In a recent post contrasting my responses to Tim Henman and Andy Murray I wrote:
"At least my relationship with Henman was straightforward - he was my class enemy."
This has inflamed Jonathan Calder. Under the headline "Bourgeois Radical False Consciousness" he produces what I think he may believe to be an expose:
"Class enemy? I wonder what Hill does for a living? Coal mining, perhaps? sheet-metal working? Farm labouring? Er, no. If you look at the top of his blog you will find that hill describes himself as a novelist and journalist. And a journalist who writes regularly writes for the Guardian at that. Hill couldn't get more middle class if he tried."
Several points here. Firstly I'm not sure that the fact of being a novelist automatically defines a person as "middle class", as Jonathan implies. The same is true - though maybe less so - of someone who writes for The Guardian. As ever with these matters much depends on how you're defining middle classness in the first place. Is it a question of income? Of occupation? Of tastes and attitudes? Of roots? Some complex combination of them all? In Britain, of course, the term has long encompassed a very broad social spectrum which renders its meaning imprecise unless deployed with qualifications.
Let me tell Jonathan a story. As a youth I was quite a talented sportsman: not truly outstanding, but the type who sometimes rose above school team level. I was once invited to attend a programme of coaching sessions run by my home county's tennis authority. This followed a visit to the state compehensive I attended by its roving talent-spotter, his task being to locate any potential Roger Taylors lurking outside the independent sector, British tennis's traditional seedbed.
Clearly, he saw something in the slice backhand I'd cultivated on a local concrete court through watching Wimbledon on TV, and soon I was displaying it in company of an unfamiliar type: boys called Gavin and Quintin; boys who spoke with a bored, self-confident drawl; boys who played on private grass with their parents at weekends. For me, it was like entering another world; the posh, county set world from which, a few hundred miles away, Tim Henman later emerged. I was intimidated. I stopped going.
None of this is an attempt to claim working-class origins. I have always considered myself middle class. My father was a skilled manual worker - a plasterer - proudly self-employed and, like my mother, proudly respectable too. I grew up in a detached three-bedroomed house and all my material needs were met. But it was a very different middle classesness from that which Henman personifies and even today tends to rub me up the wrong way. That said, there was another element to my "class enemy" remark that Jonathan seems to have missed - I was having a joke.