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?

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!

why do everyone rave so much about breast?! In my house we would fight over the legs and thighs!!!!

@ravenmum

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.

To come from “real and grinding poverty” And manage to go to university Would suggest to me that perhaps you weren’t in quite “real and grinding poverty”!

No, the gardener would wash their hands at the outside tap.

@Tavelo

I'd never had pizza or pasta (unless you count spaghetti from a tin) until I was almost a teen, seemed very exotic and I was surprised to meet people who ate them so frequently. It wasn't until I went to uni that I learnt bread could go mouldy, in our house it never lasted long enough too. Similarlly we kept the butter in the cupboard because it never lasted long enough to go off.

Same here and the pizzas you got from Iceland etc. were quite different to the pizzas you see now in shops.

"For heavens sake stand on your own 2 feet is what I think."

I had this discussion with some rich people. Their argument was that they want to give the money away now rather than pay inheritance tax on it later. They didn't really get my argument that people should pay at least some contribution to their own living expenses.

@GeorgiaGirl52

Never realized until college that families lived in rented apartments. Everyone I knew growing up lived with their family in their own house. Only college students lived in rentals. Then I discovered that there were blocks and blocks of apartment complexes filled with families and children. I was astonished the first time I saw a school bus pull into an apartment complex and unload children coming home from school.

I had the same realisation but in my first proper job after uni, I am ashamed to say. I did grow up in a middle class family in a lovely village where everyone was fairly well off. My aunt and uncle though are working class and have normal jobs (care assistant and factory worker) and they owned their house so I just thought that was what adults did. When I properly thought about it though, I realised that made no sense as I was officially an adult (technically I still don't think of myself as a grown up and I'm 40, I'm waiting to be busted for pretending to be adult 😂 ) and I didn't own a house. I just hadn't ever thought about it until a lady at work said something about renting the house she lived in.

I then went to work at the job centre and was very shocked by the amount of 18yr olds who were sofa surfing and had been kicked out of home, or who had already got a couple of children, or had been to prison several times. It really is a whole different world.

@TheSmallClangerWhistlesAgain

I know someone who pays a bloke to put her Christmas lights up. She's very well off but enjoys her money and is generous with it. If she has more than a few people round for dinner, she gets caterers in.

Another well-off friend has a handbag wardrobe in her huge dressing room. A whole small wardrobe for bags.

A surprising number of people I know have booze fridges. A whole fridge just for booze.

And then they fill them with cheap wine. Ditch the fridge and enjoy better wine

To come from “real and grinding poverty” And manage to go to university Would suggest to me that perhaps you weren’t in quite “real and grinding poverty”!
I didn't say I was in poverty at all, let alone in real, grinding poverty! I was just not very well off.
But in any case, when I went to uni, it was the 1980s and I got a full, non-repayable grant. Our year were the last in the UK to get it. I spent some of that grant getting the train up to London and protesting against the government's plans to stop the grants, but it didn't work, sorry.

@Gwenhwyfar

"For heavens sake stand on your own 2 feet is what I think."

I had this discussion with some rich people. Their argument was that they want to give the money away now rather than pay inheritance tax on it later. They didn't really get my argument that people should pay at least some contribution to their own living expenses.

Do you look down on people claiming benefits and tax credits as not ‘standing in their own two feet’? If not why do you feel the need to judge people helped out by family?

I never had a pair of new shoes until I went to secondary school in 1978. (Even then they were not leather and bought from a market stall). I was the youngest of 5, with quite a few cousins, there was always a pair of shoes ready to hand down. Shoes for the oldest would probably come from the jumble sale. Mum would jump a bus on a Saturday afternoon to go to jumbles in posh areas.
I had no idea that people took their children to a shop to be measured and get new school shoes every September.
When I had dc of my own, the staff in Clarks at Croydon knew them by name.

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

I got raised eyebrows for ordering wine in a pub in about the year 2000!

I’d never had a proper pizza until uni. Pizza from an Italian takeaway

Thought I was so sophisticated when I Took my mum to Pizza Hut with the bogof vouchers in the paper.

Didn’t have wine til uni.
So when asked what kind of wine do you like? I replied white or red That was the total of my wine knowledge. People thought I was being terribly funny. I had no idea about grape varieties, region’s etc

@Gwenhwyfar what? Raised eyebrows from who?? Why? I remember my parents ordering wine in the 90's!

@BlackeyedSusan

Brought up to save for stuff not use credit, apart from a mortgage which you pay off asap.

I was too. Then it was pointed out to me that in those days you got mortgage tax relief and if you paid it off early you were turning down free money - that was obviously a long time ago! Equally I always use 0% credit if it’s available on the basis it keeps my money in the bank. Again, now interest rates are so low, that’s pointless too.

@grey12

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!

why do everyone rave so much about breast?! In my house we would fight over the legs and thighs!!!!

I think the legs and thighs are generally accepted to be more flavoursome, but the shredded, stringy brown morsels we got were certainly nothing to be fought over.

userchange902

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

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

OP here, yes that's right. At home wine was strictly one glass at Christmas and on a 21 st birthday, garlic was unknown as afoodstuff though Dad probably came across it during his airforce service around the Mediterrenean in WW2. I do think my father being of an older generation than others of my age affected me too. He certainly did not like it when I proudly made the spaghetti bolognese I had learned from university friend. (My sisters loved it) But then he could not eat onions either so maybe another reason our diet was restricted.

