If someone had asked me what I wanted to be when I was a child, I’d have said middle class. I mean, I wouldn’t have said precisely that, but I wanted music lessons and a piano in our hall. I wanted foreign holidays. I wanted horse-riding lessons. I wanted to not live in a council estate where my brother’s friends, sons of the headmaster at our Catholic primary school, weren’t allowed to come and play because it was “too rough.” More than anything else, I didn’t want to be looked down on by people who thought they were better than me just because their family had more money than mine and lived in a different area.
I wanted us to have central heating because my friends who lived in the nicer part of town complained it was always freezing at my house. I wanted a car and a telephone. We ticked one of those off when my mum passed her test and bought an Opal Kadett for fifty quid from a kid on our estate. It had go-faster stripes and alloy wheels, and it was so old and cronky that one of the doors eventually fell off at school drop-off. This is one of the least embarrassing things my mother has done to me, in a life-time of persevering. There was also a pink fluffy slipper incident, and an Anglican doxological clanger at class Mass that is still too painful to fully discuss. I can still feel the cringe I experienced when the priest said to my mother, as she blithely carried on praying out loud (loudly) when everyone else had stopped: “Ah. I see you are not one of us.”
Feeling embarrassed of my background - and the underlying, accompanying whisper of shame -is something I’ve felt all my life but most acutely since I joined the ordained ranks of the Church of England. It’s something I try to squash down and suppress, but like sauerkraut it keeps bubbling back to the surface, not pretty to look at and omitting an unpleasant odour. Is this coming from me, a soggy chip on my shoulder, a feeling of deep-seated insecurity that I project onto others? Probably. But it’s also, undeniably, a product of too much time spent trying to belong in an upper-middle class institution, which is as alien to me as our council estate was to our headmaster.
British people are inescapably shaped by class, the boundaries of which are more complex and opaque than ever, but despite it cropping up in the national conversation obsessively, we’re still hopeless at talking about it. I suspect it’s our Britishness (if I can generalise for a moment) that makes it so awkward. The conversation stalls between people who want to talk about it to help narrow the gulf between us, and people who feel unable to talk about it for fear they’ll be characterised as too privileged to have a stake in it. They must take a conversational backseat, or worse, invent or exaggerate a lowered status to prove that they get it. And because I’m British, I hesitate to talk about some of the things that matter to me because I don’t like to make people feel uncomfortable.
I’ve really grown to dislike reductive conversations which boil everything down to privilege. It’s a simplistic, nuance-free way to talk about human beings, which fails utterly to encapsulate the layers of people’s lives and the experiences which shape them. To give an example, my husband is a middle class, privately educated white guy who lives with a feisty wife and two equally feisty daughters. His identities would appear to give him huge privilege and yet he’s too oppressed by all the feistiness to exercise it. On the other hand, he’s also the son of immigrants. How many points does he notch up for that? Does he get to speak or should we keep telling him to sit down? I don’t know, it’s so confusing!
This is partly why billionaires feel the need to pretend they’re just like the little people because they had Sky tv, or they honestly do love watching the Crystal Palace play association soccer ball. Look: I don’t care how you were raised, what school you went to or what your father does for a living. Just don’t lie about it.
But at least telling porkies to distort the past is an acknowledgement - albeit a tacit one - that someone is aware of how their background might be perceived. I remember the first Church of England event I ever went to at a retreat house, where I came home shuddering like Haley Joel Osmont in the Sixth Sense, telling my husband, “I saw posh people. They didn’t know they were posh. They were walking around thinking they were regular people.”
I feel equally irritated by the performative spitting contest which is the Working Class Olympics, a competition where every single person you speak to wants to claim a working class identity and to compete in who had it the worst, each round getting increasingly egregious like a Monty Python sketch:
“Council house? Pah! You were lucky. I lived in a shed.”
“Spare me your shed privilege! I had nothing but a small rock to shelter under.”
