"I'm not an intellectual - I'm not posh!"

So my dad says to me on the phone last night. Apparently, he was called 'an intellectual' by some new 'friends' (my dad, "the hermit", doesn't have any friends...so he says...).

"But", I say, "you're a thinker".
"Maybe so, but I'm not one of THEM".
"Eh?"
"I mean, they're in a different league aren't they - I used to work for people who fitted the description of 'intellectual' when I was a lap-dog at the library. I was always aware of the difference between me and THEM. I just didn't fit into THAT atmosphere - didn't have the same opportunities, background, status, wealth etc. I always felt like a fraud, like I was gonna get found out."

When I was a kid, my dad would excitedly tell me every time he passed as 'Dr' at work - how his initials 'D.R' were misread by the 'elite', as he called them, and that, as a result, he was temporarily accorded membership to 'the old boys club' at an office meeting - offered a cigar rather than told to make tea.

My dad - quiet, gentle, polite, thoughtful, curious, inquisitive, bright etc - fits the bill. In a parallel universe - one in which he stayed on at school rather than leave at 14, got some qualifications rather than work a string of dead-end jobs, went to university rather than support his single mum....maybe in THAT life, he might have become an intellectual.

Being a proud man, my dad doesn't talk much about growing up poor - about his mum working all hours at the factory to single-handedly raise 5 kids, getting teased for having no clothes and being forced to wear his sister's hand-me-downs, having frequent colds from leaky shoes and threadbare jumper and no coat, going hungry. He still has the only Christmas present he received as a boy - a shrivelled-up orange which he keeps tucked away in his bedside drawer.

However, unlike my mum (more on her later!), my dad would never say he was working class. but neither would he say that he was aspiring middle class (whatever that means). He just notices differences.

I wanted to ask my dad whether he thought I was an intellectual. I was too embarrassed. Me - the Dr of the family, the second to go to university (my sister was the first) and the first to do a PhD. Sometimes, I feel a class gulf between me and my parents. I've had all the opportunities they never had. And yet, I also feel set apart from most academics I know - I feel ambivalent about being a Dr (how ridiculous a notion), 'mummy' and 'daddy' didn't pay for me to go to uni (I was lucky enough to get a string of means-tested scholarships) and I don't have the right connections.

On paper, I should fit and yet I don't. Like father like son, I feel like a fraud.