Word: upper-class
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There is still a smattering of opposition to Duvalier in Haiti. Once in a while someone scratches "Caca Doc" (a Creole obscenity) instead of Papa Doc on the wall, and in a Port-au-Prince bar last week a sodden upper-class mulatto suddenly raised his voice: "How long must we stand here and suffer and be killed?" But most Haitians have resigned themselves to a numbing life under Duvalier. The dictator's 5,000-man Tonton Macoute roams the country ferreting out opposition and collecting "donations" from terrified businessmen. Even Duvalier's own henchmen live in mortal...
...Edward VII, Bertie changed his style of living not a whit, giving Britain the most colorful court it had seen since Charles II. If he skirted scandal, it was because no man alive better understood British upper-class tribal customs. When, during a divorce proceeding, the testimony of Lady Charles Mordaunt was read in court confessing that she had committed adultery with Bertie when he was Prince of Wales "often, and in open day," it proved embarrassing but not fatal, because Bertie had played his part honorably-visiting her Ladyship secretly and in a hired brougham in mid-afternoon...
Jubb is horribly shy. He keeps a stiff upper lip about his strange afflictions, even when his grimy world is coming apart. He has traditional British hobbies-serving on a Good Neighbours Club, writing Keep Britain Tidy letters to the local papers, collecting back numbers of boys' magazines like Gem and Magnet through which he vicariously enjoys upper-class memories of "uncles with fivers, tuck shops, and inky fags." Acting as a rent collector in a shabby new housing development, he dreams of spending a week amid the iniquities of Hamburg's sex-riddled Reeperbahn. Yearning for some...
Take some Holden Caulfield crap about adolescents trying to find themselves, and a rebellion from the strictures of upper-class society, and you've got the makings of a monumental literary stereotype...
...invoking the perpetually Edwardian world of the British upper-class family, where Nanny's always Nanny and nobody dares call her Nan, Pamela Frankau has performed what must by now be almost a ritually required act for all female British authors. Despite this, the Weston children's summer opens onto satisfyingly sunny uplands of the past. Predictably arch and fey and charming, the characters are nevertheless conveyed with a kind of loving concern that can make even a relative seem momentarily fascinating...