There are certain words, carrying overtones of money and privilege, which stir up strong emotions. One is ‘private income’. ‘What’s held me back,’ says Uncle Giles in The Music of Time, ‘is that I’ve never had a private income.’ J.B. Priestley used to say, disdainfully, ‘He’s got a private income voice.’ There were various euphemisms used by the squeamish to whom talking about money was indelicate. About 1870, someone noting a list of clergymen at Lambeth Palace inquired what was the significance of the letters ‘W.H.M.’ after the names of some of them. He was told they stood for ‘wife has means’. Another such emotive phrase is ‘expense account’. I remember when I was first given an official expense account, and how proud I felt: I had arrived. Now such things are discredited, regarded as vaguely dishonourable, though doubtless continuing in one form or another. The old accountant at Granada TV in Manchester, very sharp with expenses claims, used to say: ‘There’s no expense accounts in Heaven, tha’ knowst,’ adding: ‘Or in Hell, neither, lad.’
Another fighting word, or rather snarling word, is ‘perks’. It is the abbreviation of perquisite, from the Latin perquerere, and is defined as ‘any casual emolument, fee or profit, attached to an office or position in addition to salary or wages’. Bishop Jewell, defending the breach with Rome, referred angrily to ‘the yearly Preventions, Dispensations, Pluralities, Trialities, Totquol-Tolerations, for his Bulles, his Seals, his Signatures for Eating Flesh, for Egs, for White meat, to Priests, Concubines and other like merchandise’. But the system was much older than that. Dark references in the hieroglyphs suggest that behind the gigantic nobility of the pyramids at Giza, and their mortuary chapels, lay an intricate system of perks, shared from immemorial times by priests, scribes and even works-foremen, not in money but in funerary goods, embalming fluids, mummy bandages and the like saleable items.
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