To ask, if you grew up working class or not well-off and have done well for yourself?

[TheHouseOnTheLane]

Do you ever get a weird longing for the past and the way it was even though you know the reality wouldn't please you?

Do you ever feel a sort of guilt if you left your home town?

DH and I have done ok...we're not rich but have a lovely house in a very lovely town. Blah blah...DH is from a middle class family but I grew up in a steel town during the 70s in the UK...my memories are probably tainted but I sometimes hanker for the close community that was my home town...I feel guilt for leaving....or something...what IS it?

Similar story here, from a northern town, one of 6 children, working class, dad worked in a paint factory and mum did an early morning milk round then worked 9-5 in a factory.
They're honest, 'good' people but they have never had any ambitions or aspirations. No desire for change or improvement within their lives. We were never pushed as children, never challenged to see what we were good at or nurture any talents.
I left because i went to uni, first one ever in my family.
I met my now DH there, totally different childhood, only child, wealthy parents who wanted the absolute best for him, I couldn't believe there were parents out there who were like that.

My life now is unrecognisable to what it was. We are wealthy, our children want for nothing, we have a beautiful home. I guess the legacy of my childhood is that I worry it will all disappear, that i don't deserve this life, that I'm somehow an imposter and I'm about to be 'find out' because I wasn't born into this life.

We go back to my home town now and then, Christmas etc and I'm treated with a mixture of pride and disdain. I still feel like the same person but obviously I'm not. My family have all stayed in the same town, are still friends with the people we went to school with, live close to each other etc I don't fit in at home anymore, not because I'm any different but because they perceive me to be different, they assume I'm a snob, that the food they provide isn't good enough etc but really I think the problem lies with them.

I grew up working class in Liverpool during the 70's. No heating, outside toilet, tin bath, family of 5 in a 2 up 2 down. I remember a great sense of community in that people rallied to help each other and looked out for elderly neighbours, but it was also stifling.
There was a definite poverty of aspiration, I was bright, but this wasn't valued, education wasn't pushed as a means to better yourself, we weren't even entered for the 11 plus, only the local comp,as that was closest it just wasn't on the horizon.
I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. I have done ok, but had to go back to Uni as an adult, but I always felt that I missed out. I can comfortably afford my house and manage to save regularly, but I find it really difficult to spend money on 'luxuries'. I didn't replace my 25 year old kitchen until it actually started to break, rather than replacing it because I just didn't like it. I only buy clothes because they need replacing not because i just fancy it, yet I can afford this now. But a childhood of only getting new clothes at Easter and Christmas or when they were beyond repair is hard to shake off.
I occasionally see friends from school at large events and I have nothing in common anymore,they still work in low wage jobs, ducking and diving to get by, putting up with arsehole men, still living in each others pockets and judging anyone who does well for themselves, the resentment is palpable.

I regret that my children have not grown up close to my parents as I did to my grandparents.

I regret they have not had the playing out as a gang like I did in the 1970s. We are far too middle class and do carefully targeted play dates instead.

To be honest, I feel like I don't fit in anywhere and some of that's linked to class and some of it is not.

It can be a pain though.

I look back on the stability of living in one place, going to the same school as my mum did...it was a nice sense of belonging.

None of my own children have finished a school they have started at, such is the moving to better the career aspirations of middle class living.

It's a sense of belonging I think is missing.

I'm glad I have got out of my home town and doing well for myself; good job, own home, solid relationship etc. My family are either on benefits or have low paid jobs and come from a background where having children at 15 is the norm etc, chavvy you could say. Unfortunately it's my parents that make me feel distanced from them and bad for making something of myself - calling me snobby or saying I've changed, like when I ask them not to make casually racist remarks in my home...

I agree meddie. I could theoretically buy anything I like but I just can't? I can't let go. My husband finds it hilarious.

I grew up poor from a dysfunctional family. Living on a council estate with druggies and thieves as neighbours. I hated it as a kid because I was pretty sensitive. I only made friends with kids from the 'nicer' estates because those on my estate frightened the life out of me.

I haven't made anything of myself, I had DS1 at 21 and have only ever had minimum wage jobs, but I was determined my DC would never have to live on an estate like the one I grew up on. I wanted them to feel they could play out without fear and not be ashamed of their home.

We don't own our own home, but we spend out a lot every month to rent a nice house in a safe area. A lot of people think we're daft and should get on the council list for a cheaper rental, but I wouldn't move my DC to anywhere like my childhood home for all the tea in China.

I grew up in the rural north in the 1980s. I remember feeling trapped as a teenager - I couldn't afford the bus fare to get a Saturday job (not that the buses ran early enough to make this feasible). One of my friends walked 8 miles to the nearest town, worked her shift in the supermarket, and then walked 8 miles home. I wasn't allowed to do this.

It was a relief to go to university. I loved it, even though I was still very poor as a student.

I'd never move back to a village. I currently live less than a 10 min walk from the town centre, and I love the convenience of being able to readily walk to anywhere I need to go (swimming pool: 5 mins; supermarket: 20 mins; train station: 15 mins; park: 5 mins; corner shop: 2 mins; bus station: 10 mins).

Genx77 - I'm glad I read your post. I totally agree with it being their issue, my partner calls it their 'inferiority complex'.

