How the other half lives, what and when you learned

[tomorrowalready]

Reflecting from another thread made me realise it was not until my 20s I found out some people expected to have a private bathroom. I went to university then and shared with another mature student who had been married, divorced and said she found having to share a bathroom with unrelated people unpleasant. I had always taken it for granted as had live in jobs and rented bedsits before. She was a lovely person and also the first person I knew who had a glass of wine every evening and she introduced me to many new things - cooking with garlic, sherry, owning and using a car for shopping for example.

So what did you take for granted that surprised other people you met?

@InMySpareTime

I grew up on a council estate, DH went to Private School from the age of 3. There were multiple culture clashes when either of us stayed with our parents. Eg: Me- wondering why the knives were weird and pointy when they served fish (they had a "dinner service" that was kept in the dining room, including fish knives and cheese knives). DH- having to wash dishes between lunch and dinner because there were only 6 plates/forks/knives in the house. Me- having to separate some of the crockery and cutlery after meals because "the bone handled knives can't go in the dishwasher and the gold edging on plates isn't dishwasher safe". DH- finding out that there were only certain routes to my parents' house that were safe to walk after dark. Me- finding out that a "guest bedroom" was an actual thing (my bedroom was immediately taken when I left for uni, there was not space for unused rooms). DH- eating a meal composed entirely from yellow-stickered random ready meals, dished up from tubs in the kitchen, and learning that this was standard fare. Me- eating a meal served from pots at the table. Each pan had its own coaster to protect the table, and its own serving spoon with a spoon rest.

Does make me wonder how any DCs are being raised in your home ... somewhere in the middle?

This thread is really interesting to see what people think is posh or not.

It gets more interesting when you add other cultures into the mix.

I have a Romanian friend who didn't understand why horses were posh. She had a uni friend who bragged about her horses and her riding and showed off about it.

My Romanian friend said that were she came from gypsies have horses. Rich people have cars. You only have a horse if you can't afford a car.

It is very interesting to see how different things are.

This thread reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with the mum of one of my DC's friends who had not long before moved to the UK from South Africa. She explained to me that her DC were all fantastic swimmers, because "in South Africa, everyone has a pool!"

I didn’t realise
a) how many young adults were financially supported by their parents
b) how many are not open about that support and are actively aim to show the facade of all their ‘material success’ is off their own back. And how this extends into forties and beyond.

I found out about the first one in my mid to late twenties. When around me tons of friends started to buy their first properties / flats in London. It made me think wtaf? How much are they earning that they can do this? It wasn’t until I went to stay with one of my friends parents that the parents disclosed they had done a partial remortgage on their home and given both of their children £40k each as deposits on their first homes. That friend had always made out he had got on the property ladder himself. Exact same in every other situation. No one bought their first London flat in their twenties without some form of financial help/ inheritance.

Now I’m older it’s the exact same scenario regarding private school fees. Huge proportion of grandparents pay fees, eye opening. None of the parents are open about that (nor should they be, it’s their private family affairs). But I do think it’s interesting what facade is presented to the outside world.

@DappledThings

Church. I didn't realise till I was about 11 that not everyone goes every Sunday. Or more specifically that not everyone follows any religion. So I thought pretty much everyone went regularly to church or synagogue or mosque etc. I knew some people didn't but if you'd asked me at 11 to guess what percentage I'd have said less than 10% probably.

(I don't think we'd actually covered percentages by 11 but you know what I mean)

Yes. I found this odd as well!

I grew up with a foot very much in two different camps.

We lived for a good few years in the annexe of a relative's mansion in a very fancy part of the South-east. Neighbours were old, old money and footballers. Huge garden and multiple gardeners, family Christmases were catered with service staff, security men with dogs doing laps at night.

I remember the next door neighbours had a 12-bedroom mansion with indoor pool and acres of garden –they helicoptered in (literally) for 5 days a year to go to the races and then it sat empty the rest of the year.

My immediate family, on the other hand, were scraping by (hence living in the annexe rent-free while trying to save enough to get into our own place), and my mum built my bed out of crates and second-hand sun-lounger mattresses. I remember many weekends spent digging around in skips to find what my mum called 'treasures' for the house.

Lots of weird awkward conversations where we felt both incredibly lucky to be in such privileged surroundings, but also incredibly ashamed because we knew the family and people in the neighbourhood were looking down on us. We didn't fit in.

Nowhere near the poverty of many people, and we did manage to move on, but the 'clash' felt very immediate and obvious every single day for a long time.

I'm still trying to untangle the impact of what it did to my own ideas about money and how I run my finances these days.

