The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [93]
61. ‘Middle-class’ Used as a Term of Abuse
It was rare for the Pollock family to go on an outing together. This was not through any lack of inclination to do so, but it was rather because of the crowded timetable which Irene prepared for Bertie. Not only was there a saxophone lesson each week – complemented by a daily practice session of at least half an hour (scales, arpeggios, and set pieces) – but there was also Bertie’s yoga in Stockbridge, which took at least two hours, and Italian structured conversazione at the Italian Cultural Institute in Nicolson Street. On top of that, of course, there was psychotherapy, which, although it might take only an hour, seemed to occupy much more time, what with Bertie’s writing up of dreams in the dream notebook and the walk up to Queen Street for the actual session.
It was an extremely full life for a little boy, and there was more to come: Irene had planned a book group for Bertie, in which five or six children from the New Town would meet regularly in each other’s flats and discuss a book that they had read.
The model for this was, in Irene’s mind, her own Kleinian book group, which had flourished for several months before it had been sabotaged by one of the members. This still rankled with Irene, who had resisted this other member’s attempts to introduce works of fiction into the group’s programme. This had effectively split the group and left such a sour taste in the mouths of Irene and her allies that the group’s meetings had fizzled out and never restarted.
‘The whole point about our group,’ Irene had complained to a friend, ‘is that we are not one of those awful groups of middle-class ladies who meet and talk about the latest vapid imaginings of some novelist. That we are not.’
The friend had nodded her agreement. ‘Thank heavens for that,’ she said. ‘Those people are so earnest. So self-consciously serious. All trying to outdo one another in the depth of their comments. It’s quite funny when you come to think of it.’
This conversation had taken place in the Pollocks’ flat in Scotland Street and had been overheard by Stuart. He wondered what was wrong with book groups, which he thought were a rather good idea. Indeed, Stuart would have liked to have been in a book group himself and had almost joined one organised by a colleague in the office – a book group for men – but Irene had poured cold water on the idea.
‘Join it if you wish,’ she had said disparagingly. ‘But it’s sad, don’t you think? Rather sad to think of these middle-class men all sitting around talking about some novel they’ve tried to finish in time for the meeting.’
Stuart had said nothing. He had never understood Irene’s prejudice against people whom she called middle-class; indeed, he had never comprehended why the term middle-class should be considered a term of abuse. To begin with, he thought that they themselves were middle-class; not that he dared say that to his wife, but surely it was true. In income terms, they were about the middle, and they lived in a street where just about everybody else was in roughly the same position. And Edinburgh, of course, was itself mostly middle-class, whatever some people liked to think. As a statistician, Stuart knew the figures: 60 per cent of the population of the city was in highly skilled jobs and was therefore middle-class. So why should Irene speak so scornfully about the middle-class when the middle-class was all about her; and if you took the middle-class away, the city would die . . . just as it would if you took away the people who did the hard, thankless jobs, the manual work that was just as important in keeping things going. That, thought Stuart, was why class talk was so utterly pointless: everybody counted.
And now, overhearing this attack on book groups, Stuart pondered this again. It might be true that middle-class ladies belonged to book groups, but what was wrong with that? It seemed to him to be an entirely reasonable and interesting