by George Mikes
It has still never occurred to one single Englishman that not everybody would regard it as a step up, as a promotion, to become English; that in the last decade or two quite a few of these bloody foreigners started regarding the English as the laughing stock of Europe and looking down upon the present generation with pity; that, indeed, many of them thank Almighty God for letting them belong to more prosperous and successful nations. No; the pound is still ‘sterling’, hundred mark-notes are still strange pieces of paper with some Teutonic nonsense printed on them. And if Britannia does not rule the waves, very well, that is only and exclusively because the waves and the world do not deserve it any more.
Old and New
Understatement is still in the air. It is not just a speciality of the English sense of humour; it is a way of life. When gales uproot trees and sweep away roofs of houses, you should remark that it is ‘a bit blowy’. I have just been listening to a man who got lost in a forest abroad for a week and was scrutinized by hungry wolves, smacking their lips. Was he terrified? – asked the television interviewer, obviously a man of Italian origin. The man replied that on the seventh day, when there were no rescuers in sight and the sixth hungry wolf joined the pack, he ‘got a bit worried’. Yesterday, a man in charge of a home where six hundred old people lived, which was found to be a fire risk where all the inhabitants might burn to death, admitted: ‘I may have a problem.’ (Mind you: he may have a problem. What about the six hundred? Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to burn and die.)
Britain is still a class-ridden society. As soon as a man opens his mouth, we can tell in what sort of school he missed his education. Aliens have a tremendous advantage here: they may be beyond the pale; but they are beyond class too.
But the class system has changed. Britain has a working class which does not work; a ruling class which does not rule; and a middle class which is not in the middle but is sliding fast to the bottom.
Before the war you could place a man by his clothes. The rich – particularly at weekends – went around in rags; the working class wore cloth caps; prostitutes wore foxes round their necks and smoked cigarettes in the street; wives of rich brewers wore mink coats and wives of dustmen were dressed as today only Eliza Doolittle is in revivals of My Fair Lady. Today mink has become vulgar and the Marks and Spencer era has abolished class differences in dress. There are tricks, of course, and there is Dior, of course, but by simply looking at a woman you can no longer tell whether her husband is a struggling property developer or a rich dustman.
Not long ago my blue raincoat was taken away in the Garrick Club by mistake by one of our noble lords – keys in the pocket and all – and I was left with the other man’s blue raincoat – keys in the pocket and all. The noble lord wrote me a letter of apology: ‘My only excuse is that a Marks and Spencer raincoat resembles a John Collier raincoat to such an extent …’
Before the war people came here to settle only when they were driven to do so: refugees and immigrants. (In those days immigrants could be white. But we were white Negroes, really. Today a Negro, as a rule, is black, except that no black man may be called a Negro.) No one settled in this country who was not forced to. Today, fellow-aliens from happy and prosperous countries flock here: Germans, Americans, Swedes, Arabs and many others. The British are poor – slightly beggarly, even – but well-mannered, good-humoured, tolerant and civilized. Their elegant decadence is the magnet that draws people here. The English, on the other hand, leave in large numbers. Their exodus is called the brain drain and includes a fair number of the completely brainless, too. The emigrés are old-fashioned Imperialists who want cash and security. Similar exchanges of population occurred after the war in the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia or the former German regions of today’s Poland, for example – but those exchanges were enforced, these are voluntary. England will soon be full of completely anglicized immigrants from California, Frankfurt, Port of Spain and Jeddah while other lands will be full of frustrated and morose Britons. Mr Enoch Powell is barking up the wrong tree. If he wants to live among white Englishmen, all he has to do is move to Kuwait.
The cloth-cap image
Language
In my early days there were stories about funny refugees murdering the English language. A refugee woman goes to the greengrocer to buy red oranges (I mean red inside), very popular on the Continent and called blood oranges.
‘I want two pounds of bloody oranges.’
‘What sort of oranges, dear?’ asked the greengrocer, a little puzzled.
‘Bloody oranges.’
‘Hm …’ He thinks. ‘I see. For juice?’
‘Yes, we are.’
Another story dates from two years later. By that time the paterfamilias – the orange-buying lady’s husband – has become terribly, terribly English. He meets an old friend in Regents Park, and instead of talking to him in good German, softly, he greets him in English, loudly.
‘Hallo, Weinstock … Lovely day, isn’t it? Spring in the air.’
‘Why should I?’
And on one occasion I received a written message from an Austrian gentleman, that he wanted to speak to me urgently ‘in the nearest convenience’.
