I have friends that went to Oxford at assorted times; all but one good working class grammar school kids. It was long ago and far away, but not another country. The past does stay with us. Since it was Oxford, their past includes some of today's Great and Good. One took chemistry with Margaret Thatcher and remembers her as very beautiful. All the males she knew had a crush on Margaret Thatcher.

Another, in the sixties, was secretary of the student Labour party and  someone important from London gave a talk. It was customary for the Secretary of the group to take any speakers to dinner. After the talk,  the granddaughter of a famous man, member of one of the large, well-known upper middle class liberal families of England, waltzed over, introduced herself and annexed the the London visitor. The two went off to dinner together, leaving the Secretary standing. The woman is a well known journalist on a liberal newspaper today.

At about the same time, late fifties, another friend had a brother that went to Cambridge. Academically brilliant, socially unacceptable. He took his first class degree and emigrated to the U.S.

Then there's the view from the other side: working class that stayed, frequently proudly, working class. Perhaps there was a time when the forelock was pulled gladly, although the BBC's  Cranford suggests not.

When I first came to Canterbury, I worked at anything I could get. First job: picking hops. It was a hop farm at the end of the street, and 'picking hops' involved standing in a huge barn while hops came by on a conveyor belt. First, the tractors pulled their trailers full of long, winding hop vines to one end of the barn. The first stage was mechanical/ A machine stripped the hops from the twiggy, woody vines. Then the hops came on a moving belt and I picked over them, pulling out leaves and stems. We started at 6 AM, had a fifteen minute break at 10:am, lunch from 12 to 1, another fifteen minute break at 4, then quit at 6PM. On Fridays, I got £80. in cash in a little brown envelope with my name on it - first names only.

It was cold, wet, noisy work and I hated the smell of the hops. When it rained, the water poured through the open building and I stood in water. All the women wore gloves. The skin was rubbed off your fingers by the work. Washing up gloves were best. I went through several pairs. The work rubbed the tips off the gloves as well.

The other temporary workers were a mixed lot. There were a couple of older women who remembered the time between the wars, when London's East End came down to pick the hops - a working vacation. After work, they'd have a proper knees up and a bit of a song. They stole anything that wasn't nailed down, I was told. But they were remembered with great affection.

The cockney sparrows didn't have a lot on the locals - they, too appeared to steal anything that wasn't nailed down. One woman I worked with spent her time at lunch picking apples in the orchard for her two horses to eat during the winter. She had picked beets earlier and done the same thing. She kept her two horses supplied with assorted veg and fruit all winter long on the stuff she lifted during the picking season. A lot of the rest were middle aged women, most of them on the dole, working illegally.

Outside, the farmer's sons drove the tractors and a crew of hard men cut the hops with their great huge scythes. This was skilled work and they moved around the country doing assorted short term agricultural labour. I got to know the outside lot better when we moved on to potatoes.

Picking potatoes is the hardest work I've ever done. A tractor turned up a field of potatoes. We followed with a sack and put the potatoes in. It was usually almost raining. The dirt was mud. We didn't work in a hard rain, but drizzles were a different matter. The tractor and its trailer were alongside and we dumped our potatoes into the trailer. You could kneel and crawl to find the potatoes or you could stoop.

I'd been an outsider in the hop barn. American, a husband working at the university. I felt less alien in Pakistan. Then came the potatoes. The women formed a little group, protecting each other. The migrant males were abusive. The toilet was the woods around the field and they followed women in. One of the older women tried talking to them and they laughed at her.

One afternoon, the tractor turned up the potatoes and it started raining hard. We quit work leaving a field of exposed potatoes. That night, someone (I think it was one of migrant crew) came in and took them all. Threw them in the trunk of a car and took them to sell on the housing estates around Canterbury, people said.

I lasted a week, and it was pure pride that drove me in Thursday and Friday. They were sure a woman with a husband teaching at the university couldn't take it, wasn't tough enough. I lasted longer than some. The woman feeding her horses quit after two days. She'd been followed into the woods when she went to urinate; it wasn't the work, it was the roaming gang. She'd been followed, viewed and mocked. It was then the older woman tried talking to the leader of the crew.

"It's a bit of a laugh, innit?" he said.

So the weekend came and the Monday followed and there was no way I could force myself back to the potato field.

The next job was temporary typing. I got a long term placement at an insurance company that had been taken over by a large conglomerate. I worked there for over a year.