"It had genuinely never occurred to me that you might buy a £150 ticket for a fancy event and then on the day be “oh I feel a bit hungover and I just don’t fancy it” and not turn up."

I've learned of this for the first time today!
The missed flight thing I can get because they probably had the money to pay a bit extra for an exchangeable ticket.

@lastcall / @inmysparetime DH and I have similar. But the funny thing is that whilst MIL is clueless about knives and forks and counts food because she was very poor as a child and one of six, whose parents were working class, she is incredibly snobby about people who go to Spain for their holidays, and is unbelievably condescending to my cleaner (whilst being chippy about the fact I have one) whereas my mother will have a chat about how nice it must be for her cleaner to get away to her caravan/her hairdresser to look forward to Spain and the pool, etc. And MIL who became a deputy head should know better but still counts food

@SurferWoman

Until I was about 20, I assumed that everyone reused 'lucky' unfranked stamps from envelopes by soaking the corner of envelope in a little saucer for ten minutes.

My parents rarely paid for stamps. We all just glued old ones onto new envelopes.

It didn't occur to me that it might be immoral to do this.

We re-used stamps as did most people we knew. I heard someone say it a few years ago that they thought it was illegal. I was really shocked! I even kept unfranked stamps at work because I wouldn't have been able to throw them away, kept foreign stamps too for people who collect/charities. I also keep packaging and big envelopes for re-using, more for convenience than cost.

I had a very privileged upbringing (not unlimited money by any means, but enough for foreign holidays, and expensive days out like Thorpe Park etc)

Anyway, when I started uni I had a bit of cash from working all summer, and I was quite smug that a) I'd stuck out a fairly miserable minimum wage job all summer, and b) I'd managed to save most of my wages. I hadn't realised at all that some 18yos had to hand over most/all of their summer wages to their parents for housekeeping, and had been doing so with their weekend jobs since age 16.

@PissedOffNeighbour22

I don't think I realised quite how poor we were as kids until my ex said it sounds like I grew up in the Victorian age. I actually grew up in the 80s. I was definitely the only person I knew that darned my own socks as a child, was sent out to collect dropped coal when the deliveries went past and had to share one small egg fried rice between 3 people as a 'treat' as that's the only takeaway meal we could afford and it only happened a couple of times a year. My mum even bought us second hand underwear .

This is pretty tough. I know that for people my parents' age, eggs were expensive treats, but they weren't really in the 80s. The picking coal thing appears in Angela's ashes, set much earlier. I've had friends say my 80s-90s upbringing sounds really old-fashioned as well, the two main examples being that there was no mains gas in my village and one set of grandparents still having an outside toilet that was in use (they had an inside one too).

I went to Public then finishing school. Worked in 5* hotels in management for a few years where we could order our dinner from the a la carte menu and stayed in the hotel bedroom when on duty. Then went to work for a fine wine merchant.

The first week responding to calls when I joined the police was rather a shock.

"@Pissedoffneighbour22, I darned my tights when I was in my twenties."

I can't sew, but we did put nail varnish on ladders in tights to stop them spreading. I'd just throw them away now, socks too as paying for the socks would be mended makes no economic sense.

@userchange902

Some of the things you talk about- drinking wine, using garlic - were around long before the 70s.

That's the op's point, that she hadn't been exposed to it because of her background (I think!)

I grew up in the 70's & 80's in Kent. Working class. Outside loo, no central heating, no holidays. Not exposed to garlic or wine at all. 'Tea' was potato based usually. I'd never had loose leaf tea in a pot, or fresh coffee until I got my first job where I soon learned to make both. I both worked for an 'dated' (I was 19, he was 40, yuk...) an Old Wykehamist who delighted in teaching me 'how to use cutlery properly so I didn't embarrass myself'. He thought he was Rex Harrison I think. Actually he was just a sleaze but I didn't know better.

@LastSummerHere

It's mind blowing that people in university were shocked that others live in poverty. Didn't you READ as a child??

Of course I did. It's very different seeing real, grinding poverty in its unromantic reality rather than through a description in a book that your brain translates according to your own experience. Poverty in all 5 senses is very different to poverty on a page

When we were kids a family used to come on holiday and stay in a caravan close to where we lived and we became friends with them and I remember they had a bowl of fruit on the table. My Mum hardly bought fruit because she said 'you'll only eat it all' (???!). She probably had a point though. The family also had cans of coke in the fridge to help themselves. They also had a nickname for their car!

I noticed differences early on (early in primary school). 2 of my friends had black and white portable televisions and one of those friends only had an outside toilet.

