By Eirwen Abberley Watton

I’ve always struggled with and yet been fascinated by the intersections between class and identity. It wasn’t until I left home, until I moved away to a Russell Group University and became surrounded by people who’d been to grammar, private and public schools, that I realised what a massive part of my identity home was. In many ways, class is an invisible identifier; it’s something far more hidden and mutable than other identity classifications. It’s not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, like gender, disability or race (although the possibility has been discussed in the interest of addressing social immobility).

Class is an extremely complicated subject. In many ways, I was fortunate as a child. I was raised by a strong, independent single mother who owned our house and did everything in her power to give me access to opportunities. I went to a nice, small rural state school. Yes, the textbooks were falling apart and provided on a 1:5 ratio (textbook to students), and I was the only person in my year group who even considered applying to Oxford or Cambridge, but my teachers wanted me to succeed. My education was overall a very positive experience. My grandad was the only one who didn’t want me to go to university. My brother and I were the first in our family to do so, with everyone else working service or manual jobs.

It was when I left this rural Welsh bubble that the inequalities became stark and really manifested themselves in my sense of self (my Welshness, and its history of inferiority and oppression, is a whole other subject in itself). As my friends sent their essays to parents to be read, I proofread a letter my mum had written expressing her mistreatment at her job as a cook. As my flatmates looked forward to reading week, to going home and being cooked for and looked after, I prepared myself to do online admin for my uncle and to do what I could to reduce my single mother’s domestic workload. As the people in my seminar found work experience at companies owned by family friends, I received an email from the university about a charity supporting graduates from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ to become more employable.

I am grateful to that charity. Not only did they give me valuable career support (in writing CVs, getting internships, and mock interviews) that I could never have received from my family network, but they also ignited my passion for social mobility. As I learned more about the entrenched reasons behind the work they did – for example, that working-class students at Russell Group universities who get a first-class degree are less likely to secure an elite job than a more privileged student who gets a 2:2 degree (UpReach) – I gained a sense of pride in myself and what I had accomplished. I was validated for all those times that I returned to my room after seminars and cried because I felt so behind everyone else or left a sports society taster session before it even started because everyone there had clearly had hours of expensive lessons.

I loved university. Once I settled in and realised that my achievements and hard work should be an even greater source of pride based on my background, I relished the academic environment. I felt inspired to volunteer for social mobility charities and pursue a career that could have a positive impact on other people’s lives. That doesn’t mean that everything was suddenly easy, of course. I struggle daily with my confidence and with believing that I am capable of anything more. This isn’t just imposter syndrome – these inequalities and barriers to social mobility are starker than ever in the UK. It was when I entered the workplace that I really began to struggle with the distant concept of ever having children.

For context, I’m 22. I graduated from university about 18 months ago and went straight into a competitive local government graduate scheme, with a higher starting salary than I expected as an English graduate. Side note: no one ever talks about what it feels like to be barely an adult and already on a higher salary than your parent has possibly ever been (and it’s still below £30,000). Or the little twinges of guilt that accompany any non-essential purchase (like a £4 coffee or a theatre ticket) that you know your family would not have made.

My sense of self is so interwoven with these warring feelings: the fierce pride I feel for what I’ve achieved despite my background, my leftist politics that are abhorrently against the accumulation of wealth, and my complicated relationship with how these things distance me from my family. So I can’t tell whether it’s wrong or not to want any children I have to grow up the way I did.

I don’t know what will happen in the future; my circumstances are of course uncertain, and I’m not even sure if children are something I’ll want. And maybe the fact that the idea of my children having more privilege or advantage than I did does not fill me with joy is a sign that I shouldn’t have them. My socio-economic beliefs and politics are so passionate that the thought of having children who are removed from that experience, who never have to scrimp and avoid any form of waste, repels me (this might also be because this part of myself is so inseparable from my environmental consciousness and my detestation for consumerism and waste).

In some ways, it’s a null question. Even if my income plateaus or declines, my education has given me access to a cultural capital that cannot be erased and that I never had from my family. My child would never find themself proofreading their mother’s letters. They might never comprehend the pain of loving a family that you are conscious of not looking down on because that would make you hate yourself (although you are past that now – now you are merely sad and angry for everything they don’t have).

I want my hypothetical children to work, as hard as I did, to feel so fiercely passionate about where they come from. I don’t want a central part of my identity to be something that they will never be able to relate to, a diversion in experience that would be entirely unbridgeable. But my cultural capital and everything I’ve gained will become theirs, and my childhood will be lost in the march of progress.

I don’t want children.