Read Class for Free Online Page B

wild about new-born babies. Nancy Mitford once described one as a ‘howling orange in a black wig’. But they are delighted to have their double-barrelled names carried on by male issue.
    A few years ago Harper’s published a brilliant piece on the ‘Sloane Ranger’, the girl who has a flat in Kensington and parents in the country, who lives in headscarves and went to a ‘good’ girls’ boarding school. She epitomizes the level at which the traditional upper-middles merge into the lower ranks of the upper classes. The Sloane Ranger husband is very chuffed whatever sex child he has. If it is a boy he goes to his club and writes two letters, one to ‘my housemaster at Eton, and one to Mrs Ingham at Easton House’. Then he opens a bottle of champagne.
    Harry Stow-Crat, who certainly wasn’t present at the birth of any of his children, might ring up his mother or his old nanny, have a large whisky and soda, then go off and see his mistress.
    Poor Gideon Upward is having a horrid time. He now knows exactly why it’s called a ‘confinement’, that he’s being conned rotten forking out for a private room, and it’s not very fine the way Samantha who, disapproving of epidurals, insisted on natural childbirth and is now yelling her head off. Still he’s delighted when little Zacharias appears. (Samantha went right through the Bible to find a name no one else had used.) It’s so nice to have a boy first, so he can take little 0.7 to dances when they grow up.
    While Samantha is in hospital Gideon plans to have a crack at his secretary, but ever-thoughtful Samantha arranges for married friends to ask him out every night. Gideon gets drunk, partly out of frustration and partly at the prospect of his mother-in-law coming to stay next week, and makes sodden passes at the wives while their role-reversed husbands are doing the washing up. The passes are tactfully forgotten about afterwards.
    Mr Definitely-Disgusting finds it difficult to visit his wife in hospital because of shift work and National Health visiting hours. When he does, the conversations are usually monosyllabic and inhibited by groans from the labour ward next door.
    Aristocrats often get married just before the birth to legitimize the child in case it’s a boy. I attended one such wedding where the bride was actually in the last stages of labour. The hospital had thoughtfully provided an altar with a brass cross and two plastic orchids in a mauve vase. The bridegroom hadn’t bothered to brush his hair but looked so impossibly handsome that the screaming queen of a hospital chaplain got thoroughly over-excited and spent so long holding his hand he almost forgot to join it to the bride’s, who was manfully carrying on with:
    ‘To have . . . ( groan ) . . . and to hold, from this . . . ( groan ).’
    THE ANNOUNCEMENT
    If you are very grand The Times reports the birth on the social pages free of charge. The rest of the upper classes put it in the birth column as briefly as possible:
    ‘To Caroline, wife of Harry Stow-Crat—a son.’
    Harry wouldn’t have bothered, but Caroline thinks Mummy’s friends would like to know. The Upwards’ announcement would include the name of the baby (Zacharias Daniel) and a ‘née Garland-Watson’ to remind people of Samantha’s up-market connections. Jen and Bryan Teale might include the name of the hospital and mention earlier children: ‘a brother for Christine and Wayne.’ Less smart but more reactionary members of the middle classes use the Daily Telegraph. The left-wing middles, conveniently combining parsimony with a flouting of convention, don’t bother, which explains why the Guardian seldom has any birth announcements.
    Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, who gets her children’s names from the TV Times , tends to put the announcement of Sharon Esther, a sister for Dive Darren, in the local paper, with special thanks to the midwifery department at the hospital. It is a working-class characteristic to be