Those days are over. Not only former refugees but the whole world has learnt to speak proper English. Pronunciation is another matter; the refugee may still be the man who has lost everything except his accent. On the other hand, Central European has become one of the legitimate accents of English. Or the trouble with the foreign student may be that his English is too good, too precise, too correct. ‘He speaks English too well, he must be a bloody foreigner,’ is a frequent comment. And a just one, too, because while the rest of the world is busy learning English, the English themselves are busy forgetting their beautiful mother tongue. If you want to sound a proper Englishman use no more than eight hundred words and, preferably, about half of them incorrectly. Most Englishmen will tell you that ‘English has no grammar’, which is just another way of saying that they have no grammar. Not long ago I kept seeing Post Office vans with the attractive slogan: ‘Everyone should have a phone of their own.’ In a letter to the Guardian I remarked: ‘But I think nearly everyone do already.’ A number of correspondents wrote in to tell me off as a pedant and a prig, remarking that the Post Office had used good ‘colloquial’ English.
Before the war a spade used to be a spade – often brutally so. I remember an institution named Hospital for Incurable Diseases. How gentle, how tactful, I thought and tried to imagine the feelings of the patient driven through the gates. But by today a dustman has become a refuse collector, a policeman a law enforcement officer, the pilot of a plane a captain, a man who sells second-hand socks from a market stall a business executive and a dog a home-protection officer.
If you want to sound truly English, you must learn to speak the language really badly. It will not be difficult, there are many language schools where they teach you exactly that. (If you are unlucky you may choose one of the old-fashioned ones and be taught English as it should be, and not as it is, spoken.) Remember that everything is a ‘situation’ or a ‘problem’ nowadays. In the old days a man was travelling, today he is in a travel situation. In the past he got married, today he finds himself in a marriage situation. In the past he went bankrupt, today he has a liquidity problem. In the old days he was impotent, today he has a virility problem.
In our economic plight rationing has already begun. This is kept a secret and for the time being only the letter r is rationed. The modern Englishman has a certain number of r-s at his disposal and no more. He – and that applies even to some radio announcers – uses them foolishly. He will speak of Indiar-and-Pakistan and of Lawr-and-order, only to find that he used up his r-ration, frittered it away, and now he has to save madly where he can. So he will speak of a Labouh M.P. and of the Fah East.
Do we really have a serious r-problem? Or are we just in an illiteracy situation?
Food
‘On the Cont
inent people have good food; in England they have good table manners,’ I wrote in How to be an Alien. Since then, food in England has improved, table manners have deteriorated. In those days food was hardly ever discussed, it was taboo, like sex. Today newspapers and magazines all have their good food guides and many so-called experts send you off to eat uneatable meals. Then it was possible for a much-travelled businessman, even a diplomat, to have no idea what an avocado pear was; today any docker may quarrel with his wife: ‘What’s that Doris, paëlla? Paëlla again? All right, I know I like paëlla but paëlla every day – bloody paëlla and nothing else? What about a decent, honest-to-goodness ratatouille for a change?’
There is no denying that the post-war travelling mania has improved British eating habits beyond recognition. Before the war, the French loved eating and were proud of it; the puritanical British loved eating just as much but were ashamed of their passion. After the war, millions of people got acquainted with good food abroad and refused the staple diet of stale boiled cabbage floating in tepid, salt water. You could eat very well in London in the sixties and seventies. Even Michelin published a guide to British restaurants, partly to pay tribute to this improvement, partly to emphasize that in spite of all improvements not one single British establishment deserved three rosettes.
That much-boasted improvement, however, is not quite so universal as we should like to believe. In 1976 the police noticed that a large number of foreign lorry-drivers were committing speeding offences. They were driving their enormous articulated lorries as if they were racing cars or as if they were being pursued. Investigation established that they were, in fact, pursued: by English food. They were doing their level best – risking their licences and even their lives – to get away from English meals. They wanted to deliver their goods and return to the Continent on the same day. As they had to eat something while in Britain, most of them – according to the UICR, the Union Internationale des Chauffeurs Routiers – brought decent continental sandwiches with them.
There is another remarkable development. In those early days one could not find one single English restaurant on the Continent and very few in London. Soho was full of Italian, Greek, Chinese, Spanish and Hungarian restaurants. Yugoslav and Portuguese places came later, to be joined before long by beefburger and Kentucky fried chicken establishments, Wimpy bars and other glories of American civilization; but proper English restaurants were few and far between even in London. Today, almost everything that is bad in the English kitchen is becoming popular on the Continent while everything that is good is going out of fashion even in Britain.
Take the English breakfast, for example, the true glory of English culinary art which puts the pale and insipid café complet to shame. Is it gaining ground in Oslo or Luxembourg? On the contrary – and it has almost completely disappeared from English homes and is fast disappearing even from English hotels. You can make your own breakfast in some hotels from instant coffee or tea supplied in little bags, or you may be served scrambled eggs made of top-quality plastic mixed with outstandingly tasty cotton wool.
But other things English are gaining ground. Fish and chip shops (this is an exception to the rule: fish and chips is one of the glories of Britain) are being opened all over Europe and British cod is being wrapped in the Daily Mirror – after all, you cannot wrap up fish and chips in the Dagens Nyheter and still less in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. So far so good. Fish and chip shops are great institutions, but the true horrors and monstrosities of the English kitchen are becoming even more popular.
