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?

[miltonj]

My husband is very down to earth, but grew up in a very middle class environment. We are from quite different worlds. I was young when I met him, and it was weird to me that his friends and acquaintances would ask me things like 'where did you go travelling'. As though that's a thing that everybody does before uni. I hadn't even been to uni! (Although I have now). When I was in school, it was just kind of excepted by kids and parents too that it was just what you had to do, in the world my husband grew up in, all the kids deeply cared about their grades. His parents friends would ask me things like 'what do your parents do'. Or talk about accountants as though everyone has one. It was all a big culture shock. I find it quite amusing now really, and we all rub along nicely.

[alexdgr8]

this is fascinating; thanks OP.

[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.

[fraddu]

I didn't realise how many people were "supported" by their parents. Even now I'm still surprised by people I know in their 30s/40s who have holidays paid for or money to help them move up the ladder.

[Travielkapelka]

I genuinely had no idea until I was in 6th form that some people didn’t have a dishwasher. I remember being completely shocked and thought the family must be really poor. (They weren’t). I also remember going to a house and asking where the rest of it was when I was about 8. No concept that people didn’t live in detached houses with drives. I also used to tell people we really were quite poor an explanation for why I didn’t get a car for my 17th birthday like all my friends. I was also convinced we must be very very poor as we never went skiing.

I led a very sheltered life which was interesting as my dad had grown up in absolute poverty

[jasminoide]

Just to show that the other half aren't all that, my dd had a tea party once and one of the invitees was very wealthy. I brought out ice cream and jelly at the end and said girl exclaimed "oooohhh, you've got a proper ice cream scoop!" as if it was something really special. It was a bog standard metal one, nothing fancy at all. I bumped into her mum at the school the following week and she thanked me for having her daughter and then said in hushed tones she heard we had a proper ice cream scoop and enquired where I had purchased it from the local carboot sale. It was most bizarre!

[BlackeyedSusan]

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

[InteriorDesignHell]

I remember meeting a girl at school who really did have a pony and hunted! My goodness, we had hamsters and gerbils and a dog and were the towniest of townies. On the bright side her mum was a GP and she was my partner in Biology and did all the yukky dissecting quite happily while I did the notes, so win-win!

[MyMummyHasGotABigBottom]

I struggle a bit more with my DD going to private school than I thought I would. Obv we’re v privileged and have a really different financial situation than the one when I was growing up. Although DH definitely had a (financially) easier upbringing than I did. V keen to make sure DD doesn’t get too caught up and maintains friendships etc outside of school but equally want her to be happy at school.

So paranoid the school mums think I’m common 😂

[Hardbackwriter]

I think the moment that I realised what a privileged little bubble I'd been in was when I was 19 and with a boyfriend and his phone rang and he looked at it, sighed, and said 'oh god, dad keeps ringing but I know he'll just ask to borrow money that he'll never pay back'. I was shocked, I just took it so for granted that your parents give you things and money I couldn't quite get my head around a father cadging money off his son.

[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 .

[tomorrowalready]

@Pissedoffneighbour22, I darned my tights when I was in my twenties. When I lived in a bedsit I had a set of one of each crockery and cutlery item as I had not grown up with the concept of entertaining others. So I just got everything I needed from Woolies and the slotted spoon only broke 2 weeks ago.

As I said I went to University as a mature student after working for some years and made friends with similar students. My divorced housemate had previously studied at catering college so she was a bit of a foodie and gave me my first tast of things like camembert, brie, aubergine, olive oil, vinagraitte (sp?) on salad, home made bread, pasta and yoghurt. Our other housemate was half Italian so I actually learned more about food and drink than my subject. We had a great whole food diet actually, even had wild garlic and figs growing in the garden.

My first day there I studied the handbook and noticed most of the lecturers' first degrees were 'Cantab'. Oh, that was a coincidence I said to another housemate, I thought of applying to Canterbury University. Nope, = Cambridge. Though one of the said lecturers did ask me how Chinese takeaways worked when he heard I had worked in hotels previously. I had never been in a Chinese restaurant or had a takeaway at that point. Most of the said lecturers were probably grammar school scholarship boys and girls in their day in fairness.

