I’m solidly middle class - my mum is the eldest of seven kids, brought up in a two-bedroom council flat in Holland by my Opa, a miner who became a plumber when the local mines shut down, and my Oma, a cleaner. My Opa’s mum got pregnant by a soldier passing through town (the scandal). My Oma’s parents were a poacher and a washerwoman. So my mum was solid working class, though both of her grandmothers’ parents were middle class (but hey, get knocked up and left to be a teen single mum or run away with the local poacher and you get cut out 😂). She came over here as an au pair and ended up being the head of buying for a global home catalogue business (helps when you speak six languages!)
My dad probably was more middle class - his dad learned to be a bomb technician in WW2 and went on to work as a chemist thanks to that training, rising to become head of Ciba’s South Africa division. His mum was a housewife who unfortunately died when my dad was young. But go a couple of generations back from him and they were mill workers and the like, that came over from Ireland. So the opposite story, I guess!
I had private schooling, a nice holiday a year, horse riding since I was old enough to wobble about on chubby legs. We weren’t rich enough to be upper class, I had too much privilege to be working class. I now have a job that I could mostly do from home but it doesn’t pay well enough for me to be comfortable about retirement or affording kids. We live in a nice house with a mortgage but on an ex-council estate. So I figure I’m pretty middle class. My mum is as well - she now runs her own Pilates studio (she retrained) and again, has a nice little semi that’s a million miles away from a council flat in rural Holland but her retirement won’t be cruises and galas lol. Her sister’s probably UMC now (kids went to boarding schools, several nice holidays a year, a flat in Marbella and a wine cellar that I’m very envious of, and the knowledge to make good use of it to boot!).
I have a friend who was brought up as a minor lordling, I guess, with ski seasons and overseas boarding schools and Monaco red carpets, who’s happy living in a three-roomed flat as a welder.
What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really matter what your origins are or . You’re not lying, you are just who you are. Your opportunities, choices and those of others all play into what you become. Was my mum, in that council flat as a kid, somehow middle class because her parents would save up every penny to take them to the theatre sometimes, or listened to classical music or put a huge emphasis on education and learning everything they could? Financially speaking, I guess being middle class is basically never qualifying for benefits but never having enough to feel comfortable massively splashing out, either. It’s the slightly anxious, middle-ground.
So basically, what is class? Is it where you live? How much money you have? Where you come from? Where you feel comfortable? It’s a complex, highly subjective thing with so many factors that impact on it.
You seem to have a pretty narrow view of what it means though, @MargaretBrewer, that suggests you feel that if you are born into a role, you and your kids should stay in your lane. How dare a privately schooled child of common workers ‘lord it about’ as if he’s middle class? How dare a woman with a keen interest in the arts and culture, and has made the money to fully explore them, act as though she’s UMC when she came from such lowly beginnings?
Me? I guess I’m going to carry on being middle-class. Because I probably am, despite my ancestors’ origins. And I’m not going to worry my head about whether I, or anyone else, truly am or not.