To show there's no ill-feelings over your (unaccountably!) liking "Survivors" I'm going to add to your story. This is not to cap it. I'm full of admiration for the way you picked your way up from the bottom -- and I am also full of admiration for the way I've picked myself up from the bottom, too!
The reason why I am adding a brief account of my story is that I am weary of those FWers (not Ed, incidentally) who think we Englishmen are all effete aristocrats and class conscious. (Yes, we are certainly class-conscious -- we couldn't be otherwise, having lived in England -- but you and I were born working class and will remain so till our last breath -- at least I will, even though I now move in middle-class circles and will have a middle-class choir singing Bach and Handel at my funeral -- with a good party afterwards when they've buried me under a walnut sapling.)
In my younger days, I can beat you -- I actually had more than sandwiches with members of the government in the Liberal Club, this working class person had actually dined with Peers of the Realm! So there! Yet I found myself penniless, too -- just like you -- (almost so, anyway -- I had £32 at the bottom) 30 years later. Seventeen years ago, when I arrived in Bath and after two years of holing up in single bedsit room 12x8ft studying the cortex as a form of therapy, I met my present partner and decided to help her son who was extremely shy and couldn't get a job in architecture. Being an ex-industrial chemist it was bravado on my part just to impress this wonderful woman I'd just met.
Her son had no money, too. I was 53 and he was 23. We put ourselves up as labourers. We decorated people's rooms, we dug gardens, we built walls. We did this for six months in order to save £500. Then I asked an elderly Quaker at Bath meeting house for some money and he gave me £500, no questions asked. We started the business, and from then onwards we worked 12-15 hours a day and I slept under my drawing board. It took longer than your two years to buy a house -- three years in my case -- but not a newly built house, but one of the few bow-fronted Georgian houses in Bath, architecturally-listed and very desirable, too. My partner's son also has a Georgian house. He doesn't work 12-15 hours a day now but he and his staff certainly pay me a very good pension.
We know what it's all about, don;t we? Fortunately, you and I both had enough manual skills at our fingertips. We are too old now, but in principle if you and I were thrown out onto the streets we would still survive.
It is strange, is it not, that you and I, both working class, and who know what it's all about at every level of society from top to bottom, should be the ones (the only ones on this list as far as I can make out) who are calling for private schools. IT IS BECAUSE THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION, DUMBING DOWN FOR THE PAST CENTURY AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY, IS THE GREATEST INJUSTICE THAT HAS BEING DONE TO MOST ORDINARY WORKING PEOPLE'S CHILDREN BECAUSE BASIC SKILLS ARE NO LONGER TAUGHT. They are now being left defenceless just at the time when we should be vastly upgrading our skills.
This is the first time I have gone into upper case on this List and, unlike the person who called me a Jew-hater in upper case some time ago (though I have also been called a Muslim-hater), this is not directed at anybody in particular. So I hope Futureworkers will excuse this lapse just for this once.
Keith
At 01:12 15/12/2003 -0800, you wrote:
Ed,
If you are married with a family, you do whatever is necessary and legal to earn a living. Greater respect comes from feeding, clothing, and sheltering, your family, than from refusing a job because you are too good for it.
When I arrived in Toronto with my $84 I shared a YMCA room with another English immigrant. He had $500. After about 3 months, he said Canada was a joke and went home. So, he kept his respect.
I remember my first job got me $200 a month. I thought it was $50 a week until I worked out it was really about $46.
I remember I would have one meal a day at a Chinese restaurant where I could get a meal from soup to dessert for 89 cents. I would make the meal last while I read a library book, or a newspaper. I actually began to save on my $200 a month.
However, it was quite a come-down from a couple of months earlier when I would be playing chess with a member of the government while having a ham sandwich in the National Liberal Club.
All of this was quite new to me, so I had to play it by ear. I suppose I didnt do to badly. As I earlier mentioned, a year later I had my family across and within 6 months they moved into a newly built house.
I think, Ed, you write from the point of view of the established middle class. You do reasonably well at high school, get a qualification of some sort in college or university, enter a respectable job, work for 3 or 4 decades, enjoy a genteel if not well paid - retirement.
We used to think that unlike the stratified English, the North Americans would be a lawyer one week, a doctor the next, an accountant the next. Wasnt true, but that was what we thought.
Now perhaps over here, we have adopted some of the stratification of the old world.
But, whatever, money is translated into bacon and eggs and perhaps things with less cholesterol. Dont look down on it.
Harry
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
