So why are you thinking of taking him out of Grovefield Primary?

Oh, it's only really for the class sizes. They never have more than 14, and it's fantastic, they get so much individual attention at Melville and there's a musical instrument to choose each term for nothing really, well for a big chunk of those fees hahaha but it's all worth it and really there's nothing to beat that sort of start in life for one thing he's going to be surrounded by children who know how to speak correctly. I know we're not as bad here as in London, but really can you imagine being the only one speaking English as a first language? And we have kids from the estate at Grovefield of course, poor things, that's bad enough! It's not their fault but you hear those vowels... and the mothers, quite how I'm supposed to get on with the mothers, I have no idea. And I'd thought about St Peters but it's really not the same is it, having to pretend to be religious just to get in with the right sort, and in later years he'd always feel a bit like we'd scrimped and had to take the holy route and let's face it a religious education is always going to come second to a real one, and it's about keeping standards up, isn't it? You know, the little things, the ones that will always make a difference when you're with the right people - so that the right people will know you're one of them, of course, people like us, you see - and you have to be ever so careful these days - I heard some children in Larchwood uniform the other day and you would not have known - you would NOT have known - that they were at a private, I mean independent, school. I mean, really what's the point? You spend all that money and they talk like they come from the estate. It's not as if we can afford a real public school of course, one of the great ones *sigh*, and I suppose they'll always carry that cross with them through life, but you do the best you can. And that means no regional vowels. At. All. And none of this having to slow down for the non-English, you know, the foreign ones, though of course most of the good schools are so full of Russians and Indonesians these days - rich as Croesus, the lot of them - that even in a good place you're going to have to make some, you know, adaptations for different cultures and so on. When you strip away all the other things that are important, knowledge and skills and so on, the one thing you can't deny is that the more your child sounds like an army officer of the 1950s the better they are going to do. It's a universal currency. Show me anywhere, in any real job (excluding the public sector of course) where the child with good vowels isn't going to be hired and promoted over the lower class one. Because that's what it's about really, if I'm honest. We're middle class and we need to find ways to stay like that. It's hard enough with what the government are doing these days to mess everything up (what IS going on with university places?) but at least if you have your vowels under control you're going to be marked as one of the right sort. And we say middle class and so on, I know, but really it is upper and lower class - and that's all there is to it. In every village around here - in fact in most of England (I can't speak for the North of course, never been there) - you know from the moment someone opens their mouth, immediately, what side of the line they're on. And that's all there is to say, really. I would sooner die than have a child of mine sound lower class. And if it started to happen at Melville, if those Estuary vowels crept in, I'd move him, I really would. So much else follows if one just sounds right - I laugh sometimes and say to Gerald that we should probably just keep him at Grovefield and pay for the elocution classes, as that's really all that matters - you know when you meet someone at church whether they're one of us, and whether we should make friends, and it just saves so much time having to work out if people really are dreary and not going anywhere. Can you imagine, can you really, the leader of a political party these days having a regional accent? Well, precisely. It just indicates weakness, to those who count, anyway. And when one sounds right, so many other things slot into place. You know the words to the right hymns, you know the entire Radio 4 schedule backwards, what to wear at Glyndebourne, how to pronounce Montrachet, the folly of wearing off-the-peg suits, who to butter up in the City and all that. All the important things. The ones that mean you belong. He may well not get into Cambridge now, with all these silly equality things going on, but if we play our cards right, nobody need know. He will walk and talk just as if he did, and can make sure in time that his children do exactly the same. We know our place, and it is not going to be down with the riff-raff.

Ah. When you said it was all about class sizes - right, now I get it. Those class sizes.