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?

In a good area which has spaces for those out of area who cannot afford house prices in their normal catchment area...

We've got a lottery system for secondary schools in Brighton, not sure how well it works though as my DC are younger.

I was technically poor growing up but the differences between me and my more MC uni mates didn't really hit me until suddenly everyone could afford to do an internship or a masters straight after uni and I had to go back home to my parents for a year.

@RampantIvy

The sense of failure is bollocks

It isn't. Loads of 11 year olds were written off under the old 11+ system.

They weren’t written off. They were streamed. At a time when only 5% of the population went to university grammar schools were there to prepare the most academic to apply for those places.

For many poorer parents the fear of cost of a Grammar School place put them off taking up places. Help may have been available but parents wouldnt necessarily be aware of it and even then may still have worried about help being withdrawn.

Also with a school leaving age of 15 until the mid 70s young people would be expected to leave school as soon as they could and get jobs to contribute to the household income. An academic education would not have been seen to be useful in achieving this.

Just to pick up on the point of the cost of uniform and the secondary modern having a uniform too.

My blazer at the grammar in 1980 was 4 times the cost of the high school.

@cariadlet

The quiet place to study and plenty of encouragement are more than many kids from really deprived backgrounds would have had so even though your dd is clearly very bright and although she wasn't tutored, she still had considerable advantages. I would guess that she also grew up in a house full of books and with parents who talked to her a lot, both of which would also have given her a headstart in her education.

All true, but these are not things that the State can compensate for. If anything at least a grammar offers the chance of quieter classrooms with less low level disruption, which is also very much relevant to your point. Not to mention perhaps the chance to escape peer pressure or a prevailing culture that scorns educational success/aspirations.

I've been thinking about this thread. My family was not well off but we did live in a big house in an expensive area. We did have a cleaner.

My parents were socially conscious so we were always aware of families needing help with food or childcare, mental health etc. So I was comfortable with wealth and also aware that lots of people had very little.

Tbh it wasn't until I took a contract at a business just two suburbs from my home, at age 40, that I had my biggest wake up call. The number of families we dealt with living in abject poverty, constantly short of food and basics, serious health problems, squalid living conditions... it changed me - and made me realise what a privileged life I'd had. At that point I was a lone parent living contract to contract but I could see v clearly how much more comfortable my life was than most of the clients. No amount of budgeting or "hard work" was going to improve their lot, they were so deep in poverty that only a miracle could drag them out.

It changed me and I now have very little patience for middle class wittering.

@Shedbuilder

What a nice sounding man your friend's dad was. I doubt they laughed at you. It's nice when people with money behave with grace and charm.

Too often people equate having money with 'posh'. Definitely not the case!

"I then mentioned having to stand up when an adult entered the classroom and only sit down when told to, and the teachers wearing academic gowns"

A friend had to stand up for teachers in her very normal state school in the 90s. It was already seen as old fashioned by then.

When we lived in London, there was not one state comprehensive school in our Borough that offered three separate sciences, a choice of MFL or a classical language. The only schools that did were in neighbouring boroughs and strongly religiously affiliated. There was a grammar school within spit but neither the boys nor girls school were particularly geared up to linguists so not right for ours.

We were fortunate and paid.

"Gosh your Home Ec teacher was a patronising arsehole! I am more than a decade older than you and my grandparents knew what Chinese takeaway was! Although back then it was largely limited to egg fried rice, prawn toast, prawn crackers, sweet and sour pork balls and beef chow mein or chop suey (Not all at once, but any of those).

They knew what curry was too! Although we always had ours with mango chutney, and never had popadoms."

I'm a similar age to dappled and my grandparents would have no clue about any of those things so the home ec teacher would have been right in my case. They had fish and chips, but they never had any other takeaway.

I still now wouldn't be able to name something off a Chinese takeaway menu without seeing the menu...

We live in London and my DC went to a state comprehensive (not religious) that offered three separate sciences, a choice of languages, and classical languages (twilight subjects).

@bananafish

Genuinely didn't understand that you could be 17 and not have passed your driving test and have a car. Or not know about/been to point to point, spend winter holidays skiing or go to school and know your classmates' brothers/sisters at the other Public school.

My muuuuch older self looks back and cringes wholeheartedly at my lack of understanding.

