How to be poor

know how. Here are a few hints.
    1) The main plague in this country is
still a man’s accent. (By the way, when I say man I also mean woman. When
I say he I usually mean she too. This is no linguistic male
chauvinist piggery, I fully support women in their struggle for equality, but
resent clumsy and ugly ways of speaking. Chair-persons were not invented for
me.) So, as I said, the main plague in this country is still a man’s accent.
This immediate categorising does not exist in any other country of the world.
Naturally, an educated person will express himself differently from an
illiterate one all over the world, and this difference in speech often reflects
difference in class — but not always. Landowners, on the whole, in other
countries speak the language of their peasants. And if an able working-class or
peasant boy learns to be articulate, no one will be able to spot his background
as soon as he opens his mouth — that is in German, French, Dutch, Polish, Thai
and all other languages.
    In England a man puts himself into a
certain category as soon as he utters a sound. A person with a lower-class
accent will often claim to be proud of it, all the same, they will do their
best to get rid of it. A large number of Trade Union leaders are ridiculous in
this way. These bulwarks of the working classes try to hide their natural way
of speaking, dwell on certain vowels for half an hour or so until they get
angry and then the East End a-s and i-s bubble up freely. Similarly, quite a
lot of people manage to get rid of their country accent too, so long as they do
not get angry or excited.
    I know from personal experience how
difficult it is to get rid of an accent. Not that I have tried terribly hard.
Once, when my accent improved a tiny bit, a radio producer told me quite
anxiously that I must not lose my Hungarian accent. I would not sound genuine
and would become useless for the radio. The danger of really losing my accent
has always been infinitessimal. As long as I can write, more or less,
without a foreign accent, I am content.
    A foreign accent has tremendous
advantages over all other accents. It is classless. As soon as I open my mouth,
people know that I was not born at Stoke Newington or Chipping Norton, but they
have absolutely no way of knowing whether my father was a Court Chamberlain to
Francis Joseph or a swineherd.
    So this is my first advice to my
pupils. Cultivate a foreign accent. If you were brought up with a
Cockney or Geordie or whatever accent, and are unhappy about it, try to imitate
Georg Solti or the late Professor Koch, the ornithologist. If your name is
MacKilligan and you were born in Aberdeen, it may be difficult to explain where
your Polish accent comes from — but, thank God, you still do not have to
explain anything in this country. And it is easier to change your accent than
you might think. I know a couple in Leeds, an Austrian husband who speaks
English with a formidable German accent, and a Yorkshire-born wife. After years
of happy and harmonious marriage that honest Yorkshire lass is speaking with a
German accent heavier than her husband’s — without even trying.
    2) How to dress. I have already
mentioned the subject. Do not overdo it: shabby clothes, holes in your socks
are aristocratic but, I am afraid, very hard to carry off. It is not enough to
put on socks with holes; you must know how to wear them.
    3) There is a great deal of snobbery
involved in motor cars. Some naive people think that the more expensive the car
the greater the glory. Far from it. A Rolls Royce is a vulgar, nouveau riche car while a Mini is perfectly all right.
    Not to have a car at all is, once
again, aiming too high. It is eccentric, even aristocratic, like not having
television. (The thing is to have television but never switch it on.) However,
not having a car has certain advantages. It will occur to no one that you do
not have a car because you cannot afford it. People will think that you have
lost your licence because of drunken driving, and drunken driving is revered
and admired in our society.
    4) Give the impression of being less
well off than you are. The real big incomes are still middle-class incomes, but
on the average, the working class is better off. Unemployment is a plague, of
course, but even the Trade Unions do not care much about the unemployed. They
are an excellent stick to beat the government with but they have no power.
People in jobs are well off. A miner earns more than a