It wasn’t just luck that steered the Guardian columnist to Oxford and into a media career ... She reflects on the subtle mechanics of class (and an early encounter with a naked future PM)
hildren know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know.
To live a well-heeled life on the left is to live with inevitable hypocrisy, with good intentions destined to fall short of ideals The truth is, the Oxford scholarship exam was designed to reward people of exactly my background and journalistic state of mind But now when I think about it again, probably that extra help from a great comprehensive teacher wasn’t pure luck. What if I’d been a working-class O-level failure, who would have bothered to see if I was worth a second chance? Mr Stedman Jones may have picked on me for special coaching because he knew of my family’s literary and academic background and just assumed I must have an inherited talent hidden away somewhere, though I had nothing much to show for it.
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