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a strange place
Apr. 25th, 2013 11:20 pmLast night was book club and I learned so many fascinating things and it was one of those moments where as an American (especially one born/raised on the west coast) I felt like I had come to visit another planet. It wasn't awful in the slightest but it was hilarious and hair-raising. We were chatting about books and things and somehow we got onto the subject of schools and the like. I think it might have been about Patrick Leigh Fermor.. One of the ladies had told us about how her Father had been at school with him and said that Paddy Fermor was a rogue, even as a boy. I love this lady, she always reminds me of Jennifer Saunders' character in Jam & Jersualem. She is absolutely lovely, totally snarky, has an amusingly posh accent, and loves wine like it was Mothers milk. Plus she has a great book collection. Anyhow, she mentioned her experience being a matron in a boarding school and how the older girls were truly atrocious and that the youngest girl was five years old and Irish and so tragic. The little girl's parents were very glam and were too busy hanging out in Africa to care for their child. (they weren't even civil servants or anything. Just glam people who were pretending to live the lives of the Happy Valley set or something and a child totally harshed their mellow.) Even the little girl said, "I am only five, why did they leave me?" Let that break your heart into three million pieces. F. said it always broke her heart. It turned out a number of the ladies there had been at boarding school. F. of course. She said when she was nineteen and on a walk with her Mother, her Mother said, she had wished she had stood up to F's Father when he said, "I went to boarding school. I hated it but it did me good, and so my children should go to boarding school." And so off she went and she only lived half an hour from her parents. Madness.
Then there is A. who had a Father in the civil service so he was off in Singapore and then Kuala Lumpur (oh the days of colonialism eh?) and she was sent to England (half way around the world from her parents) at the age of eight to be educated at some proper ladies school. She said it was dreary. They had to wear cloaks, the education wasn't that good, and it was always freezing cold. A. said her Mother justified all of this by saying, "A woman can have someone else take care of her children, she can't have someone else take care of her husband." My eyeballs nearly fell out of my head. I mean yes yes yes it was another age, and everything but good lord no wonder this country is run by completely bat-shit insane people. She said that eventually her parents ran out of money when she was a teenager and so she had to leave school. Slowly but surely over the years she did get a university degree and became a teacher. She says she has always worried that her posh accent would put shop-keepers off and she recognized the privilege of her position when so many in the school didn't or were oblivious to it. I said as a representative of the great unwashed, that people are only bothered by the posh accent if it comes with a nasty/uncivilized attitude. I think she felt better. J. attended a boarding school but she was only a day student but still... all the insanity that went with it. A. mentioned how you would arrive by train and your Mother would come to pick you up and you would get a brief peck on the cheek and every single woman there (including my Mother in law, who came from the working class but through her Father's job in the civil service was able to become a member of the middle class, and then an established member of the middle class with her education. She went to a grammar school and eventually university) said that none of them remembered their Mothers ever cuddling them. I suppose it was another age/time. My sister in law and I both came from working class homes, (though her Mother was of slightly posh stock but rejected all of it for the hippie life, but they were Irish and a little mad.) we both have rather fragmented educations, and we got plenty of cuddling from our Mothers. I think it was a reaction to the lack of cuddling one received from our Grandmothers. I said to A. you can't be too stand-offish when you are working class/poor and living in three rooms. You have to have all the emotions out or you will murder one another. I made her laugh when I said, "sometimes one has to have a fist fight on the front lawn. It's tacky but it takes care of things vs. years of repressed emotions that result in someone have a stroke."
F. spoke of checking out one school as a possibility when she was a teenager but she realized that all the girls there were truly wretched. Very sloaney, bitchy, and a sort of detached sense of poise. I loved her impression of the girls. Barely moving her mouth and "Yah, Yah... rilly." She made a vow that she was never sending her children away to school. So instead she has them living out in the middle of nowhere -which isn't the worst.
Then J. who had done work with the ANC spoke of the life in South Africa (in the 60s and 70s) and the oblivious nature of white South Africans over what went on. She knew a couple that moved from South Africa to Texas and how they said it made them think so much of South Africa and how much they loved it. (yes they had maids and in their happy white gated community everything was beautiful.) J. had a low opinion of the Afrikaans, thought that a number of Jewish people had a sort of selective blind-spot to the ghettos that the black people were forced to live in, and how she and her husband had to skip town quick at one point because of the trouble they were experiencing because they weren't so hot on apartheid and were loud about it.
