wikipedia (is that a middle class thing to do?), but it was rather vague and rather US centred. I found myself having to investigate my past. My researches have led me to be believe I'm a cross between failed land owning gentry and social climbing peasantry.

Let me explain. On my father's side his family came from Kephalonia ( Captain Corelli's Mandolin). They have a long history which can be traced back to the late 15th century and Venice. In the succeeding centuries they migrated down the Dalmatian coast losing their Italian and gaining Greek identity. In my grandfather's day they were a big noise in Kephalonia and were seriously top stratum. At one time they were legal advisers to the Greek Royal Family and owned quite a bit of Kephalonia. I'd have put them in the upper middle class bracket. Lots of land, money and influence.

The trouble was my grandfather. He was no good with money or odds - gambled away his inheritance. He, however, married a woman of  decent Scottish descent. The genes were favourable. So of the five off springs all except my dad made up for their father's short comings. One was a highly successful millionaire, one an accountant, one a teacher and two entrepreneurs. My father was the unsuccessful small businessman. He ran numerous catering enterprises - all of which failed. 

My mother came from yeoman stock. She was one of eight, her father was a farm worker. Of the four boys three were farmers or businessmen. The women married servicemen. I suppose WWII made pairing unusual in that it levelled the playing field. First, uniform had a unifying effect on class and  couples, where the man was on active service, didn't always see further ahead than the next few months or even weeks. Anyway, my mother married a half Greek from a once wealthy family but now on their uppers.

My father left my mother when I was 8 or 9 and although she had a nice three bed roomed house in a nice area, we weren't wealthy, but we weren't poor. Later she married a man who definitely had middle class pretensions - although when she was introduced to him through a dating agency in 1959 (I didn't realise how brave she was) he was living in a caravan!

He was so proud of his middle class past that he wanted to recreate it - even though his job as a tool maker was more high skilled working class. He hawked me around all the second tier public schools in the UK. Breeding will out. I couldn't get into any of them, but to a private school I went - where most pupils were the sons of tradesmen!

All I knew at the time was that most of my school mates lived in posh houses in posh areas and their dad's drove posh cars. We, on the other hand, rode around in pre war Daimlers ( Had I known how frightfully upper middle class that was!). I didn't think we were slotting into any class structure - we were just less well off.

My class consciousness/education began at university. My mates were so much more sophisticated, so much more at ease and they came from so much wealthier families. Parents were doctors, dentists, professors and successful businessmen. They knew what to do with a avocado and they went to exotic places overseas. At university I learnt about learning and art and how to appreciate the finer things in life - vicariously - I couldn't afford any of it. 

Dating played a part in my middle class education. I went out with a woman who lived in Hampstead whose family owned a pasta business and were Jewish escapees. They had much cultural history which I discovered. My first wife's father was a wealthy South African business man, who married a wealthy  South African woman. They both had middle class ancestry oozing out of them. I experienced, the theatre, fine dining, dishwashers and German kitchens. I started to aspire to posh cars, posh clothes and attending posh weddings.

Imperceptibly I was absorbing a new class. My classless awareness had given way to an acute sense of where I stood in the social pecking order. At a glance I could pin point where someone stood - above or below me in life's social ladder.

I am definitely "Middle Class". It's a state of mind not a financial or educational data set. I watch unflinchingly and uncritically  "AbFab" but  "East Enders" has me getting out all the social science reference books. I need help.