Words for the workers

Published Tuesday 6 May 2008 at 12:45

‘The most voracious and passionate readers of the Bard’s work [19th century] were the working classes’ (Shakespeare for the People - Working-Class Readers 1800-1900 book review, page 22, April 24). You could have fooled me. As a member of the working class - a class, alas, that never endeared itself to me - I found little urge within them to douse themselves with learning or poetry.

Choosing my parents and class rather carelessly, I left school quite legally to go to work at age 13. And never once at my primary did I ever hear the name of Shakespeare mentioned. We went to school to be taught how to be stupid. We were those casual by-products of sexual liaison provided by the state to sweep the factory floors and fight the country’s wars. (I remember the late Johnny Speight saying that when he found himself in khaki, he was not fighting for his own country but for his landlord’s country).

In the cinema once while I watched a tiger swimming a river, one of the ghetto sages behind me opined: “Well that’s rubbish for a start, cats don’t like water.” Apparently the evidence before us could be blithely dismissed.

As a child, after Churchill had guided us through a war his criminally incompetent predecessors had not prepared us for and he now quite sensibly warned us that ‘an iron curtain has descended upon Europe’, I heard him denounced by adult semi-literates (who had just voted his opponents in and were thoroughly sovietised) as a ‘bloody old warmonger’. When shown a newspaper picture of a large pit in Belsen packed with emaciated corpses, another ragged-arsed Socrates gave up the distillate of his genius thus, saying to us children: ‘Don’t believe it, it’s bloody propaganda.’

Ignorance here was not merely bliss, it was sheer paradise. Were these then the noble savages passionate for Shakespeare? Don’t make me laugh.

Frank R Long

Bond Road

Mitcham

Surrey