Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch

Author:Afua Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

6. CLASS

Alexander Paul, speaking at the Conservative Party Conference in 2014, aged 18.

I don’t really believe in race. I don’t really believe in colour. But I do know what I see.

– James Baldwin, Baldwin’s Nigger1

After growing up in Wimbledon, eleven years of private school and three of Oxford University, I thought that nothing about race, class and privilege in the UK could shock me. And then I decided to become a barrister.

It began with a secret world. A cloistered world, hidden away behind its Tudor walls, a large, spacious and gloriously ancient campus. I remember feeling a childish wonder as I ducked away from the claustrophobic clutter of the concrete, stone and glass law firms on Chancery Lane, the heartland of legal London, and found the Great Lawn of Lincoln’s Inn – a neat expanse of striped green, and a majestic red-brick library like a palace on the other side. Beyond that, the gateway to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a hidden gem of a park built during the reign of Henry VII. My first encounter with this oasis reminds me of a scene in the Sex and the City movie, when Carrie and Mr Big walk into the ridiculously luxurious penthouse apartment they’re viewing in New York, and she says, ‘So this is where they keep the light.’

I lived in the Inn during my year of Bar vocational training, thanks to the generosity of its scholarship programme, which boosted my chances and my ability to devote time to studying and temping to pay back the bank loans that began where my bursary ended. It was a scene lacking in diversity in every way. Even the clothes people wore were all the same – dark suits, dull uniform. The only colour you were likely to see was a horsehair wig, or the occasional postbox red of a tax barrister’s Ferrari.

Then there were all the cultural aspects of life at the Bar to contend with. Dining in Lincoln’s Inn – which was compulsory – was like experiencing Oxford on steroids. An intimidating medieval hall, lined with grand paintings of dead white men, working out which of several sets of cutlery to use, and which of the side plates is for your walnut rye and butter. ‘There are ghosts in this hall,’ Sam would say, even less used to both this environment and the port that was served in it, which saw him become both drunk and haunted for the very first time. At the end of that year I read about how William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, had been tasked with ruling on the legal status of slaves after heated discussions in this very hall in 1772. And how a fellow ‘bencher’ – or senior member of the Inn elected in recognition of their services to law – the famous jurist William Blackstone, had amended his authoritative reference book Commentaries on the Laws of England to suggest Mansfield should find against the slaves’ case. In the end, the judge championed the underdog, declaring slavery ‘odious’.

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