The first thing to say is that I don’t remember it being that bad, being poor. Let me caveat that straight away: I was not poor for long; I was a child at the time; I had a set of careful, caring, parents who bore the brunt of worrying. I understand now that it could easily have been very different.
It’s still worth noting how pleasant things were. So pleasant, actually, that I didn’t fully realise I’d been working class until I wasn’t anymore. Even then, the realisation came slowly. In fact, I don’t think I understood how deeply my alliances were split until I read The Uses of Literacy on a train, found myself unexpectedly tearing up over Richard Hoggart’s final chapter, “Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and the Anxious”, and realised that my family had not so much jumped the class barrier as vaulted over it without thinking too carefully about the landing.
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