Feature: First Generation: A Working-Class Student in a Middle-Class World

A first-generation student writing about their experiences at university is no new thing. ‘Fish out of water’ does not do justice to the culture shock that you go through when the drunken camaraderie of Freshers Week dies down and you actually have to contend with your environment and the people in it. My experience wasn’t that of blatant exclusion nor a crisis of class consciousness as the sons of Bullingdon make fun of my shoes and spit on passing proles. However, studying modern languages and taking a year abroad has exacerbated the differences that were little grievances before.

A bit about me: I’m an English and Spanish student from a single-mother household in South London. I’m among the first of my family to go to university and the first person in my family to learn another language. With some individual merit but mostly the guidance of some amazing teachers, I’ve come out of Britain’s ever-disintegrating modern languages department with the tools to live in Spain without any major issues.

My family also prides itself on being well-read, fitting the space to read somewhere on a busy day. I wasn’t exposed to the classics that have become more relevant to me at uni (I didn’t know who Homer was until he was compulsory reading) but my relationship with language was undeniably nurtured by my mother and grandparents. I still remember the rising excitement of reading a new word in a Lemony Snicket book and thinking, “Yes, I will find a way to say ‘lachrymose’ at the dinner table tonight”.

During my childhood, my sister and I were constantly reminded of the importance of language by both sides of the family. My limited memories of my father involve lectures on ‘proper English’ as opposed to his thick cockney twang. I still remember the mantra “you don’t want to sound like me when you grow up”. As a result, my accent wouldn’t immediately reveal my social class until I’m in a room with my cousins. Even now, my natural accent that comes out with my cousins and sister is not the way I would speak to my own mother, let alone a lecturer at my university.

The prestige of my uni isn’t on par with Oxbridge (no one goes punting along the Itchen River) but Russell Group universities are not exempt from elitism and class ignorance. I got into the uni after months of worrying about whether I would be able to afford the commute to my sixth-form college. After a surgery that knocked me out for weeks, I had to get cabs to school and back while I recovered from the anaesthesia. Money has been an issue all the way through school and university. I didn’t erupt with joy upon receiving my invitation to my first-choice uni. Instead, my mind became saturated with everything we’d have to buy and how quickly I could land a decent part-time job.

As I say, I didn’t feel much of a difference between myself and my peers at university until the novelty of moving to a new city had worn off. It was very much a slow-burning realisation that for all my merit and education, I was just born in a different world. From money talk to outside connections, it can be disheartening to immerse yourself in a world that so clearly wasn’t created for you. Everyone seems to have an uncle somewhere that can fix them up with some exclusive work experience, or even your dream job straight out of graduation. Everyone’s parents have a company where they can conveniently slot in your classmates with no questions asked or have the disposable income to follow their postgraduate dreams.

I worked as a receptionist with my naive dreams of doing a masters and a PhD. I looked up the annual cost of both a casual afterthought to my lamination duties. It was there I had to start accepting that maybe my dreams might come true a bit further down the line. I might have to make some judicious cuts to my ideal career path to support my family. I came to uni with that Girl Power outlook: career first, become independent, do whatever is necessary to get to that point. To this day, my education and career has always been a priority but not to the detriment of my family.

I think many single-parent children grow up with the fierce determination to give their parents something better than what they’ve had for so long. I want to get to a point where my mother doesn’t have to work anymore if she doesn’t want to; where my mother doesn’t have to take the minimum from employers that don’t appreciate her worth; where she never has to look for a man for financial security and the dangers that come with that. These sentiments often go amiss in higher education.

I remember sitting in a Spanish oral class in which the subject was wealth and poverty. One of the questions on the board to break the ice was “have you ever had to go a day without eating?”. This question would have been strictly out of bounds at my comprehensive secondary school. Even then, my secondary school was predominantly middle-class but somehow still had some notion of class sensitivity. From casual conversation to obtuse lectures about travelling abroad to maintain your progress in your second language (“why don’t you just move to Barcelona for three months?”) I couldn’t help but feel alienated by a course that was supposed to open the world up to me.

Of course, this experience isn’t limited to university. I wasn’t 18 the first time someone reacted with palpable discomfort when I said my father wasn’t around. I wasn’t 18 when I first became friendly with people whose lifestyles were too rich for my blood. I wasn’t 18 when I had to clarify that I can’t just ask my mother for money to compensate for reckless spending. I still see university as emancipation, a direct means to achieving a better life for myself and my family. It’s just harder to keep up the optimism when you’re surrounded by a culture in which my way of life is inconceivable.

Despite the complaints, university is definitely the best thing that’s happened to me. It’s been my gateway to some degree of social mobility and to opening my mind beyond myself. I’m literally writing this in Spain during my year abroad which never would have happened without higher education. For all the compulsory reading, seminars and presentations, my relationship with language stems from a single mother and a family that banded together for a budding bookworm and her sister. My family has carried me to a place where we’ve since become inconceivable but I write this to make ourselves, and the families like us, known.