English grocer-shops are being opened in Brussels and other places where true Britons congregate in large numbers. They sell canned steak and kidney pud, English sausages, porridge, cans of oxtail and mulligatawny soups, baked beans, tomato ketchup and other outrages on the human palate. You might have thought that the British leave this country in order to get away from all this. Not at all. They queue up for them all over Europe. I am happy to report that these imports have not made any impact yet on the continentals. As soon as the French start queuing up for baked beans, I shall commit harakiri, simply by leaning slowly on my favourite carving knife. Yes: the day the French start eating canned steak and kidney pie with a little tomato ketchup on top will mark the end of a great civilization, the end of European supremacy and the suicide of a Continent.
‘Watch it, mate, I ain’t eatin’ my chips out o’ some bloody foreign paper’
And a final warning to continental visitors. Many have come to grief, not knowing an important British custom.
At dinner parties – on the Continent as well as in Britain – you will be offered a second helping. On the Continent – particularly in Austria but also in other Central European lands – you say ‘No thank you’, upon which the hostess will shriek, moan, sob and beseech you to eat a little more. She will accuse you of not liking her food, of spoiling her evening, of making her unhappy, of being unappreciative and ungrateful, a bad guest and a bad man. So you protest your appreciation, assure her that the food is magnificent, one of the memorable meals of your life, take a lot more of everything, force it down, get indigestion, and speed on to an early demise.
All continentals, brought up in Mönchengladbach, Attnang-Puchheim, Hódmezövásárhely or Subotica, start off in Britain, too, with an innocent ‘No thank you’, as their mothers taught them. And that is the end of the affair. To their horror, the hostess does not fall on her knees and does not threaten suicide if her guest does not make a pig of himself. With rueful eyes the poor guest sees the dishes disappear, and the subject is closed.
So when offered a second helping, grab it. Or simply nod. No one will think the worse of you. And no one will regard you as a gentleman for not taking a second helping. No one will regard you as a gentleman whatever you may do – so you might as well take that second helping.
Drinks
Drinks have gone in or out of fashion, like clothes. When I first came here, gin and lime was the most popular drink. Ask for a gin and lime today and people will look at you as if thinking you must have fought with the Duke of Wellington’s army. Then came the pink gin era. Apart from a few fossils, who drinks pink gin today? Whisky, of course, has remained a favourite and vodka has become popular. (Justly so. Vodka today is 2.7 per cent stronger than in Czarist times. Some sceptics doubt that this one single achievement of the Soviet State justifies sixty years of upheaval, misery, Stalin, purges and the Gulag Archipelago – where, by the way, not much vodka is consumed by the prisoners.)
During the post-war years the English have learnt a great deal about wine and Britain is now, par excellence, the land of wine snobbery, beaten only by the United States. The British love sweet wine but all deny this with a vehemence worthy of a better cause because they know (or believe) that drinking sweet wine is non-U. Excellent and expensive dry continental wines are being shipped here, then a little glucose is added to them, in secret. As a French wine expert once remarked to me: ‘The English like their wine dry as long as it’s sweet.’
British drinking habits are also gaining ground abroad. Whisky, and gin and tonic, have long been favourites among knowledgeable continentals but nowadays British-style pubs are being opened all over Europe and ale is on draft at many places. Serious Belgians – Flemings and Walloons alike – sip Guinness and nod approval. But if the expansion of British ale is a little surprising, the conquering march – well, the few conquering steps – of British wine is downright flabbergasting.
More and more people maintain that Britain is a vine-growing country. If it could be done under Elizabeth I why not under Elizabeth II? What’s wrong with our Elizabeth? A friend of mine, in a high and responsible job and otherwise quite normal, keeps reassuring me in all seriousness that his own wine, grown in Fulham, beats any French and German wine hands down. As he produces only twenty-eight bottles per annum of his Château Parsons Green, Pouilly Fumé and Niersteiner need not tremble yet. But they’d better watch Fulham. I tried his wine in Chelsea, in a house some
five hundred yards from the Fulham border. It was vinegary, indeed undrinkable, and we were all embarrassed – except for him. ‘I admit,’ he said generously, ‘that fine though this wine is, it doesn’t travel very well.’
In the mid-sixties I wrote a book on snobbery with the Duke of Bedford. Once, after dinner, I asked him what his own, worst snobbery was.
‘What exactly do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Something you know is snobbish and silly, still you stick to it.’
He did not have to think long: ‘I’d rather bite my tongue off than say “cheers”.’
‘What do you say? Skål?’
‘Nothing, of course. That’s the point. A man likes to drink in peace and does not want attention drawn to himself whenever he lifts his glass to his lips. Just drink and keep silent.’
For a while this rule was followed in U circles. But today people do not want to be U any more. Besides, the one strong measure the Chancellor has taken to solve the economic crisis is to raise the price of drinks higher and higher. That is supposed to save the country. Like taking in one another’s washing. So the drinkers of Britain are really saving us all. Drinking another double whisky is an act of patriotism. Even pink gin. And vodka, too. England expects every man to do his duty.