Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints by Simon Doonan

Author:Simon Doonan [Doonan, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Humor, Biography & Autobiography, Literary
ISBN: 9781439159361
Google: G7PVPrzr0jkC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-04-14T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

DAUGHTERS!

I was being treated for a lisp, and Biddie was there because he dropped all his t’s and h’s.

In the late 1950s, Biddie and I found ourselves attending speech therapy classes, courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government. We must have been about seven or eight years old.

It was all very Eliza Doolittle: Biddie had to repeat words like bottle and house, and I was forced to repeat more interesting phrases, like “hot toast” and “I swallowed a sackful of snakes.”

For some reason we also had to say “Peggy Babcock” over and over at high velocity: “Peggy Babcock! Peggy Babcock! PEGGY BABCOCK!” This is a skill which I have retained to this very day. Though I still cannot swallow a sackful of snakes without a lisp lapse, I can repeat the name Peggy Babcock with machine-gun efficiency and speed.

Viewed from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, these efforts at self-improvement probably seem embarrassingly bourgeois. I would ask the reader not to judge too harshly, and to remember that our Peggy Babcocks took place at a time when upward aspiration was assumed, applauded, and actively encouraged. Improved speech was the gateway to a middle-class life and all the benefits that came along with it.

It had not yet become cool to be common.

These poignant attempts at social betterment were by no means limited to me and Biddie and our state-sponsored speech therapy classes. All over the United Kingdom people were trying anything and everything to divest themselves of their regional working-class accents. The crisp, clear, modulated speech of radio and TV announcers was the ideal to which we all aspired.

The arrival of the telephone in British homes increased the pressure to “act posh.” Phone users adopted what was known as a “telephone voice.” Once a caller had been identified, it was customary to say, “Air. Hair. Lair.” (trans.: Oh hello!).

Not everyone wanted to play the game. There was a small number of very naughty people who aspired down instead of up: there were middle-class girls who drank too much sherry and got pregnant, and public school–educated aristocrats who splurged their family fortunes on drugs and dockyard prostitutes. Those who demonstrated these kinds of self-destructive behaviors were the objects of grave concern. They were going against the grain. They were ruining things for the rest of us. Anyone who was aspiring down instead of up ran the risk of being institutionalized and overseen by tight-lipped, pasty-faced nuns.

Biddie and I had no incentive to pretend to be more common than we already were. It made no sense whatsoever. We were determined to become more posh than we were, regardless of how many Peggy Babcocks it took to get there.

* * *

Fast-forward ten years.

The class struggle continues.

During my years at university, I attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to craft a gay identity. It was hard to find a reasonable point of entry, if you’ll pardon the expression. There seemed to be only two alternatives, both of which were quite extreme.

First there was the middle-class campus Gay-Lib Society. The hippies who dominated this scene had long hair and crushed velvet maxi vests.

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