Free Class by Jilly Cooper

Teale’s child will be constantly pulled up for some real or imagined coarseness of speech or enunciation. It’s so important to be ‘well-spoken’.
    Middle-class children put cherry stones on the side of their plate with their spoon and chant, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief’. Upper-class children conceal the journey from mouth to plate with curled fist and say ‘Army, Navy, Law, Divinity, Independent, Medicine, Trade’. The working classes only eat cherries out of tins of fruit salad with the stones already removed.
    Children’s parties are a sophisticated form of torture. The upper classes tend to give parties just for nannies and children, mid-week, and ending at six so as not to involve the husbands. No drink is offered to collecting parents.
    Nanny Stow-Crat couldn’t stop Fiona inviting Tracey Nouveau-Richards as they sit next to each other at nursery school, but Caroline says she’s not having those ghastly parents in the house: ‘They never know when to leave and once through the door, they might make a habit of dropping in.’
    Samantha Upward, being very democratic, encourages Zacharias to invite all his little state school friends who run absolutely wild all over the newly planted perennials that were once going to make an herbaceous border. They refuse to play party games and drive the conjuror into hysterics by explaining in loud voices how every trick is done.
    Mr Nouveau-Richards, who feels that only the best is good enough for my Tracey-Diane, employs Searcy’s to do the catering, Dick Emery for the cabaret, gives each child a Tiger Tiger doll’s house as a going-away present, and shows the premiere of Star Wars II after the interval. All the surrounding middle-class mums would like to refuse, but daren’t because they’d get such flak from their children.
    The upper-middle merrytocracy mix drink, nannies and mothers, thereby making the children’s party a much more jolly occasion. Parties in Putney are rather like singles bars with separated fathers turning up to collect children and meeting pretty divorced mothers and getting nose to nose over the Soave and the hassle of bringing up children on one’s own.

3   THE NANNY
    ‘The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be the inmates of our dwellings or guardians of our children’s minds, and persons.’
    Charlotte Brontë.
    Anyone studying the English class system will have noticed certain similarities between the extreme upper and lower classes; toughness, xenophobia, indifference to public opinion, passion for racing and gambling, fondness for plain speaking and plain untampered food. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny , says the reason is that the ruling classes for the last two hundred years have been brought up almost entirely by working-class nannies, their parents abdicating all responsibility.
    ‘With monthly nurses, nannies, prep school and public school,’ admitted one mother, ‘it’s almost as though we put them in care.’
    Certainly one of the reasons why the aristocracy has always notched up so many marriages has been because thay never had any boring middle-class worries about how it might affect the children. Nanny would always be there to look after them and provide continuity.
    Working for the great, nannies took on their own snobbisms, not unlike suburban crones working in Knightsbridge dress shops for £50 a week who make you feel bitterly ashamed of your scuffed heels and the fact that you can’t afford £500 for a little black dress.
    There was a group of nannies who ruled Hyde Park.
    ‘Are you a titled mummy’s nanny?’ said one gorgon, when a newly employed nanny sat down beside her.
    The new nanny shook her head.
    ‘Well I’m afraid,’ said the gorgon, ‘that this bench is reserved for titled mummies’ nannies.’
    Until a few years ago nanny was a fixture in the