While reading the recent biography of playwright John Osborne by John Heilpern, I ran across a detail that confirms a suspicion that I had about British cultural shorthand for indicating that a house is firmly upper working class or lower middle class. I'm like Goldfinger, who believed in the evidentiary rule of three: First time, happenstance; second time, coincidence; third time, enemy action. That semiotic shorthand is--ducks on the wall. (This might be no big secret for the British, but for an American, it's at the least interesting.)
Evidence:
1) In Epitaph for George Dillon, the play Osborne wrote just before his breakthrough, Look Back in Anger, the stage directions reveal that lower-middle class family's home has "painted china ducks" in flight on the sitting-room wall.
2) The song "Ducks on the Wall" from the Kinks album Soap Opera.
3) In the Who's concert version of Quadrophenia in the late 1990s, the hero, Jimmy, soliloquizes (on projected film) from his home. The only props are the ducks on the wall behind him.
In the 1930s, George Orwell insisted that the badge of English middle-class respectability was the aspidistra in the front window. I wonder if there's a corresponding totem for American middle-class life?
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In the Roger Waters song "Dunroamin, Duncarin, Dunlivin," he sings about a middle-class life that saps his will to roam, care, or live:
"I nailed ducks to the wall
Kept my heart in dark ruins
I built bungalows all over the hills."
The American equivalent? Probably depends on the era, but maybe three-way adjustable lamps, toaster ovens, and shag carpeting in the rumpus room?
I knew there would be more evidence of duckophilia; it seems to have been a manifestation of the 1950's, when Osborne's play is set and when many of these rockers were growing up.
Those are good suggestions about American shibboleths, but I think the temporal qualification you bring up is important. In the 1950's, many American working class families were moving into the middle classes, and that move meant a spatial move into the suburbs, from apartments to single-family dwellings. Also, the various ethnic and religious backgrounds would have made a big difference. For Catholics, a maudlin picture of the Sacred Heart or Jesus in Gethsemane would be de rigeur. In Scorsese's "Raging Bull," the cross in Jake LaMotta's bedroom was originally from Scorsese's parents' home.
Osborne, Davies, and Townshend are London products--but Waters grew up in Cambridge. Interesting.
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