Although, to be fair, I can't give my children that life and I wish I could.

And you still think point to point needs no explanation. I googled, but the first few results were about telecommunications until I saw one entry about a horse race.

" I never went shopping to choose them. I had school uniform bought for me aged 11, and was wearing the same set aged 16, massively worn out and undersized."

Oh dear. I'm surprised nobody at school noticed and helped out.
I felt bad for myself because I had to wear the hand-me-downs of some overweight girls at my school and had a hand-knitted jumper for a few years instead of the factory ones everyone else had.

I got new uniform when needed and that's made me always sceptical of those articles in newspapers showing the cost of bringing up a child because they always assume a whole new uniform every year.

I had the same skirt the whole way through. It was bought enormous and my granny took a panel out and remade it when I was in first year and then as I grew it was let down and the panel added back in. There was a shade difference. I was bullied. It was awful.

"In my family we only bought items as needed, and most of the time they weren't needed as there was always some old-fashioned hand-me-down from a better-off family that would do the job perfectly well. What we did get new was mostly from the market."

That was pretty normal in the 80s and didn't necessarily mean you were particularly poor. I had hand me downs most of my life and also massive bags of jumble sale clothes bought by an elderly relative. I'm still a bit traumatised by the fear of own clothes day at school and I think my parents could have afforded some new clothes for us, but just didn't want to.
I had much older cousins so I suppose my hand-me-downs were much more old fashioned that if I'd had a sister a couple of years older...

I had my brother’s clothes. 😳

My poor dd grew like the clappers between 9 and 11 and I therefore bought her school uniform a size or two too big. She was 5'3" when she joined. She is 5'4" at 23. She never grew into it. It would probably still be on the generous side.

TBF gwenyfhar I'd imagine everyone to know what a point to point was.

Never heard of a point to point. Still no wiser

"My Mum taught me that when one leg if your tights laddered you should cut off the laddered leg and then keep the good one, still attached to the body bit, until the same happened with another pair of same-coloured tights. You then wore the two legs with a “double gusset”, which had the extra benefit of keeping your tummy held in grin. We weren’t poor, but she did not like waste."

Hilarious. Especially if they were not exactly the same colour tone.

@EspressoDoubleShot

Grammar schools are free public school education for the mc Grammar schools never addressed social mobility for the wc, they’ve always been skewed to the mc. Yes a minority of wc kids broke through and out but they were the minority. It’s a popular myth that’s gained traction, that grammar schools promote mobility for the wc. Sadly not

I also think that in the heyday of grammar schools there was social mobility happening anyway. There were new jobs appearing in the 50s/60s that didn't exist before and society and the economy were changing. The people who managed to do well in those grammar schools would have done anyway from a comprehensive.

I know this isn't class related, but I can't get over people using taxis. I just think of them as a huge extravagance even though we could afford them. A taxi from ours into town is £25, so a round trip for an evening out is £50. I just cannot bring myself to pay that sort of money and am amazed when friends talk of getting a taxi as though its an everyday thing.

"And no system can be completely ‘fair’, some parents are poor parents, some people have worse physical health, some people are more intelligent some are less intelligent, some are lazy some are motivated! There is no way an educational system can flatten those differed out."

Not entirely, no, but some systems are obviously better than others. Selective schools increase inequality.

@Gwenhwyfar

"My Mum taught me that when one leg if your tights laddered you should cut off the laddered leg and then keep the good one, still attached to the body bit, until the same happened with another pair of same-coloured tights. You then wore the two legs with a “double gusset”, which had the extra benefit of keeping your tummy held in grin. We weren’t poor, but she did not like waste."

Hilarious. Especially if they were not exactly the same colour tone.

Can I just say, this is an actual genius idea and I wish I had thought of this myself.

How much frigging money have I spent on tights in my lifetime!

@cakeseeker

Never heard of a point to point. Still no wiser

I'd never heard of point to point either until I moved down to Sussex as an adult and made friends by joining the local hunt sab group.

They're amateur horse racing meetings which, around here at least, are either run by, sponsored by or have very close links with local hunts.

@Iwastheparanoidex

I had my brother’s clothes. 😳

I had some of my quite older male cousin's clothes (they fit me, they had been kept in storage for maybe 7y)