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

servants while we did not. It didn’t occur to me that a damned sight more people were servants than had them.
    Don’t get me wrong – I think if I’d actually lived in a house where you rang a bell and an adult employed by my parents appeared to do my bidding, I would have found that weird. (Although there was a time, at my grandparents’ house in Swansea, when I did have a little bell which I’d ring if I wanted to be given more orange squash. This was humiliatingly revealed on Would I Lie to You? and, I must stress, was a temporary arrangement and basically just a game linked to all my dressing up and pretending to be other people. So I hope that goes some way to expunging the image you’re forming in your head of me as a spoilt and snobbish little brat. That’s what I hope, not what I expect.) I wasn’t thinking about servants as individual people but about the overall concept, which seemed so smart, so grand, so posh .
    At Napier House, which being a private school wasn’t purpose-built by visionary Victorians but had once been someone’s home, there were still bells on the wall for summoning servants. The fact that they no longer worked and, even if they did, no one was in the kitchen to hear them ring seemed to me a step backwards for civilisation. The world – and certainly Britain – was not what it used to be.
    I know that, as economic analysis goes, this is a heady cocktail of the nonsensical and the heartless. But, in my defence, I was forming these ideas as a very small child and most very small children have in their psychological make-up many of the personality traits of the tyrant and the megalomaniac. And I had a natural liking for hierarchies. ‘Who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who?’ is what I always wanted to know. And of course I imagined my future self being in charge of everyone and everything.
    Having said that, I think I wouldn’t have minded the thought of only being in charge of some people while others were in charge of me. I found the thought of that sort of military-style order of precedence quite satisfying. It might even be worth being a servant, just to live in a world where some people had them.
    Much as recalling these thought processes is quite embarrassing, I can still feel the attraction of the pyramid-shaped institution. I mean metaphorically pyramid-shaped – architecturally I prefer a nice Georgian square.
    After all, complete meritocracy, complete social mobility, of the sort that we in the West sometimes flatter ourselves we live in, doesn’t really exist or work. In Britain, most of us know that, while merit and application can help in life, a lot of people get on because of who they know, how much money they’ve already got and other pieces of luck: being born intelligent, talented or having the ability to apply yourself are also pieces of luck. We think society is probably more meritocratic than it was fifty years ago but that doesn’t mean things are actually completely fair or ever likely to become so.
    But some Americans seem genuinely to believe they’re living the meritocratic dream. There are two problems with this: first, it’s nonsense. While it’s of course possible to transform your life by hard work and talent in the United States, there are millions who live in miserable circumstances with few chances of escape. Not none, but few. The ridiculousness of the notion that the United States, wonderful country though it basically is, is a level playing field for opportunity is demonstrated by their political system which, much like Britain’s in the nineteenth century, is dominated by a small number of rich and influential families. We had the Russells, the Cecils and the Churchills – they have the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Gores. At least our Victorian leaders didn’t claim to be egalitarian.
    The second problem is that a proper meritocracy would be a heartless place. In such a society, those at the bottom of the