David Mitchell: Back Story by David Mitchell Read Free Book Online

lunchtime discipline was important to a child’s development. This was a fee-paying school, which was a stretch for my parents – I think my grandfather helped them out – and they probably felt that they should respect the educational judgements of the professionals they were paying, however counter-intuitive that must seem when your five-year-old son is stinking of his own stomach lining. To ignore the educational specialists would be like throwing away a doctor’s prescription.
    There’s a dutiful middle-class approach for you! – laced with the Protestant notion that you have to be cruel to be kind. It’s very different from the approach taken by those parents in the Jamie Oliver series about school food who protested at the school gates against fresh vegetables and passed bags of chips through the railings. The exact opposite, really. But my parents just didn’t feel that sense of entitlement – they were paying too much money.
    The school I went on to when I was seven – New College School, a small prep school originally established for the choristers of New College – was, by most standards, strict and old-fashioned. But their take on lunch was that, while you had to eat everything on your plate, you didn’t have to put anything on your plate that you didn’t want to eat. There were stricter lessons, lots of homework and regular exams at that school, but to me, thanks to their liberal lunch policy, it was like escaping to the free West. I never had to stand in a corner again.

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    Summoning Servants
    The houses round here don’t contain enough servants for my liking. I’ve turned off Quex Road onto West End Lane, which is lined with large houses that have been converted into flats. The life that was lived in them when they were built would seem bizarre to us today – when every one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings like that, all over London, had a version of Upstairs, Downstairs going on inside. Not quite as grand as that perhaps, but along the same lines, with the presiding family on the middle floors and servants cooking in the basement and sleeping in the attics. Each building probably accommodated about the same number of people then as one household as it does now all divided up. In a way, it’s a nice metaphor for how society has become comparatively more egalitarian – certainly the country’s property is divided between many more people now.
    That’s not how I saw it as a child. I was aware of the concept of servants from an early age. In fact I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what servants were, which is odd because I can remember when I didn’t know what a tumble-dryer was. And we had a tumble-dryer while I’ve never even met a servant. Nobody is a servant these days – apart from a few anachronistically trained ‘butlers’ who wear fancy dress and work for Texans. Rich people might have cleaners, gardeners, nannies and au pairs, maybe the occasional housekeeper. But no one has maids, valets or footmen any more. The profession of servant has pretty much totally disappeared and it wasn’t much more prevalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a small child.
    Yet I was very servant-aware. I was growing up not long after the era of bells and butlers. Millions of Britons spent their lives ‘in service’ until the Second World War – and it must have remained a significant profession for much of the 1950s (I’m largely basing that assumption on what I gleaned from episodes of Miss Marple ), which is only twenty or so years before I was running around Staunton Road pretending to be a king.
    Perhaps it’s Miss Marple’s fault. Not just Miss Marple, but Upstairs, Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited and Dynasty and the dozens of other things on TV that seemed to be full of uniformed and obedient domestic staff. They definitely caught my imagination; I was disappointed that people with the twin dignities of wealth and ‘being from the olden days’ had