Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain. Harry Wallop

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ marry Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, but he ended up with Miss Middleton. Who knows? Maybe he thought it might damage the Windsor brand to associate it with a triple barrel.

      The method of your birth is another key marker of class, though again it reflects far more on the parents than on the babies, who clearly couldn’t care two hoots if they were born at home with a doula, in a busy NHS hospital or in a thick-carpeted private one. But, boy, does it matter to the small number that avoid the NHS option. A mere 0.5 per cent of the population is born in a private hospital, and it is almost entirely for the status-enhancing comfort that it brings to the parents. The two most famous options are the Portland, a private hospital in London, where all of the Spice Girls, Jemima Khan and the Duchess of York had their respective children, and the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Paddington, where Princes William and Harry were born. Only a handful of parents announcing the birth of their children in The Times or Telegraph waste precious words (you pay by the word) on detailing the location of the delivery. But a disproportionate number of those giving birth in the Lindo Wing or the Portland like to tell you so. I suppose if you have spent many thousands on a private birth, what’s an extra £20 on telling the world about it? And indeed the Portland offers you a 50 per cent discount on placing a birth announcement in The Times as part of the package, though the choice of name is as much a giveaway as the consultant’s invoice. Hermione, Zander, Honor, Felix, Oscar, Freya, Walter, Amalfi Cordelia and Cosima Celery are just a small selection of the names of the children born in these places.

      The statistics support the cliché that the Portland really is the first choice for those too posh to push. Of the 2,232 births that took place there in 2011, 53 per cent were Caesarean sections, more than double the UK average of 24 per cent. Those that come here to give birth are the real elite in Britain. The babies born at the Portland are, of course, at that moment of naked, mewling innocence no different from those born a quarter of a mile down the road at University College Hospital, but they are born into a world absurdly different, and some might say grotesquely privileged. A simple birth costs £5,900, an elective Caesarean costs £8,200 – though you need to add £890 for an epidural. And all of these fees must be added to the consultant’s bill, which starts at £5,000 a baby. But it is not the cost that marks out the Portland Privateers as Britain’s über-elite. It is the added extras that come as part of the package. Along with the discount for announcing the birth in The Times, Sky television, a hair dryer and complimentary toiletries from Molton Brown, there are discounts for certain nanny agencies and an extensive menu for you to enjoy during your stay (£1,750 for each extra night after your first day). I know of a couple, both City lawyers, who chose the Portland over the Lindo Wing purely on the basis of the wine list. I kid you not. Perrier-Jouët, chilled, will set you back £70 a bottle.

      The great majority of the Portland Privateers easily fall into the legendary ‘1 per cent’, so despised by politicians as being the venal, blood-sucking, corporate-raiding section of society, earning over £150,000 a year. But they can be surprisingly insecure about their status, with most of them recent arrivals into the Club Class lounge. They have enough money to buy almost any comfort, but they do not feel it. Over-taxed and under-loved, they seek comfort in various brands and labels that offer them the reassurance that their sacrifice of working ludicrous hours and rarely seeing their children is all worth while. Most of them are successful enough professionally – as lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, consultants, fund managers, designers – to have rubbed shoulders with the mega-rich, the 0.1 per cent, the ‘have yachts’, the servant-employers, and to know that their own wealth is but small change for the international plutocracy who mostly pay their wages. And despite earning five times or more the national average salary, their disposable income is not that huge once they have paid for what they consider key outgoings: private medical insurance, nannies, private school fees, a cleaner, gym membership, weekly frothy coffee and dry cleaning bills. What defines them is their separateness, from Britain and from the other classes that make up Britain. They are almost uniformly Londoners, or live in the commuter towns around the capital, while a handful can be found in Cheshire, and they reside within certain very specific postcodes within those areas, sometimes even choosing the gated community option. While private births make up just 0.5 per cent of the national figure, they are as high as 33 per cent in certain wards in Kensington & Chelsea in London. They will at every opportunity choose private over state, believing – with some justification – that the Welfare State was never designed for them. They have a sense of community, but it is unrelated to their neighbours; it almost entirely derives from fellow parents at their children’s private school and work colleagues. Unlike the Middleton classes, they have no desire to assimilate if that means they have to wait for a dentist’s appointment, swim at their local council-run pool, shop at Asda and eat at La Tasca. Without the support of the Portland Privateers a whole host of very successful brands would not thrive as they do. We will come across some of them in later chapters, but they include Smythson iPad covers, By Nord bed linen, Jo Loves smelly candles, Mulberry handbags, Louboutin shoes, Hermès ties, Bugaboo buggies, Emile et Rose and Marie Chantal baby clothes, Beulah London (Lady Natasha Rufus’s ethical clothing line), Emu furry boots, anything from Daylesford Organic, the Chewton Glen hotel in Hampshire and the Harbour Club gym chain: all brands that defiantly cater to the affluent bubble floating above the rest.

      Many of the Wood Burning Stovers would love to go private, but don’t dare face the opprobrium of their friends for buying their way to a room and a midwife all to themselves. The Rockabillies, who have fewer scruples but often less money, pretend they adore the NHS, but can’t wait to get home to the comforts of the au pair. The solution for the WBS crowd is to go for a home birth, with a doula, a Birkenstock-wearing hand-holder, who can help you deliver your baby with the same stamp of exclusivity that a box of Abel & Cole organic vegetables brings.

      After the birth, there is the delicate matter of circumcision. This is now seen as a barbaric act to perform on a young child and one only practised by orthodox Jews and Muslims. Not true. It is, or was until really quite recently, common practice among the upper classes, all the way down to Rockabillies, but no further. The most recent figures suggest just 3.8 per cent of male babies are circumcised, with the rates lowest in the white working-class districts of Liverpool, specifically the Bootle area, as medical opposition to the act takes hold. But it was as high as 20 per cent during the 1950s, with those at the upper echelons the most likely to do it. My father reckons that 95 per cent of his school contemporaries were done. In my prep school changing rooms you could tell who was really smart by their lack of foreskin. Mine was lopped off, when I was one week old, at home, by a rabbi called Jacob Snowman, who performed the procedure on Prince Charles. His name was shared around the upper classes of 1970s London in the way the Portland Privateers now divulge the name of their plastic surgeon. When my mother asked if he needed anything, expecting an answer such as ‘some hot water’, he replied, ‘A glass of red wine would be nice.’

      Breast-feeding, too, is still widely a class issue. Your willingness to expose yourself to feed Clemency during lunch at Leon says as much about you as your ironing board cover or newspaper of choice. An academic study of thousands of mothers found that 86 per cent of the top class, as defined by job status, initiated breast feeding when the baby was born. Only half of the lowest class did so. By the time babies were four months old the discrepancy was even more stark: half the top class were still exclusively breastfeeding, but just one in five of the lowest class were.

      From life-changing events to tiny immaterial items, class is everywhere when it comes to babies. Even nappies. There is a clear hierarchy, with Pampers the smart option. Huggies are low class. The really chic choice is any of those supposedly eco ones such as Nature Babycare. Only a handful of self-flagellating Wood Burning Stovers attempt washable nappies. If you think it is only the higher echelons of the modern middle classes that obsess about such ludicrous things, think again. Asda Mums are defined by their children almost as much as their supermarket of choice. Vikki, a dental receptionist, is typical of many in her careful choosing of brands. Little Angels nappies, the supermarket’s own brand, are acknowledged by many of its customers to be excellent. ‘I haven’t tried them,’ says Vikki. ‘I just think they wouldn’t be the same quality. I feel bad that I haven’t СКАЧАТЬ