Somewhere between books, we discussed the nation's problems, why we all thought George Osborne and David Cameron had faces that needed a good smack. I loved J. saying, "Osborne was someone who should have been smacked as a child by one of his peers and I suspect he wasn't." There were a couple of moments where you could tell who (as my sister in law put it) were Times readers and who were Guardian readers. A gentle debate about the poor and what should be done with them. Like they are nits or something. Always that Calvinist belief that through bad choices someone ends up poor and it is all their fault and that there are supposedly poor people fleecing the state out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. I may have told someone to their face that it was an absolute lie and that they shouldn't pay attention to such propaganda. Ahem. Then everyone had more wine and ended things the way British people do to make everyone feel even, by telling embarrassing stories about themselves. Usually situations where one puts their foot in their mouth. (on trains or at dinner parties of course)
Oh England. You may have a caste system which some in charge would like to make more concrete but you like to keep yourself from feeling too mighty by being cringe-worthy. Is it a form of Penance? Maybe despite the reformation you still have popish leanings here and there. You can't say a decade of the rosary but you work out in another fashion.
Then there is A. who had a Father in the civil service so he was off in Singapore and then Kuala Lumpur (oh the days of colonialism eh?) and she was sent to England (half way around the world from her parents) at the age of eight to be educated at some proper ladies school. She said it was dreary. They had to wear cloaks, the education wasn't that good, and it was always freezing cold. A. said her Mother justified all of this by saying, "A woman can have someone else take care of her children, she can't have someone else take care of her husband." My eyeballs nearly fell out of my head. I mean yes yes yes it was another age, and everything but good lord no wonder this country is run by completely bat-shit insane people. She said that eventually her parents ran out of money when she was a teenager and so she had to leave school. Slowly but surely over the years she did get a university degree and became a teacher. She says she has always worried that her posh accent would put shop-keepers off and she recognized the privilege of her position when so many in the school didn't or were oblivious to it. I said as a representative of the great unwashed, that people are only bothered by the posh accent if it comes with a nasty/uncivilized attitude. I think she felt better. J. attended a boarding school but she was only a day student but still... all the insanity that went with it. A. mentioned how you would arrive by train and your Mother would come to pick you up and you would get a brief peck on the cheek and every single woman there (including my Mother in law, who came from the working class but through her Father's job in the civil service was able to become a member of the middle class, and then an established member of the middle class with her education. She went to a grammar school and eventually university) said that none of them remembered their Mothers ever cuddling them. I suppose it was another age/time. My sister in law and I both came from working class homes, (though her Mother was of slightly posh stock but rejected all of it for the hippie life, but they were Irish and a little mad.) we both have rather fragmented educations, and we got plenty of cuddling from our Mothers. I think it was a reaction to the lack of cuddling one received from our Grandmothers. I said to A. you can't be too stand-offish when you are working class/poor and living in three rooms. You have to have all the emotions out or you will murder one another. I made her laugh when I said, "sometimes one has to have a fist fight on the front lawn. It's tacky but it takes care of things vs. years of repressed emotions that result in someone have a stroke."
F. spoke of checking out one school as a possibility when she was a teenager but she realized that all the girls there were truly wretched. Very sloaney, bitchy, and a sort of detached sense of poise. I loved her impression of the girls. Barely moving her mouth and "Yah, Yah... rilly." She made a vow that she was never sending her children away to school. So instead she has them living out in the middle of nowhere -which isn't the worst.
Then J. who had done work with the ANC spoke of the life in South Africa (in the 60s and 70s) and the oblivious nature of white South Africans over what went on. She knew a couple that moved from South Africa to Texas and how they said it made them think so much of South Africa and how much they loved it. (yes they had maids and in their happy white gated community everything was beautiful.) J. had a low opinion of the Afrikaans, thought that a number of Jewish people had a sort of selective blind-spot to the ghettos that the black people were forced to live in, and how she and her husband had to skip town quick at one point because of the trouble they were experiencing because they weren't so hot on apartheid and were loud about it.
Somewhere between books, we discussed the nation's problems, why we all thought George Osborne and David Cameron had faces that needed a good smack. I loved J. saying, "Osborne was someone who should have been smacked as a child by one of his peers and I suspect he wasn't." There were a couple of moments where you could tell who (as my sister in law put it) were Times readers and who were Guardian readers. A gentle debate about the poor and what should be done with them. Like they are nits or something. Always that Calvinist belief that through bad choices someone ends up poor and it is all their fault and that there are supposedly poor people fleecing the state out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. I may have told someone to their face that it was an absolute lie and that they shouldn't pay attention to such propaganda. Ahem. Then everyone had more wine and ended things the way British people do to make everyone feel even, by telling embarrassing stories about themselves. Usually situations where one puts their foot in their mouth. (on trains or at dinner parties of course)
Oh England. You may have a caste system which some in charge would like to make more concrete but you like to keep yourself from feeling too mighty by being cringe-worthy. Is it a form of Penance? Maybe despite the reformation you still have popish leanings here and there. You can't say a decade of the rosary but you work out in another fashion.