Just pisses me off that parents are supposed to want the best for their kids but when they get it, it's met with negativity. Bloody families eh?

My Dad was a farm labourer and my mum was a cleaner for a couple of wealthy local families. Money was always tight but we did live in a beautiful part of the country and I still miss that. Brother and I both went to university (encouraged by our mum) and into professional jobs. Our lifestyles are now a million miles away from that of our upbringing. I do miss living in the proper countryside, but not the poverty or the run down farm cottages we lived in.

I told my Mum that I had looked around our estate as a kid and vowed to get out. She verbally hammered me as a terrible snob. But she had never had to go to the sodding school! To be fair to her I have never told her some of the stuff that happened at the secondary school in particular so she did not get the full motivation which was not about folk swearing a bit.

No. Absolutely not. I feel an immense sense of relief at having "gotten out " and not having to lead the frankly very limited life that my contemporaries do.

Mind you, I never "fitted in" there, and it wasn't till I left and went to university that I began to meet people on my wavelength and started to feel like less of an oddball.

Oubliette I could have written this myself...

But I don't really 'belong' anywhere. Not back home - I have a totally different life to the people I went to school with, and very little in common with many of them. Not here - I don't have the certainty and sense of entitlement that comes with never having been short of money.

DH is from a wealthy non-UK family and he never spends money. I grew up in a single parent family on the bones of our arse and I have a shameful shopping habit. Even now, when I earn a six figure salary, I find it hard to save and constantly want to buy "things" that I don't need while I can afford them. DH thinks I am crazy but then again he has never seen his mother crying over the electricity bill, getting the phone cut off or having to put things back at the supermarket till.

Now I sit there smiling and nodding while DH's friends tell me about the Dreadful Foul Mouthed Children From State School who infliltrated their little darling's dance class and called her a posh motherfucker tried not to laugh I guess they wouldn't approve of my comprehensive on a sink estate in London, but the crazy thing is, they just assume I had a private education because that is the "norm" for our social circle. I go home to my old neighbourhood and feel like a fish out of water there too.

Can totally relate OP

I grew up in a solidly decent working class family, in a mining village.

While I was at University they closed the mines. My home village is now like one vast horrible sink estate. My younger sister seems to have gone from working class to underclass; even my parents seemed to have abandoned most of their values.

DH, (similar background) and I have moved around a lot but now we live in a lovely middle class village, about 5 miles from the council estate where he grew up. Interestingly, our kids are friends with kids whose parents went to the same school as him and are also "made good".

For a long time I haven't felt like I fit in anywhere: my best friends are mostly people I went to Uni with who had a similar background to me. In the past few years I've just begun to feel settled. People are very decent and pleasant here.

I do miss the wit and humour of the people I grew up with though; middle class people are a bit dull.

I dont think this is a thread about putting down WC people Ususal its more about our experiences of doing well from a working class background and feeling like you no longer fit in to either community.

You can't change people's experiences because you don't like them usual.

The reality is that what makes working class communities so special, can also cause problems when someone leaves them. It's the same with any tight knit culture.

OP thanks for starting this thread as lots of what has been said sums up my own experiences of being poor and growing up on a council estate in a big city in the 70s and 80s.

I scraped some qualifications at 16 then at 18 and went to uni (ex-poly) where I gained a decent degree. I think my family were proud of me but also didn't understand a lot of what I went through and possibly feared I would changes and look down on them.

I now live with DP and DD in a small 'naice' town a few miles away from my home city and we are looking to move soonish and hopefully keep DP's house to rent whilst we buy something bigger. We'll have 3 properties then which is something I could never have imagined when I was a child. In fact having good food on the table, new clothes and not worrying about every bill which came in would only have been a pipe dream for a teenage me.

Do I look back? In a way I often think that my life would be less stressful if I'd never been educated and settled for marrying a local boy and having a couple of kids. Life would have been mapped out for me in a more straightforward way and I wouldn't have the pressures on me which I currently have with my job. I know this is an idealised view and life would possibly have been more difficult had I not been educated but it is a recurrent thought I have.

OP, I think it must be a thing because the French have a term for it. They call it la nostalgie de la boue – nostalgia for mud.

The phrase comes from a play by Emile Augier in which one of the characters says, ‘Put a duck on a lake in the middle of swans, and you'll see that he will miss his pond and end up going back there,’ to which another character responds, ‘La nostalgie de la boue!’

I don't know Usual. I'm in my fifties. In the village I'm from, the working class hardly seems to exist any more. People are aspiring middle class or underclass, (by which I mean the whole benefits/kids running wild/substance abuse cliche). Maybe it's different in areas with more work?

Usual, I can read the hurt in your messages and I'm sorry you feel that the thread is descending into bashing your identity and lifestyle.

But how are the posters who are talking about having grown up with poverty, violence, threats and misery, and having escaped these things for a life that's closer to what they wanted, supposed to feel, if not relieved?

If your experience of being WC is a positive one, then clearly it isn't the same as other posters' experiences, which sound objectively negative (being beaten up at school and sneered at in the "community" for being clever), and it isn't really fair to blame them either.

It's complicated though. My DH grew up in a council house in West of Scotland. His DF was from Southern Ireland. Had a scholarship to private school then university. DH trained as an accountant. I'm from a farming
background. My DF left school at 14.