Don’t get me wrong – I think if I’d actually lived in a house where you rang a bell and an adult employed by my parents appeared to do my bidding, I would have found that weird. (Although there was a time, at my grandparents’ house in Swansea, when I did have a little bell which I’d ring if I wanted to be given more orange squash. This was humiliatingly revealed on Would I Lie to You? and, I must stress, was a temporary arrangement and basically just a game linked to all my dressing up and pretending to be other people. So I hope that goes some way to expunging the image you’re forming in your head of me as a spoilt and snobbish little brat. That’s what I hope, not what I expect.) I wasn’t thinking about servants as individual people but about the overall concept, which seemed so smart, so grand, so posh.
At Napier House, which being a private school wasn’t purpose-built by visionary Victorians but had once been someone’s home, there were still bells on the wall for summoning servants. The fact that they no longer worked and, even if they did, no one was in the kitchen to hear them ring seemed to me a step backwards for civilisation. The world – and certainly Britain – was not what it used to be.
I know that, as economic analysis goes, this is a heady cocktail of the nonsensical and the heartless. But, in my defence, I was forming these ideas as a very small child and most very small children have in their psychological make-up many of the personality traits of the tyrant and the megalomaniac. And I had a natural liking for hierarchies. ‘Who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who?’ is what I always wanted to know. And of course I imagined my future self being in charge of everyone and everything.
Having said that, I think I wouldn’t have minded the thought of only being in charge of some people while others were in charge of me. I found the thought of that sort of military-style order of precedence quite satisfying. It might even be worth being a servant, just to live in a world where some people had them.
Much as recalling these thought processes is quite embarrassing, I can still feel the attraction of the pyramid-shaped institution. I mean metaphorically pyramid-shaped – architecturally I prefer a nice Georgian square.
After all, complete meritocracy, complete social mobility, of the sort that we in the West sometimes flatter ourselves we live in, doesn’t really exist or work. In Britain, most of us know that, while merit and application can help in life, a lot of people get on because of who they know, how much money they’ve already got and other pieces of luck: being born intelligent, talented or having the ability to apply yourself are also pieces of luck. We think society is probably more meritocratic than it was fifty years ago but that doesn’t mean things are actually completely fair or ever likely to become so.
But some Americans seem genuinely to believe they’re living the meritocratic dream. There are two problems with this: first, it’s nonsense. While it’s of course possible to transform your life by hard work and talent in the United States, there are millions who live in miserable circumstances with few chances of escape. Not none, but few. The ridiculousness of the notion that the United States, wonderful country though it basically is, is a level playing field for opportunity is demonstrated by their political system which, much like Britain’s in the nineteenth century, is dominated by a small number of rich and influential families. We had the Russells, the Cecils and the Churchills – they have the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Gores. At least our Victorian leaders didn’t claim to be egalitarian.
The second problem is that a proper meritocracy would be a heartless place. In such a society, those at the bottom of the heap not only have to cope with poverty, boring jobs or no jobs, they are also denied the solace of considering it unfair. This is such a hapless state of affairs to contemplate, it’s actually funny. History has a recurrent theme of the down-trodden rising up and overthrowing their oppressors (or in Britain, gradually extracting concessions over hundreds of years), and of injustices which had kept people in penury being swept aside. In this scenario, people aren’t kept in penury by injustice, but by justice. The poor sods deserve it – like Baldrick in Blackadder. And their chances of overthrowing their oppressors would be pretty slim because presumably they’d cock everything up. Their betters would run rings round them because – well, the clue’s in the name. Those unhappy Baldricks would just have to hope that merit and kindness go hand in hand, just like aristocracy and kindness seem to in Julian Fellowes’s vision of early twentieth-century England.
As a child, I was much of Fellowes’s mind. I simply thought that servants were good because they came from ‘the olden days’ – and everything from the olden days was better and more glamorous than my own time.
I liked the thought of kings and emperors, kingdoms and empires; people in old-fashioned clothes being in charge of lots of other people. A mixed-up world of treasure and swords, steam engines and suits of armour, castles and wing collars – as cheesy and incoherent as a historically themed Las Vegas casino.
Cars used to be better, I thought, with shiny round headlamps on either side of the bonnet like eyes. Trains were better too: how could drab diesel boxes ever have been considered preferable to those brightly polished steaming metal tubes with massive and magnificent wheels?
The only thing that matched the olden days for style and excitement was the future, by which I basically meant space. If I were to trade in my hopes of crowns, castles, steam engines and servants, it would be for a spaceship – preferably a massive one like the Starship Enterprise, which must surely have had as many rooms as a palace – and a laser, a communicator and an opportunity to visit other planets.
Somehow my own time had managed to fall between those two glittering stools. We had neither penny-farthings nor matter transporters. NASA’s rockets and shuttles were pitiful objects that could barely go as far as the moon. They didn’t even have gravity inside them, for God’s sake. The astronauts spent the whole time floating around in their pyjamas, eating disgusting liquidised food. In order to leave the ship, they seemed to have to don motorcycle helmets. It all looked extremely undignified.
Two school subjects, history and science, were poisoning my enjoyment of the universe by lacing it with regret. History made it seem as if the magical world of kingdoms and castles, although admittedly not dragons and wizards, had once existed and had only been eclipsed because humanity had collectively lost its sense of the aesthetic. Similarly, the word ‘science’ in science fiction made me consider that world to be attainable if only humankind got its shit together. I quietly blamed the people of my own era for its stolid, unmagical mediocrity.
I don’t remember any of my friends sharing this frustration. I can’t recall much of what I did when friends came round. I think there was an afternoon when Adam Bryant and I pretended to be Superman and Batman who’d teamed up to fight crime, with a comparable disparity of actual capabilities to Angel-Summoner and the BMX Bandit.
Laurence Noble must have had a stronger personality than me because he managed to make me play ‘The Professionals’. Laurence lived in a bungalow with a swimming pool. This was an unusual type of dwelling for a suburb of Oxford, but then his dad was a builder. I had no idea what ‘The Professionals’ was, but hoped that it was to do with space. Did the Professionals have a ship? I asked. No, they just had a car. Well, two of them did while the third stayed in the office. Did they have a transporter? Only the car. Did they have lasers even? No, even better, they had guns. Normal guns? Yes, normal guns.
This was not ‘even better’ in my view. Laurence was also a fan of James Bond who, as far as I could tell, had no superpowers at all and just drove around in a car trying to cuddle women. Soppy, if you asked me. Laurence would occasionally make noises like ‘Berecca’, ‘Walkakeekeepay’ or ‘Smithywesso’ which he explained were the names of guns.
‘Normal guns, with bullets?’
‘Yeah,’ he’d say making shooting noises.
‘Hmm.’