All this was on my mind over the past two days as I spent time in that flagship of elitism, Cambridge University (St John’s college.) The neatly trimmed lawns and immaculately kept grounds, as far removed from the dirty, concrete place where I studied as you can possibly get. The Buttery, a warm and inviting refectory as luxurious as the cafe in Fortnums, where students have all their meals cooked and prepared for them every day. The Bridge of Sighs, aptly, perfectly named. Well done. The giant, ornately carved doorways! The flying buttresses! The candle-lit Great Hall, framed by oil paintings and dark oak panelling. The jaw-dropping chapel, with its intricately tiled marble floor and friezes. The whole place reeking, dripping with money and privilege. Annoyingly, I absolutely bloody loved it. LOOK AT IT.
A place so beautiful and literally awe-inspiring that I couldn’t help but feel sad and ask myself, what would this have done to nurture faith in me, if I could have come here as an eighteen year old? Would I have encountered God in this wonderful place of prayer if I’d been given the chance to hear the words of the liturgy sung in the city where Cranmer himself studied? There’s probably another piece in here about how important it is to have beautiful Anglican chapels in all universities, but I don’t want to digress. Being there answered a question in my heart which asked: am I, even after everything that’s happened, still an Anglican? And the answer to that is a resounding yes. For my sins, which is good because that’s the whole damn point.
Yes, the Church of England is flawed and is a deeply imperfect example of the kingdom of God. It’s one leg making up the three of the stool of our nation, alongside crown and parliament. Of course elitism is built into it, but so too are the rest of the people of God. In churches up and down the land, faithfully serving, worshipping and witnessing. The church belongs to them too. And while I might not currently allow myself to claim it, for the pain remains too great, it still belongs to me.
At dinner in Cambridge on Monday evening, I sat next to a wonderful woman who was as different to me as it’s possible to be. She was much older than me (almost the same age as my mum) and came from a completely different background. Privately educated, she’d led, by her own admission, a privileged life, but as we talked and shared confidences with one another, we bonded as human beings, united by our mutual experience of a particular type of suffering. I had a number of encounters like this with other people, all of them special and all of them holy. I didn’t think about the C word at any point during those encounters, because in those moments we were connected souls lifting our hearts up, and God’s spirit was with us.
One of my tutors at theology college spoke about privilege in such a way that I’ve never forgotten. He posed a question one of his own university tutors had once asked him (at Cambridge, obviously). The question was this:
In what ways are you privileged?
There have been times in my life when I’ve found it easy to feel victimised and oppressed. To feel the sting of difference and to let it consume me with bitterness. But this is not the way of the gospel and I am nobody’s victim. We’re called to relationship before we’re called to anything else. I don’t ever want to forget that. The church has given me a lot of pain, but it’s also given me something which no other place has ever managed to do; it’s given me relationships which cut across class boundaries. If that’s not the good news in action, then I don’t know what is.
Which brings us back to the question: in what ways are you privileged? For a million different reasons, I know I’m the luckiest woman on earth. I’m running the race set before me, and I get to do it whilst wearing pretty awesome shoes. I was raised by a fierce and funny family who loved me unconditionally, showed me how to talk to anyone, and taught me how to hold my head up high no matter what. They are my shoes. Because of them, I can walk into any room and feel like I deserve to be there. And that? That’s privilege.
I was a comprehensive school Cambridge undergrad. I'm sad I couldn't be there for the conference 🏥🛌🏼. My faith widened and grew and flourished in Cambridge and I am SO grateful for everything I experienced there. But I was always an outsider in so many ways. I get the tension! And I loved it too. Unapologetically,because it was gift and privilege. It was my Anglican (and ecumenical ) formation too ( I used to read at EP in GSM when the wonderful Michael Mayne was vicar (yes I'm old)) I learnt the difference between The Round Church and LSM, I made my home at St Barnabas before it was huuuge and I went to Fisher House for Exposition just to further widen my tiny mind. TBTG
I was there too at the F of P...it was lovely in so many ways...