To continue with the list of things that I found surprising when I first visited the UK in 1990:
- how little people drank. In my family, nobody drank alcohol. I knew, however, that we were exceptional in that sense. In works of English literature, the word “whiskey” appeared on every other page, so I expected all Brits to be heavy drinkers. When the girl from my host family came to visit us previous December, we gave her a bottle of vodka to take home as a gift for her father. That was actually the first bottle of vodka I had ever seen in my life. When I came to visit them in Birmingham in March, the girl’s father told me, “Thank you for this wonderful gift of vodka! I drink it all the time!” After which he took out the bottle of vodka that was still 2/3 full and showed me how he added a few drops of alcohol to a glass of orange juice. I had no idea that this way of imbibing alcohol even existed. As you can imagine, the story of an Englishman who spent months incapable of finishing one puny bottle of vodka was especially popular with Soviet people back home. I’m now guessing that my host probably had bottles with other alcoholic beverages at home. But at that time, I couldn’t have possibly conceived of a reality so complex that one would have different alcoholic beverages at home to choose from.
- the dearth of books. The family I stayed with did not have a single book at home. They had a huge house, two cars, big and beautiful TV sets but no bookshelves. In my social class back home, everybody had a home library. At least one (and normally more) room in the house would have its walls completely lined with books. So I was shocked to see that the middle class family I stayed with did not have a single book in the house.
- class divisions. I have no idea why class divisions (that I observed in my own country as well) surprised me so much. I stayed with a middle-class and what I think had to have been an upper middle-class family in the UK. I’m guessing they had to be upper middle class because they lived in a very huge house, one of them drove a Rolls-Royce, and they had two boys in public schools. The differences between these two families were huge. The upper middle-class family would sit down to dinner in the dining-room. And the table was laid according to all of the rules of the etiquette. The middle-class family had a beautiful dining room but it was reserved for special occasions. Normally, people just ate in the kitchen or in front of the TV. The middle-class family ate a lot of what they called “crisps” and drank soda. The other family looked horrified when I asked for a Coke and gave me some fresh juice instead. And they did have a home library. I also visited a police officer’s family (what are they supposed to be? Lower middle class?) And they were very different still. They were rowdy and emotional, like we are in Ukraine, so I felt the most comfortable with them. The three families were visibly uncomfortable around each other.
(To be continued. . .)
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m from Birmingham and had quite a middle class upbringing (although my roots and my parent’s routes are very working class) and I had dozens and dozens of books and was read to from a young age. My mother still has most of those books.
I’d say the middle class family you stayed with that didn’t own any books were just not “cultured” types. There are some areas of Birmingham where a lot of people are like this, where people are more interested in 4×4 cars and designer handbags, what I call the cultural wasteland! It’s more out in the suburbs and you probably get it in a lot of cities.
It all depends on the values people hold (and possibly how educated they are). I used to have friends as a child who’s houses I’d visit and I could see that they had the widescreen TV, fancy stuff etc. But equally my best friend’s mother was a nurse (a working class profession?) and she was highly educated and an avid reader and books were strewn everywhere when I visited them. Which begs the question, what actually defines working and middle class now? It confuses the hell out of me.
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In our house we had one wall that was all bookshelves (that my father built out of planks and bricks) that were stuffed with books. He also put together some of those plank-and-concrete-block shelves that every mid-century Bohemian home had to have. When I got my own bedroom (he converted the dining room we hardly ever used for me) he built me some bookshelves too. And my parents were always reading, as was I. But other families who made more money than we did (my father was a teacher and in those days teachers were considered lower-middle-class to middle-class; American class divisions are mostly based on money) often had few books and sometimes none. I’d go in my friends’ houses and look in vain for something to read because back then I had to have something to read on hand at all times or I would get nervous. One thing everyone seemed to have, though, were so-called “coffee table books” — big books full of mostly photographs, of flowers or Europe or something. And they really were laid out on the coffee table.
But yeah, the book-lined house that I always dreamed of living in was a rarity, usually only found in homes whose owners were as eccentric as my parents were.