It was a bit later that I realised that almost everyone else’s house was clean (not necessarily tidy, but always clean. Ours was filthy). Other people had VCRs and gadgets, hot water all the time and heating apart from an open fire.

Weirdly, my mother is a massive snob so we always had 15 different types of serving plate and dishes and fish knives and all that rubbish.

I was 17 before I started staying overnight at friend’s houses and realised that most were just nicer than mine, and that their parents actually liked them and picked them up from places and made an effort!

Going to University in the mid 80’s from a northern Comprehensive that had previously been a secondary modern so lots of older teachers who weren’t used to teaching to O level never mind A level. Very few went into the 6th form and made it to University. Once there I discovered most people were from the south, had been to private school or state grammars, had been on ski-ing holidays and had had frequent holidays abroad. Someone in my flat had bought an avocado. I’d never seen one, much less eaten one and I was astounded that anyone could spend that much on one item of food. Also bowls of pasta with tomato sauce on. I saw this as a southern thing as no-one I knew at home would have regarded this as a meal. Also “supper” for your evening meal. To my ears sounded pretentious and ridiculously posh. Which is strange because it’s just a word but to me supper was your cup of cocoa and digestive biscuit before bed. This prejudice against a word was confirmed later by David Cameron and his “kitchen suppers” with Rebecca Wade and the Cotswold set/people

I grew up thinking Asian food (Indian, Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, etc.) was quite normal and ordinary. I'm British, but my parents had many Asian friends and work colleagues.

But the first time I had Pizza, at Uni, I thought it was so exotic!

I'd never eaten chicken breast until I was about 11 and had no idea what it was when I saw the big white chunks of it in a dinner at my friends house. When we had chicken it was always bits of stringy brown meat shredded from the legs or thighs or something that we kind of picked through It wasn't as horrible as it sounds, but it wasn't great!

Ironically, we lived in a big house in the nice part of town. This friend lived with her single mother in a flat in the rougher part of town. But they had much better quality food (after dinner we had dessert of strawberries and cream) and we ate all together at the kitchen table. At my house my mum would generally shout "dinners ready!" and we would run in to where the plates were on the worktop, pick through the shredded meat for a few seconds then run back out to play again. Looking back I am at what my friends must have thought! And needless to say I was very skinny! Although probably not unhealthily so.

This friend (and many others) was also much better dressed than me and just generally better looked after, although my mother always looked down on anybody that didn't live in the nice part of town (up on the hill) like us. Bizarre.

I didn't know what a mortgage was until I was 11 at secondary school and kids banged on about what they'd heard their parents saying about interest rates etc. (It was the early 80s)
My parents rented cheaply abroad until I was 8 then moved to a cheap part of Britain and bought outright an old house that needed a lot of work. The work got done slowly as they could afford it. They would never have got a mortgage because my dad was foreign and worked for himself. But not knowing what one was, I of course said my parents didn't have one, which instantly 'othered' me (in addition to having a foreign parent, not having seen English TV as a young child, and having eaten foreign food!) I was so embarrassed that it was a couple of years before I could bear to ask my mum what a mortgage was and why didn't they have one. She had to explain that it would have made me appear to be very wealthy to other children...even though we were actually pretty skint in reality.

Thankfully my own children have been brought up in a disgustingly 'normal' household with a mortgage and parents who moan about interest rates
Although when my DS started university in a northern city, he was horrified to discover that there isn't a Waitrose in every town! We don't shop there often but he loves it.

When I was 11, in first year of secondary so 1990/91 we were in Home Economics talking about takeaways. Our teacher asked us what our grandparents would think if we suggested a Chinese to them and said she assumed they would all find it an entirely new experience and one they would probably be averse to.

I answered that we never got Chinese takeaway with my grandparents because my grany was Chinese so cooked it herself and didn't rate any takeaways we'd found. Teacher just thought I was being a smartarse and making it up.

At home we had fruit but we were only allowed one piece a day each. Once it was gone that was it until the next week. Same with a lot of “non-essential” stuff like a bottle of squash. There was always tea

"But you know people keep them now for the gardener don't you know. "

So they're happy with the gardener coming in to wash his hands in their kitchen sink?

It's very different seeing real, grinding poverty in its unromantic reality rather than through a description in a book that your brain translates according to your own experience.
Exactly; I watched "To the Manor Born", so I knew what it was like being rich, right? :) But even so, when I went to uni and someone in my uni said she'd bought her boyfriend a pair of Levis for Christmas - as if that was a dull present, too! - it was still enlightening.