In the best circles

PERSONAL COLUMN NIGEL NICOLSON

During a prolonged governors' meeting at a boys' school, my eye wandered to an aphorism

framed on the headmaster's wall: 'It is better to run straight than move in the best circles.' Neat. It had a Kipling ring. Irreproachable as a maxim for the rugger field, I wondered whether it was'true about life.

A few months earlier I had discussed this very subject with the senior girls of another school. Their school was smarter than the boys'

school. Full boarding, full fee-paying. They were in no doubt that they formed part of one

of the best juvenile circles, but they were not quite happy about it -So rounded was their circle, so exclusive, that they wondered whether they would ever escape from the jolly merry- go-round on which their parents had launched them so impulsively. To be on it was fun; to get off would soon become essential, 'if we are to have a fair start in life.' I was amused by the unconscious paradox of the phrase. They

loved their school, but they would not send their daughters there. 'We are the last, genera- tion,' they said solemnly. I tried to reassure them that what their parents were buying for them was opportunity, not exclusivity, and that when they left nobody would care tuppence what school they had been to; all that mattered was what sort of people they had become. They were not convinced. They would be labelled 'snobs.'. So we discussed the nature of snob- bishness, and I began by interrogating them.

'If a girl came to lunch at home, and used the expression "bound to be found out," would you catch your brother's eye if she mismanaged her vowels?' Yes."If a boy's clothes were shabby, would you hold it against him?"No, only if they were dirty as well.' If your uncle took you to the theatre, and you found that he had booked seats in the gallery, would you feel let down?' 'Yes.' So you are conscious of class, but rather ashamed of it?' They looked at each other. Then a dark, serious girl spoke for them all. 'Yes, in much the same way that your generation [sizing me up] has a built-in colour-prejudice, but tries to conceal it. We have no colour-prejudice, and our children won't have any class-prejudice. But I admit that we do, only we try to hide it.' I thought these intelligent, honest answers.

Would their parents be equally honest? What has happened during the last thirty years is that nobody any longer claims membership of the upper class. It has disappeared from the ratings. Prewar, the parents of these school- girls would have referred to 'people of our sort, if you know what I mean,' and the de- scription would have been acknowledged by a quick nod in recognition of the immensely complex attitudes, symbols, privileges and taboos that the phrase implied. At one time, a glance across a railway carriage was enough to identify a member of the clan. Shoes, hair- cut, tie, accessories like watch and wallet, all Proclaimed it, even the stranger's posture in his seat. Years of ultra-smooth shaving, good eating and annual exposure to a kinder climate, had produced a best-circle face. Such a man Would have resented intrusion by outsiders. He felt proud and jealous of his status. Today his sort is not so immediately identifiable, and he is defensive about it. No longer does he

claim a natural affinity between the upper and the working class, the squire-gamekeeper rela- tionship, such as still exists between those who get firsts at university and those who get thirds, to the exclusion of the seconds. The upper-class man with no achievement to bolster his name feels out on a limb, and he finds it chilling.

As a self-assertive and influential group, the upper class has ceased to exist, but an upper

class hasn't. So much wider and deeper are the conduits that now lead from one class-basin to another that class itself has become a sub- ject that can be spoken of only with the most careful restraint. Generally we pretend that it does not exist. Any visiting American would assure you that it does. The Wilder world, the Dale world, the Alf Garnett world, have dis- tinct corporeal life. But now it is possible, as never before, to be at ease in all of them.

Crossman's good-natured insults are as accept- able in a pub as in a club. The Frost voice has become an English more standard than the Queen's. In Savile Row, girls' dresses erupt from basements more glittering than the tailors' antique fitting-rooms above. There is no need to multiply examples. The signs of the happy revolution are familiar to us all. The point is that although access up and down is easier, the structure remains the same. All that has happened is that the top storey has been

replaced by a penthouse, an aristocracy of birth and wealth by an aristocracy of achieve- ment, or (if you can face the word) by an elite.

We hate the word because for so long it was synonymous with the upper class itself. Our self-consciousness about class-consciousness has led us to throw out with the snobbery some of the values on which snobbery was based. The formation of an elite is an inevit- able, desirable, actual and constantly self- renewing process. In all nations in all history a small group of men and women have acquired positions of power and influence by birth or their own exertions. One of the ways in which they recognise each other is by a common stan- dard of taste and intelligence, which becomes in effect the 'language' in which they converse.

They judge others by that standard, and their judgment will be often cruel. Its outward sym- bols (as in the Edwardian upper class, but with a quite different emphasis) are possessions, friendships, pleasures and forms of speech.

If an acquaintance greets you with the words, `Long time no see,' or tells you. 'They're send- ing me to Paris for my sins, when he is secretly proud of it, he betrays himself. He does not know the 'language.' which means much more than the use of the correct, or avoidance of the incorrect, words of the moment. If you find a flight of mass-produced china geese streaming across his sitting-room wall; if his holidays are noisily gregarious; if he name-drops, or repeats confidences for effect; all these things are indications that he has not noticed, or does not care, how greatly refinement can add to the pleasure of life. Re- finement is another unmentionable word, even by those who practise it. These distinctions, because they were once loaded with class over- tones, can no longer be openly acknowledged. and are therefore losing their bite. Some of these examples are trivial in themselves, and much more goes to the making of a man's character than his taste in ornaments or holi- days. But though many people choose their friends on such evidence of their personalities as this, they are called snobs if they admit it.

A soldier told me that during the war, when he was a junior officer on guard at Chequers, he once asked Churchill if he knew the chair- man of the firm which supplied the house with whisky. 'I do not expect to be on terms of familiarity with my wine-merchant,' Churchill replied. Most people would now agree that this was a snobbish remark. I cannot hear any present-day Prime Minister saying such a thing, though one, or possibly two, since Churchill might have thought it. I was shocked by the story, but not quite so shocked as my friend. Churchill may have grown bored by the young man's priggishness, and shocked him deliber- ately. Or, assuming that his remark was in- tended seriously, he was saying, brutally enough, that one must be as selective between people as between objects or occupations, and that selection always implies snap judgments and guesswork. A wine-merchant might be a man of wit, culture and profound understand- ing, but the probability is that if he possessed these qualities in the highest degree he would not have remained a wine-merchant. It was not the tradesman in him that made him un- acceptable to Churchill, but his lack of any higher ambition. It was an intellectual, not a moral or social, judgment.

By such methods of rough-and-ready justice have best circles always been formed. 'Best' in the sense of intellectually most adventurous, which is what distinguishes them from an Establishment. The best circles are non-snob, non-upper class. Breeding and money scarcely count. What count arc the intellectual qualities of learning, knowledge, experience and sus- tained mental effort; the ethical qualities of honesty, tolerance, courage and generosity; the social quality of companionableness. Notice, too, that 'circles' are in the plural. An elite will always be composed of people with these attributes. In other ways, they may differ widely from each.other, for the best circles are eccen- tric. The schoolgirls were right; sooner or later they must get off their social merry-go-round. But the headmaster's aphorism is meaningless today, for it states an antithesis which does not exist in fact.