[tomorrowalready]

I was also surprised by the more middle class people's reliance on their parents even when they complained bitterly about the parents not understanding or interfering in their lives. One girl I knew had continual rows but would still visit her parents and come back with home made food and armfuls of flowers from the garden. Another boy I knew also complained and claimed to have cut off contact but still expected his parents to drive hundreds of miles to pick him and his stuff up at the end of term. I suggested he could find a bedsit to rent as I did to be met with incomprehension. The unacceptable shared bathroom and empty kitchen problem even in the '80s. Not to mention the rent though they could have got Housing Benefit in those days.

[IjustbelieveinMe]

I remember going to a friends house when I was around 10 and she was able to just help herself to an apple from the fruit bowl. We didn't have anything like that in my house, let alone being allowed to help ourselves to food in the first place. I remember being quite shocked and realising then how different her upbringing was to mine, it has always stayed with me.

[IjustbelieveinMe]

Also, when I saw other children with their own umbrellas I would think how lucky they were. It's weird how such small things like others owning an umbrella can make you feel so inadequate.

[sashh]

I worked in Oxford for a few years.

Some of the junior Drs / medical students had no idea about real life.

One couldn't understand why a mother brought 4 children with her to an appointment, she was a single mother and it was the school holidays. Junior Dr couldn't understand why she didn't have a nanny.

Another came desperately looking for a particular colleague because he had a patient who didn't speak English. He had no idea what language the patient spoke (Urdu) or what my colleague spoke (Gujerati).

[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.

[MrsSiba]

When I went to stay at a friend's house, I was always amazed that they would leave a lamp on overnight upstairs. We always switched lights off immediately after use.

[StCharlotte]

So I just got everything I needed from Woolies and the slotted spoon only broke 2 weeks ago.

I still have a colander I bought at Woolies when I left home... 37 years ago.

[tomorrowalready]

@StCharlotte, my metal spoon was nearly 40, it had served the purpose of fridge ice basher for the last few years. Not surprising the spoon and handle broke up. Having flashbacks now to the strange bedsit in Brighton where I had a kitchenette with cooker and sink in a big cupboard in the bedroom. Not to mention the weird bathroom habits of some of the tenants - hiding the post they had stolen behind the bath panel, taking the lock of the door for a start. Mentioning even less the three mysterious elderly tenants of the top floor who never knowingly used the bathroom or toilet. No definitely not mentioning that to the shared bathroom - rejecting daughter else thread. Or the adjoining bedsit dweller who had served time for manslaughter and had strangley insistent visitors and who spent a whole night trying to convince me he had cancer so I should give him one last ' pony' before he karked it. Or the basement dwellers with their fur-coat recycling business who disappeared overnight.

[thisisnotmyllama]

I had this one uni friend who was the son of some kind of very rich international businessman. He (my friend) was appalled one day when I bought a samosa from a stall and ate it walking along the street. This was ‘common’, apparently!

Same guy, packing to go for a two-week stay with relatives in their home country. He’d laid out 17 pairs of trousers on his bed, and I said ‘Why do you need all these? You’ve got more trousers than days you’re going to be there!’

He looked at me completely baffled and said ‘But I’ll need to change for dinner?’ like it was obvious.

[shamalidacdak]

I thought everyone had servants. I went on a date once and was in shock that he had no art on the walls. I thought all adults working menial jobs were just doing it until They either got degrees or proper jobs. Yep I led a sheltered life.

[EmmaGrundyForPM]

My dh had a very middle class upbringing and went to boarding school then to Cambridge Uni.

It wasn't until we had children that he had ever been inside a council house or HA property. Our dc went to the local state schools and had a healthy mix of friends from a range of background.

[RainyDay2020]

The moment I realised my Aunty and her family were a lot more well off than us is when we went for a visit and she gave us kids slices of fresh pineapple. Just as a snack.
I’d never seen a real pineapple let alone ate one, only ever had tinned.
I ate so much of it my tongue fizzed for an hour!