Don’t slouch! Get your elbows off that table! Don’t chew with your mouth open! For goodness’ sake, stop dragging your feet when you walk! The list went on and on, forming an exhaustive guidebook of “manners” by which anyone over the age of 35 or so will remember having to live their childhood. Whenever I asked my mother why it was that I had to follow so many rules to simply exist on a day-to-day basis, she would reply, “Because you were brought up, not dragged up”.
To mothers everywhere, appearances were everything. How you behaved in public reflected life at home and so poor manners suggested poor parenting or poor family life, therefore the image must be maintained, come Hell or high water. Though we were poor as church mice when I was small, my clothes were clean and ironed and, should a spot of dirt or a mucky mark, no doubt the result of a day’s play, be present on my face, out would come the hanky, coated in spit and rubbed across the offending mark until it was banished. For all
