134
PARTISAN REVIEW
at 11 a.m. on November 11th.
My Remembrance Sunday also includes the casualties of class. Not
just the martyrs of Peterloo, Tolpuddle and the 1926 General Strike. The
"class system" that's evolved here is dreadfully hurtful to everybody.
Among other things, it means that working-class people often half-de–
stroy themselves making the exhausting leap from Class 4 and 5 to 3 and
beyond. And the middle classes get penned up in a psychic ghetto at
once snobbish and guilt-ridden. Maybe that's changing now. The Nor–
man Tebbits are supposed to be sweeping away the Lord Carringtons in
a Thatcherite "revolution of the talents." People more like myself are in
control. I'm not sure I like it.
Britain's on the move again, in one of those great modernizing
convulsions like the Land Enclosures and the Victorian railway boom.
It's quite exciting if you don't get knocked down by the traffic. I wish I
could stay
to
report some of it. The cities and shires, so ruthlessly bom–
barded by the architect-planner Luftwaffe, are starting to fight back. Even
Merseyside scouses are, against their nature, cheering up a little. None of
us knows what Britain is or will be anymore. Whether we like it or not,
"she" has given us a clear historical choice, as De Gaulle once did in
France. Each of us has to work out for himself all over again the kind of
people we are and what is important to us. Something's definitely in the
air when a polo-playing prince makes bolder statements than myoid
New Left used to.
I actively yearn for a Britain now fading away like old fax paper. It
was never "One Nation." What country ever is? Yet I always wanted it
to be. Maybe it comes from seeing
Mrs. Milliver
and
III
Which We Serve
in my soft-minded teens: movie fantasies of a whole, healthy people. De–
spite everything, I've never quite lost this American romance of a re–
newed, more generous Britain. Meantime, I fight the class war like ev–
eryone else.
Like most ex-workingclass socialists I know, I try to defend the class
I'm from rather than the one I'm in. Americans call characters like me a
"tweenie," a demographic half-caste. Privately I'm proud of inching up
from Lucozade to Perrier, but troubled I couldn't take everyone else
with me. "Rise with, not from, your class," my mother used to say. She
believed we all deserved champagne. She would not have been sympa–
thetic to my confused longing to stick with my own. Surer of her own
roots, she took 'em as she found 'em. Her more relaxed attitude to class
has for me turned to something harder and more bitter here. It's almost
a relief to return to"classless" America where money talks without wor–
rying about dropping its
aitches
.
Class distinctions seldom bothered my mother, a machine minder.
"Common" was almost the worst thing she could say about a person-