Re eating: formal dining was for Sunday, when after church we’d gather at our grandparents’. But they didn’t have a separate dining room in their tiny house, just a dining table off the kitchen. In our own home we actually had a separate dining room that we hardly ever used and like I said my father finally converted into a bedroom for me. We had another dining table (no one ate at the couch in front of the tv in those days — for dinner the tv was off), in the big central room we called the “living room.” Our kitchen was too small for eating in; the house was built in the 20s when people didn’t eat in the kitchen.
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These are fascinating stories. I’m learning a lot from them.
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When I was a child, my family was pretty well-off, but my parents refrained from flaunting the wealth in any obvious way, dad’s way of putting it was “We can either have a bunch of overpriced shit, or we can have adventures” and he preferred adventures, so we would use our wealth for travelling, rather than buying jewels, cars, or clothes, and dad always gave a lot of money to help people who needed a “leg up”, and his big passion was collecting art and Japanese antiques, so we had lots of both. We did have a lot of books in our house, I read the most in our family, my father read too, but he was dyslexic and needed a lot of time to finish a book. When I got old enough, I used to read aloud to him because it was the fastest way for dad to enjoy a book; I had a pretty big vocabulary and could handle all but the driest military history books.
When I went to the birthday parties of kids whose parents were much more blatantly wealthy than I was, my mind was blown by the opulence. They had swimming pools, huge cars, golf carts for the kids to drive, and enormous gardens, but the bookshelves were rather lacking both in quality and quantity- mostly books by political talking heads that were outdated in six months, harlequin romance novels, and a great deal of military fiction. The kids weren’t very well-read either, the idea of pleasure reading was alien to them, it was a chore for school.
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You were very lucky to have such a great father. And now you have something that will serve you your entire life: your intelligence. When one inherits money, that can be spent, lost, etc. But intelligence is forever. 🙂
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Don’t I know it. 🙂 The money’s all gone now, but I still have the books, the memories, and the lessons about what it means to really have a rich life.
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Oh and regarding eating: We always ate in the dining room, and conversation was always pretty animated and lively, especially on days when we had a dinner guest who was an old family friend. After dad died and mom’s boyfriend moved in, that pattern broke apart, because he liked to have dinner while watching TV, and when there was conversation, it was strictly one-way, he didn’t want anybody talking except him, save for permitting my mother to laugh at one of his tasteless jokes. Mom’s boyfriend was from an upper-class background, but didn’t learn anything about proper etiquette or behaviour from it, he seemed to be more along the school of, “If you have enough money and/or the right background you can say and do whatever you want.” That also explains why he did things my working-class background parents would never dream of, like snapping his fingers to summon waitstaff in a restaurant (ugh) and making disparaging comments about other people’s clothes, jewellery, and cars.
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“Mom’s boyfriend was from an upper-class background, but didn’t learn anything about proper etiquette or behaviour from it, he seemed to be more along the school of, “If you have enough money and/or the right background you can say and do whatever you want.” That also explains why he did things my working-class background parents would never dream of, like snapping his fingers to summon waitstaff in a restaurant (ugh) and making disparaging comments about other people’s clothes, jewellery, and cars.”
– This is why I always say that class differences are not limited to money. People of my social class are the ones who read, think, are politically active, and are tactful in a way that prevents them from hurting the feelings of others gratuitously. Where they work and how much money they have is completely beyond the point.
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I think you make two very important points.
The first is the undeniable class division in our society. I’m from a very poor city (Stoke-on-Trent, if anyone is interested) and my parents both have very working class jobs. With luck and and a desire to get me and my sister into the catchment area for one of the better State Schools in the city, we were able to move into a middle class area when I was quite young. But the class division in this single city is so overwhelming obvious. I’ve been to a handful of schools and sixth forms and the difference in the more working class ones to the middle class ones is staggering.
This class divide dominates our political system more than in most Western Nations, and I don’t think I be wrong to say it dominates British culture overall.
The other point is just the pure lack of damn books in some households. I consider it a real shame, and encouraging some of these children to actually read books would do a great deal of good in terms of the literacy problems this country has in some places.
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Stoke-on-Trent was actually one of the places I visited on that trip. I couldn’t verbalize all of these things about class divisions at that time, of course, but now, looking back at my experiences during the trip, many things become very clear.
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Here’s something I wrote a couple of years ago in a very glib, jet lagged state. I was angry at Britain for not being Africa — which itself involves a long story.
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