I thought of a book last week, as I sat in a waiting room with Mini Seymour.
The book in question is Class, by Jilly Cooper, a satirical observation of the strange hierarchies that existed in society in Cooper’s heyday.
What prompted this ponderation? Well, a lot of things.
Firstly, the venue. It was one of those really posh dentists, you know the type. An Edwardian house with massive rooms, high ceilings and ornate plaster decor round the light fittings. The front reception room had been knocked through so that, through the gap you could see a (faux?) marble counter behind which two smart ladies sat at applemacs; efficient, polite yet a little.. aloof.
In the front room were several armchairs, but also an odd, modern, cream boucle lozenge sofa (from Loaf, perhaps?) upon which lurked two fabric balls. I will not call them cushions. They were ornaments.
On the coffee table sat a selection of big, expensive hardback books: one on trainers (which was really cool actually) and another on film, as I recall. There was a rug, I think, but maybe that was draped stylishly on a chair, and there was artwork -really, really interesting, niche artwork: massive caricatures of people’s faces – portraits, with abstract features and lots (and I mean lots!) of incredibly white teeth.
The place fascinated me. I gawped in awe.
We were the second people to enter the room, and as we did so, I remember feeling conspicuous in my jeans. This was no ordinary doctors’ surgery-type waiting room ( a lot of dental practices no longer conform to the NHS budget restrictions, it seems), but it was a waiting room nevertheless and you can’t talk normally in them – it feels taboo. So Mini Seymour and I conversed a little, quietly with each other. Me, self-consciously, her, not so much. But we soon fell quiet, it seemed to be the right course of action, and then I reverted to my standard pastime of (surreptitiously) people-watching whilst hiding behind the world’s most comprehensive shoe catalogue. The waiting room was filling up.
Before long, there was four pairs of humans in that space. All there for a similar reason, all with things in common, yet with our individual stories unknown. And all I could think of was that here we were, four middle class mummies, all with our offspring, looking to seek help and advice for our children’s middle class teeth.
The similarities were clear. Or so I thought. And maybe because we were in a well-to-do area of Guildford, no less, I was making massive assumptions. But there we all were, middle-aged, middle-class women, sitting alongside our middle-class charges, all in the privileged position of being able to access dental care, and lucky to be able to afford the time and the means of getting to this very exclusive facility. The charges, all girls and all of the age that makes them likely to have middle-aged mummies, had similarities amongst them, too. All in a variation of a school uniform. All with long shoulder length hair. All clearly clean, presentable and outwardly functioning.
I marvelled silently to myself as I pondered the demographic I seem to belong to.
However, looking around in that room, after assuming the similarities, I started to notice the differences. The things that do not make us interchangeable. The obvious differences.
Mini Seymour, for example, was the only child in there wearing, to my shame, Nike Air Forces with her school uniform. I was led to believe that many schools have given in to this ridiculous convention. But it appears that in Guildford and in that particular waiting room, she was in the minority. The other girls had proper leather brogues, polished and smart. There was my Mini Seymour with her newly pierced ears and her shortened skirt, looking decidedly less smart that the others. She fidgeted a lot, too. Lolled on the lozenge sofa, picked up and cuddled one of the decorative balls, and then, yes, opened up her phone to peruse SnapbolloX, or whatever its called these days.
Yes. My darling daughter was the chav in the room.
It is amazing how many emotions you can feel during a ten minute stint in a posh waiting room. Mirth started it all off, as we sat in our own little bubbles, underneath the massively gawdy, abstract toothy portraits. I was silently laughing at human nature – how we conform, and how we have gone from cave-dwellers to oral aesthetics in the space of a few thousand years. Curiosity then crept in, as I looked at the mummies in the room and wondered where they hailed from. I assumed they all had big detached houses in the Surrey Hills , with unlimited central heating and cleaners. Then I scolded myself as I realised that you never know people’s stories. For all I know, one of them may have lived in a shed, or in a converted bus. Were they widows? Gender atypical? Carers? Were they mummies at all..? Or sisters? Teachers? Kidnappers..? I digress.
It was none of my business.
The Class thing is a funny one. And I often ponder it. It is such a weird dynamic, human society. Here we are, all plodding along in a world where there are queens and kings and presidents and aristocracy and also, paupers. Fortunes change, social mobility occurs yet there is definitely a class system lurking. I did think that Jilly Cooper’s book on class was no longer relevant, but now I am not so sure.
Ultimately, each of us has our own story. We mostly don’t live in an upstairs-downstairs world any more, where gentlemen can’t work, and only staff know how to wash up. That is a good thing. But society is very varied. Is that a class system? I don’t know. I’d like to ask Jilly what she thinks about it, but I can’t. Tragically, she died a few days after my ponderings in that waiting room.
What I will say though is that being in the waiting room at all, whatever class Mini Seymour and I belong to (lower middle, upper higher working urban country class perhaps), is a privilege that not everyone in the world can access. The NHS doesn’t discriminate, rich or poor, chav or no; all children with gappy teeth are entitled to this amazing service.
For which I am incredibly grateful!
Rest in Peace Jilly. The classiest of them all.
But what about assumptions I was making!
resolved to get book
Mini Seymour lolled, deffo looked the least posh
And now Jilly is no more.
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