A confession. My grammar school in the 1960s was on a mission to morph me into the middle classes. It succeeded. I lost my working class accent – and much else.
Then I went to a fancy university with dreaming spires, knee-deep in privilege and casual snobbery. Servants made our beds. I saw nothing wrong with this. My mother did. She took a very dim view of it.
She’d left school at 12 and was invincibly working class. She didn’t speak proper. Still, she once felt compelled to visit me. She was hugely ambivalent about this. So was I. She was uncomfortable. So was I. I discouraged her. In vain.
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