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in,’ said one woman. ‘I don’t hold with that sort of thing.’
    Being so dependent on the locality, the working classes are lost and desperately lonely, if the council moves them to housing estates, or shuts them up in little boxes in some high-rise block. The men have also lost much of the satisfacton that came from the old skills and crafts. Many of these have been taken away from them and their traditional occupations replaced by machines. In the old days the husband gained respect as a working man in the community.
    Women’s Lib hasn’t helped his self-respect much either. The working classes are the most reactionary of all the classes. (You only have to look at those Brylcreemed short back and sides, and wide trousers flapping like sails in the breeze at the T.U.C. Conference.) But despite this, the working-class housewife now reads about Women’s Lib in the paper and soon she’s fretting to go back to work and make some extra cash, rather than act as a servant to the family and have her husband’s dinner on the table at mid-day when he gets home. She starts questioning his authority and, having less autonomy at home, and never having had any at work, he feels even more insecure. Battering often starts if the woman is brighter than the man and the poorly educated husband sees his security threatened.
    Leaving school at sixteen, he feels inadequate because he is inarticulate. He is thought of as being bloody-minded and rude by the middle classes because he can’t express himself and to snort ‘Definitely, disgusting’, in answer to any question put to him, is the only way he can show his disapproval.

     
    The Definitely-Disgustings
     

     
    The Nouveau-Richards
     
    The working classes divide themselves firmly into the Rough and the Respectable. The Rough get drunk fairly often, make a lot of noise at night, often engage in prostitution, have public fights, sometimes neglect their children, swear in front of women and children, and don’t give a stuff about anything—just like the upper classes, in fact. The Respectables chunter over such behaviour, and in Wales sing in Male Voice Choirs; they are pretty near the Teales. They also look down on people on the dole, the criminal classes and the blacks, who they refer to as ‘soap dodgers’.
    MR AND MRS DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING
    Our archetypal working-class couple are Mr and Mrs DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING. They have two children, SHARON and DIVE, and live in a council house with walls so thin you can hear the budgie pecking its seed next door. Mr Definitely-Disgusting is your manual worker. He might be a miner in the North, a car worker in the Midlands, or a casual labourer in the South. He married young and lived for a while with his wife’s parents. After a year or two he went back to going to the pub, football and the dogs with the blokes. He detests his mother-in-law. But, despite his propensity to foul language, he is extremely modest, often undressing with his back to Mrs D-D and even peeing in a different way than the other classes, splaying out his fingers in a fan, so they conceal his member. He might do something mildly illegal, receiving a car or knocking-off a telly. He is terrified of the police, who, being lower-middle and the class just above, reserve their special venom for him. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting wears her curlers and pinny to the local shop and spends a lot of the day with a cigarette hanging from her bottom lip gossiping and grumbling.
    MR AND MRS NOUVEAU-RICHARDS
    The other couple you will meet are the NOUVEAU-RICHARDS, of working-class origin but have made a colossal amount of money. Boasting and ostentation are their salient characteristics. At coffee mornings Mrs Nouveau-Richards, who lives in lurex, asks anyone if they’ve got any idea ‘whether gold plate will spoil in the dishwasher’. She has a huge house and lots of servants, who she bullies unmercifully. She is very rude to waiters and very pushy with her children,