… as observed on the No 134 bus.<\/p>\n
Heading for yesterday’s meeting, I was at the back of the bus and surrounded by a group of four girls, three of them perhaps 12, with a younger sister of 10 or so – rather excited to be out on what was probably one of their first excursions on their own. They were scrubbed, neat-haired, tastefully dressed in what were certainly expensive labels.<\/p>\n
They were excitedly having staring competitions with each other, innocently hanging off the railings (the bus was almost empty for much of the trip), having a great display of youthful high spirits.<\/p>\n
They probably go to private schools, and if not to posh, hard-to-get-into, all-girls’ public ones.<\/p>\n
Then at Kentish Town another group of youngsters got on – about the same age, but mixed-sex, two boys and two girls who didn’t look like siblings – much less groomed, wearing nylon parkas rather than woolen coats.<\/p>\n
So far as I could tell the two groups didn’t know each other – indeed it would be surprising if they did – but there was instant, aggressive interaction. <\/p>\n
One of the boys from the new group – a boy carrying a considerable amount of weight – came up and yelled a bit of abuse at them, and this new group took control of the prime space around the exit, while the girls shrank back to be around me and hardly said a word until they all got out at Archway, the younger one looking particularly anxious.<\/p>\n
Class conflict starts young in north London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
… as observed on the No 134 bus. Heading for yesterday’s meeting, I was at the back of the bus and surrounded by a group of four girls, three of them perhaps 12, with a younger sister of 10 or so – rather excited to be out on what was probably one of their first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}