Yesterday I read this article which explained how independent/public/private/fee-paying schools in Britain try to justify their charitable status. I doubt it will be surprising that I didn't agree with its contents. Then last night I went to a gig at the Royal Festival Hall. The turnout was pretty broad, fairly white, but a wide age-range had turned out to see 19-year-old folk starlet Laura Marling perform with her posse of other rising folk starlets. I have had Laura's album for about a year having bought it on the strength of the 30-second snippets on iTunes and its Mercury Prize nomination. And I really like it. She has a beautiful voice and sings with clarity and honesty. It's not the world's best album, but given her age, it's an impressive debut. I was looking forward to seeing her live. The lights dimmed, and a large screen lit up at the back of the stage. Footage filmed by Laura showed her interviewing some of the other musicians in her group of comrades. Everyone was attractive and supportive, full of mutual love and respect. It would all have been simply wonderful, except I was too busy bristling uncontrollably: the accents from the people on screen were as Sloaney as Prince Charles drinking Earl Grey in a Barbour, standing on a croquet lawn with a black Lab. I couldn't bear it. The singer I'd come to see wasn't a carefree hippie - she was a privileged toff. A privileged toff just like me. I was furious.
I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Eton. This isn't a recent problem but lately I've noticed it getting worse. The Glastocrush has just moved in from the decidedly gritty Uxbridge Road to a friend's place in Holland Park. The houses are stunning, the delis are exclusive, the pubs are full of well-behaved Harrovians, the pavements are wide, the flaneurs are carrying Alexander McCall Smith, the dogs are not bred to kill and people turn their James Blunt CDs down after 10pm so as not to wake the baby. It couldn't be more different to my hood. Most people would, I'm sure, secretly love to live somewhere so luxurious and safe. What's not to like? But for some reason, it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I can't work out why. Then the other night, when I met a guy my age who had never had a job, instead of being jealous, I instinctively went on the attack. And when someone talked about rolling back the rug in their parents' house at Christmas time and doing some reeling, I found myself panicking.
What is going on? I, after all, was privately educated, at vast expense to my parents. I know the Dashing White Sargeant. I can hold my own at a dinner party. To my distinct irritation, I don't sound or look remotely out of place in Fulham. I've been to the Feathers, the 4th of June, Boujis and Cartier Polo (although admittedly the last was as a waitress). I know not to hold a knife like a pen, not to butter the bread all at once, to tip the soup bowl away from me and pass the port clockwise. I write thank you letters in fountain pen. Several people I know are friends with members of the royal family. Despite all attempts to adopt a more estuary twang every now and then, on the whole, my rich, plummy accent would sound fantastic on Watch With Mother. So how can I be negative about posh people when I've had exactly the same advantages, when I am one of them? As a result of my spoon-fed education, I received good exam results and went to a good university where I got a good degree - all in all, a good start in life. Spending seven of the most formative years of one's life (11-18) at a small boarding school means that you make close friends - I've just looked at my phone's contacts list, and out of our year of around 50 girls, I still have the phone numbers of 20, and see most of them regularly, just under fourteen years after we left. I am incredibly grateful for those friends. And there's no doubt that, while my schooldays were occasionally miserable, and the education I received was questionable, I did have moments when I had a brilliant time.
Still, if I could ban private education, I would. As discussed when I was loving my politics course, I believe strongly in equality of opportunity, and I'm fairly clear that private education simply doesn't allow that. I can't change my past, but I can state my belief that, in an ideal future, all of Britain's schools would be run by the state. I am convinced that only with the intervention of parents will schools improve, and the more rich, powerful parents who choose to withdraw their children from the state system, the more that state schools will decline.
I guess that, while I am not exactly ashamed of the fact that I had a private education, I want people to know that I don't believe it is fair, or right, and that I do not support inequality. And I guess that, while I think it's fine to have been to public school, what is not fine is to act as if the undeniable privilege and advantage that comes from that experience is a birthright. Basically - I'm fine with toffs as long as they are, like me, slightly uncomfortable with their toffness. Revelling in the toffness is, to me, a bit gross. Never making an effort to leave the bubble is, to me, a bit gross. Whether it's the yummy mummies in Holland Park, the chummy guffaws from the men's bar at a centuries-old golf club, the chattering at the organic farmers' market in the Oval or the clink of gin glasses from inside a gated community in South Africa, there's something that makes me cringe about this unspoken preference for PLUs.
I know, I know - people will always be different and birds of a feather will always flock together. And the hypocrisy of me saying 'Love all the people' while saying 'I don't like toffs' isn't lost on me. I guess what I'm trying to say is, things aren't great now. The divides are massive. Let's not exacerbate them by saying 'My four year old's education is worth more than yours.' Different is not better or worse. It's just different. Pitbulls aren't worse than spaniels. Garage music isn't worse than Mozart. Cannabis isn't worse than yoga. Everyone lives their own life. Judgment is wrong - right? You can't live in London and ignore the poverty, the gangs, the total hopelessness of many of your neighbours. You can't live in a rural village in your gorgeous converted farmhouse and pretend that there's not shit going down all around you. Well, you can. You can be an ostrich. But that seems so sad, so final. It's giving up. And I don't want to give up. Surely it would be preferable if we worked at this together. If we can't send our kids to the same schools, then what chance do we have?
That said, my friend once told me that she was all up for state education for her daughter until she looked round her local primary schools, one private, one state, and said the difference was so palpable as to be horrific and made her do everything in her power to find the extra thousands she needed to send her daughter to the private primary. You can be a liberal all you want, she seemed to be saying, but once you become a mother, everything will change. So, like her, I reserve the right to be a complete and utter hypocrite.
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