Livia loved the poshness of Mercia students. And she loved putting us before them, the post southern students who came to study with us.
Mercia humanities is virtually a finishing school, Livia noted. There were veritable aristocrats amongst them. To the manor born types, and all that. Old money and very old money! With Kensington Park addresses!
Didn’t she enjoy it, hobnobbing with the youth of the aristocracy? At Open Days. At visit Days? And at graduation, too?
Livia and the upper class parents. Livia, and the posh parents. Giving her speech at our graduation celebration. How she escaped from the days of communism. How she fell out of favour with the apparatchiks back home. How she escaped with a Chopin record, a book of Nietzsche and not much else. Addressing them all! Winning their sympathy!
She knew what we felt about the posh. She knew how we loved and hated them the posh. She knew what a posh southern accent did to us. To the lower class English in general!
The whole thing amused her. The class thing. The peasant thing.
Our natural deference struggling with our natural defiance. Our automatic reverence at odds with our spontaneous revulsion.
The peasants’ revolt of our lecturing. The revenge of the colonised.
Our lecturers’ revolution. Giving those poshoes what for. Hitting them with Marx! With Lenin! With Trotsky, for good measure! Teaching only communist philosophers. Our communist romance.
We wanted our revenge on the order of things – the order of the world. We wanted revenge on ourselves. We were outraged that we’d succeeded. And glad that we’d succeeded. And appalled that we succeeded. And relieved that we’d succeeded. That we’d waltzed our way into jobs.
Our issues! Our conflicts! Our ferment! Our sizzling!
Always vexed. Always conflicted. Always reeling. Always troubled.
There was an energy to our working classness. There was a drive to our mixture of class hatred and impostor’s syndrome.
Our rogues’ and rascals’ revolt. The revenge of the miserable provincials!
Work in Progress 