What my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system

It wasn't just luck that propelled the Guardian columnist into a media career. She reflects on the subtle workings of class (and a meeting with a naked future PM)

- Polly Toynbee

CHILDREN KNOW. They breathe it in early, for there's no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they C belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening. Good liberal parents teach their children to check their privilege - useful modern phrase but it swells up like a bubo on the nose. There's no hiding it.

I can summon up the childhood shame at class embarrassments. Aged seven like me, Maureen, with her hair pinned sideways in a pink slide, lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower. They were at the other end of Lindsey, more hamlet than village, 800 metres down the road from my father's pink thatched cottage set in the flat prairie lands of Suffolk, where I spent half my time, the other half in London, shuttling between divorced parents. I envied Maureen for what looked to me like a cheerful large family tumbling noisily in and out of their ever-open front door. They never asked me in, so I would hang about the door waiting for Maureen to come out and play.

Maureen and I played fairies in the cornfields, crept about scaring each other in St Peter's churchyard next door, drew hopscotch squares on the road and threw five stones on and off our knuckles. One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting "Giddy-up" and waving a stick as a mock whip.