I am coming across as some kind of foodie when I really am not but food is obviously of supreme and basic importance to everybody. so it is not so surprising it features so strongly in cultural difference discussions. And it is deeply imbued with class distinction otherwise why did employers want their servants to eat lesser food in terms of quality and amount?

Also realised that I truly learnt more about cooking and other domestic arts at university from friends than my subject. I think my literary knowledge was broadened and my food/domestic was deepened due to the stronger emotional resonance of food etc. Our family speciality was long drawn out rows over constantly refilled teapots so I was always tense at mealtimes but delighted when praised by my peers later on.

I did combine interests by subsequently reading a fair bit about food and cooking and culinary history - Elizabeth David and all that jazz.

Some of the things you talk about- drinking wine, using garlic - were around long before the 70s."
My parents don’t , won’t drink wine they regard it with suspicion and disdain. At graduation departmental do they had waiting staff walking about with wine and canapés. My mum reluctantly took a wine, sniffed it and then tipped in fly as you like in plant pot

Garlic? Christ no. Never. Again I on,y encountered actual garlic bulb when I left home went to uni

So garlic and wine may have been a thing, but it never did reach my parents or home upbringing

I think my defining moment was in about 1974 when I had an older boyfriend. I was 18 and just about to go off to university. I’m from a very ordinary working class comfortable family background, a week at the sea side once a year, a family car kept til it fell apart, food only eaten in the house with the exception of an icecream on the beach on the annual holiday ( but not every day as that was beyond the budget!) , mum and dad worked to a weekly budget for essentials etc and I had to have a Saturday job the minute I was old enough to start buying my own stuff etc.
When I met said older boyfriend ( he was about 25 I think so not old by today’s standards!) I was totally taken aback at the casual way he took money out of the bank at random times for general use not bills etc and also when he would suggest we had chips on the way home from the cinema! To me that was exactly how the other half lived!

@LastSummerHere

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

I read voraciously but I think that sort of confused the issue more in my mind. Most of what I read wasn't set exactly in the present day and I think when I was a child I thought poverty (in the UK, I knew that there were children with no food elsewhere in the world) was sort of 'historical' - e.g. the bit at the beginning of the Railway Children where they say they can afford to put either jam or butter on their bread but not both. I didn't know anyone who lived like that in real life so I think I thought that was how people used to live, not how they did now. This was bolstered by the fact that my grandparents and parents talked about the deprivations of their own childhoods, but didn't live like that more.

I will say though that I realised long before university - maybe around 13, when I started reading a newspaper regularly. I think I still had quite a romanticised view though, which is why I was shocked at my boyfriend's dad essentially trying to nick his student loan off him - my idea of poverty was quite 'noble', parents bravely going without their own food to feed their children etc. I guess this was because the paper in question was The Guardian, I might have had a different view if I read the sort of papers that wrote about 'benefit scroungers' etc.

So when asked what kind of wine do you like? I replied white or red That was the total of my wine knowledge. People thought I was being terribly funny. I had no idea about grape varieties, region’s etc.

Tbh if someone were to ask me today what kind of wine I like, I would assume they meant red or white!

I am just skeptical that anyone in true poverty managed to attend university.

@Marmitemarinaded

I am just skeptical that anyone in true poverty managed to attend university.

That poster didn’t say they lived in true poverty though.

what an interesting thread! I guess my family was a real mix up. I was a child of the 50's/60's but am the youngest in the family. By today's standards we were poor (no inside toilet, one cold water tap in the kltchen, we all bathed in a tin bath in the kitchen once a week with water boiled in buckets on the gas stove) but by the standards of our time and area, we were well off (had new clothes, not from jumble sales, hand me down clothes only from within the family, caravan holiday every summer, given pocket money every week)
The big "richer than other people" thing was that about 4 times a year, we went out to dinner at Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch in London. We learned proper table manners including use of cutlery and were all expected to use grown up manners. The rule was that we could have ANYTHING on the menu provided we ate it...us kids were given gentle guidance on choice on the lines of saving room for "afters" and being sure that we could eat a WHOLE prawn cocktail starter as well as steak. About the only non comme il faut thing was that my parents would negotiate stuff like if I would settle for tomato juice for a starter, then I could have steak and chips for main and Mum or Dad would give me a little of their prawn cocktail because shoosing is HARD when you are six. There used to be a flower woman that sold rose button holes on the pavement nearby and Dad would buy us all roses to wear....straight out of Eliza Doolittle!

The other thing was that although not churchgoers, Mum and Dad were active in the background passing on bundles of outgrown clothing, toys and occasionally canned food. I didn't realise until much later that some of this stuff was going to women who had left abusive relationships. The rest went to really poor families (no coats in winter and shoes mended with cardboard) I was taught pretty much as soon as I started primary, to say nothing if I saw a child at school in clothes that had been mine or my siblings.

and yes...even to me it sounds like the 1800's not the 1960's!

"That some people have sandwiches for lunch. I was appalled!"

Why?

@Marmitemarinaded

I am just skeptical that anyone in true poverty managed to attend university.

How bloody rude are you?

Single parent. 3 kids. Tax credits. Student loan.

Came from a very working class background and was on the bones of my arse after I split from my ex and I managed to go to university.

Grew up in a house with no central heating dinners at school the main meal and lived as an adult with it off in the winter upstairs and only on when the kids were there.

It’s possible. It’s hard. But possible.