Key Points
Confessing a background of privilege comes hard to the likes of us, who can claim no merit, no handy pulling-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps rugged path to our good professional jobs as writers, academics and teachers, set on our lucky way at a young age..
You might think that at a middle-ranking girls boarding school, Badminton School in the dull Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym (nothing to do with the stately home of Badminton horse trials), every one of us belonged to the same social class..
I was once told by an academic of an appealing education experiment conducted some years ago that alas I havent been able to trace: a group of teachers were picked and told they had been specially selected as the most highly skilled to teach some particularly brilliant children, children who were also told that secret tests had revealed they were exceptionally gifted..
This heavily class-biased exam would disadvantage very clever applicants who had worked exceedingly hard at every subject at school but lacked the family or an Alan Bennett History Boys teacher or my Mr Stedman Jones to open their wings at this early stage in their life..
Feeling ignorant of the world beyond my upbringing, I took time off to set out around the country, taking jobs in different towns and industries to try to understand work and a working-class world a planet away from my South Kensington background..
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