I went in immediately after the take over. The company assumed that since Canterbury had a high unemployment rate people would continue working, put up with anything. They were wrong. A good insurance technician in Canterbury could find work in Ashford, Dover, or London. They did. The incompetent were left.

The lower level workers reacted in a nice passive aggressive way: they stole anything not nailed down and they sabotaged stuff. It was pretty straightforward class conflict; asymmetrical warfare employed by those without formal power against those with.

In my division, the last remaining insurance technician was put in charge of me and three clerical workers. He'd been generally despised by his co-workers: he was lazy, careless and his work had to be checked. He was also a misogynist and loved sexual innuendo. The women I worked with disliked him.

Initially, when he thought he was leaving, he deleted all the computer files on clients. He planned to claim he thought they were no longer needed since the new company had a different accounting system.

Then he was put in charge. Two of the women I worked with went through the paper files and recreated all the accounts. They didn't have to do this; he never showed any gratitude, but they covered him. Working class solidarity: we stick together.

I was an alien, but more or less accepted. Then I got hired as a university temp, teaching a class, paid by the hour. One of the bosses from the new company came in and offered me a full time job in front of the others. I told him I would be working at the university.

"What do you want to go up on the hill with all those pointy heads?" he asked, assuming I'd be typing. I cleared that up - I'd be lecturing.

But I agreed to work three days a week at the insurance company.

After he left, my co-workers were angry. They thought I'd intentionally deceived them, hiding my PhD. I hadn't hidden it - I didn't see its relevance. We would eat out every Friday; I was no longer welcome. There were nasty little jokes. All about people who think they are better than us.

They forgave me after a couple of weeks. We were friends again, sort of. I still exchange Christmas cards with them.

Of the three women, two were very clever. Initially, the not clever one taught me how to use the online accounting system. Her way involved a number of steps, strange ones. Someone came up from the IT system in the basement  I asked her about it. She was puzzled: that's absurd. So I stream lined the procedure.

The thick one approached work like magic, Was it thickness? Or simply a great disinterest in the work she was doing? She was conscientious, very accurate, did dull work well. There was no one better to help proof a series of numbers. The typist would read the input,  a co-worker would follow in the hard copy. She did that really well.

She was very well liked but also teased.

I was joking with her one day. I told her I had occult powers, could see the past...

"When you were about seventeen," I said, "there was a man... a few years older than you, your father couldn't stand him... he was dark, I think, or at least middling, brown hair... you broke off with him because of your family's objections, but you've always remembered him, thought what might have been, and even though you're happily married now you still think about him sometimes..."

She looked at me, eyes wide as an owl, "How did you know that?" she said.

The clever one, the ringleader in our little group, cackled: "We've all got one of those," she said.

This blog started when I mentioned on Facebook that I was going to re-read Allan Hollinghurt's Line of Beauty - one of the best books I'd read in the last ten years. Someone asked what it was about and I mentioned class.

Someone else responded that as an American she found all this pre-occupation with snobbery and the English funny. In the US, there were people with money and how much you had decided things.

It's not about snobbery; it's about power. How do people deal with very different access to power?

For awhile, in the US and UK both, in the time immediately after the Second World War, society became more open. In the US, the GI Bill allowed returning military people to go to university and buy houses at a lower interest rate with a lower down payment. There were strong unions. In the UK, the National Health Service came into existence. Again, unions played a part in making all sorts of things possible for the working class. Both societies opened up. Then Reagan and Thatcher. The children of those that took advantage of a more open, more merit based system were not willing to pay for others to have the same advantage. The women I worked with in the insurance agency resented any money spent on the poor and unemployed. They were the ones that most benefitted from the welfare state. But they adored Maggie. They did not like the old line Noblesse oblige Tories.

I watched a BBC 2 Alan Bennett Night yesterday. It included an hour documentary on Bennett and some of his monologues from the series,  Talking Heads.  He writes very well about his origins - his father was a butcher, he had a good state education and scholarships to university.  He writes about the working class with respect and affection. He said the two things the British could be most proud of were the National Health System and the BBC. Both were under threat and we must defend them.

I feel like I'm at the beginning of a New Dark Age. As times get harder, people get meaner, more selfish, draw in the wagons from the encircling hordes. The working class and the elite get more brutal. I'm 67. We're, personally, more or less all right. My children are both solidly entrenched in the middle class. They, and their children, ought to be protected from the deluge.

That's not good enough. We sink or swim together, as a society, and kicking others off the life raft isn't morally acceptable or pragmatically sound.