Keeping up appearances: Linda Grant’s immigrant family were upwardly mobile and bought clothes that showed their aspirations

Novelist Linda Grant explains how her Jewish family always knew the value of dressing to impress

Thousands of Jewish people fled to the UK from eastern Europe in the early 20^th century, among them Linda Grant’s grandparents. This family settled in east London and are shown in a family portrait in 1915

Credit: akg-images/IAM

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN conscious of coming from an immigrant family. My grandparents on both sides came to Britain at the turn of the last century from the pogroms of eastern Europe. In the photographs taken just after they arrived, against the potted ferns and classical balustrades of a professional photographer’s studio, they are beautifully turned out but indisputably foreign-looking. This display was put on with much the same purpose as their instinctive understanding of how immigrants should deal with the authorities: tell them what they want to hear. Had they found themselves in the camp in Calais in 2016 they would be the ones caught out by the Daily Mail with a child refugee who didn’t look, and wasn’t, 15. Only after being settled in the country for 112 years do we feel comfortable telling the truth on forms.

None of my grandparents spoke the language (my grandfather who died in 1965 aged 92, would never learn much English and I communicated with him via my father’s interpretation). They lived their whole lives huddled together in immigrant communities of like-minded co-religionists, shopped in kosher shops and built synagogues. They didn’t trust outsiders and considered anti-Semitism to be a prejudice permanently endemic beneath the veneer of English politeness. In turn, they were considered to be pushy, prickly, demanding and insistently upwardly mobile.

My parents didn’t have a very good opinion of the working class. Words have meanings beyond the dictionary. For them the goyim meant not just gentiles but people who were coarse, uneducated, drank more than a sip of alcohol, and ate terrible tasteless food without flavour. They were contemptuous of the workers who told you that they “knew their place” in the class system, who identified with the class they had been born into, were proud of its traditions and culture. My grandparents wanted nothing to do with being at the bottom, they were aiming upwards, as high as you like. Henry Higgins, in the film My Fair Lady, declares that you can classify an Englishman as soon he opens his mouth. My grandparents knew that no amount of elocution would erase the guttural traces of Yiddish, but they had other means of differentiating themselves from the working class: their clothes. For a worker wore a cloth cap, a middle-class person wore a homburg hat. “There’s only one thing worse than being skint and that’s looking as if you’re skint,” was the motto they handed down through the generations.

Clothes were status as well as a sign of wealth. Their oldest son, my uncle, paid extra to have his initials blocked in gold letters in the inner sweatband of his hat. No-one could see it, but he knew it was there. It gave him an extra swagger. My father bought his suits at Austin Reed, made to measure. “The best of everything,” he said. “Only the best is good enough for my family.” On holiday he would march us up the steps of the five-star hotel we couldn’t afford to stay in and herd us into the lounge for afternoon tea. Because we looked the part, we were taken to be the part. We were never turned back or greeted with suspicion. Maybe, yes, my father looked like a rich Jew, but that’s what he wanted to look like.

My mother, who was a clothes horse from the very start, implicitly understood the symbolism of the designer label long before they became the objects of mass desire. She wore very little make-up, just some eyeshadow and lipstick, but in her wardrobe were the massed ranks of Jaeger and Aquascutum. How did she know what to wear? She read the fashion magazines, of course. Unlike her larger, louder, sisters-in-law, she also learned how not to appear the caricature of the vulgar Jewess. My aunts went for it with a vengeance. They came to afternoon tea in silk dresses, mink stoles, ropes of pearls and diamonds and a parasol. If it looked like it was worth a few bob, they’d put it on. My mother achieved her greatest aspiration in 1959 when my father took her to an East End furrier who made her a Persian broadtail coat with white mink collar, velvet-lined pockets, a satin lining decorated with hand-embroidered rosebuds and her own initials. It was spectacularly stylish.

In later life, in reduced circumstances, my mother began buying clothes from charity shops. She had a very good eye and got some terrific bargains, but it seemed to be both a sad decline from former glory and perhaps a marker of her becoming a true Englishwoman: thrifty, charitable, no longer aiming for the skies. My parents understood how power and class were intricately linked in ways they could not intellectually explain. They knew because of the pragmatic reality of settling in an another country, freeing themselves from the shadow of oppression and murder. Like their reverence for education, they saw clothes as the means by which people like them could appear to be who they were not. Appearances were absolutely crucial, not shallow, superficial, valueless. Had they had the opportunity I don’t doubt they would have worn brand new tweed jackets with brand new leather patches and taken to the grouse moors to ineffectually wave around a gun with absolutely no understanding of the contempt that would have accompanied them. It took another generation to get the layers of meaning that lie hidden in that greatest of English institutions, nuance and irony.