How to be a Brit

by George Mikes

  Shopping

  When you, Distinguished Visitor, want to do some shopping in England, you are – as you will find out soon – at the mercy of the shop assistants, now called sales ladies or sales gentlemen, soon to be called Knights and Dames of the Barter. Shopping here is different from shopping elsewhere.

  1. When you enter the shop, as likely as not, the Knights and Dames of the Barter will be engaged in lively and witty conversation with one another. You must wait until they turn their attention to you and that may take quite a while. Under no circumstances are you to interrupt their conversation; you are not to speak until you are spoken to.

  2. If there are other people waiting in the shop – be the shop the local butcher’s where you intend to buy a quarter of a pound of minced meat or Cartier’s, where you mean to spend a quarter of a million on a ring for your girl-friend – you wait for your turn. If the death penalty is ever to be restored in Britain, it will not be for murder – an art the English admire and appreciate as connoisseurs – but for queue-jumping, the most heinous of all crimes.

  3. While – say – the butcher serves a lady who is shopping for five days for her family of fourteen, you must not take advantage of a momentary pause (as you would in France) to butt in and ask if he has any calf s liver – not because you want to be served out of turn, of course, just to find out whether it is worth waiting. You will get no reply. This is not discourtesy: it is simply due to the fact that you do not exist. You may not be aware of this; you may live in the mistaken belief that you do exist, but you do not. Before your turn comes you are less than a dog. A dog would be noticed and urged to leave the shop. But you definitely do not exist before your turn comes, you are a non-person, you are thin air, a nonentity, a body non-incarnate, waiting to be materialized when the butcher turns his smiling attention to you.

  ‘You are my heart’s delight!’

  4. Few British people go shopping because they need something, still less because they can afford it. Shopping is a social occasion – an opportunity for a chat, an opportunity to display your charm, to show the world that you are on Christian-name terms with the butcher’s second assistant and not just a casual who has dropped in from the street. When your turn comes, the butcher’s full attention will be yours. No one exists but you. You are the centre of his universe and that’s quite something. You may wax a trifle impatient when – having already waited fifty-seven minutes in the queue, ankle-deep in sawdust – the lady with the large family starts explaining to the butcher which of her children loves liver and which prefers kidney, or when she enquires if the butcher’s younger daughter has already had her second baby. You should suppress this impatience. When your turn comes, the butcher will be yours and only yours. You can then discuss with him last night’s rain, your digestion, your children’s progress in arithmetic, the topless lady’s photo in today’s Sun (but not politics or indeed anything that a reasonably intelligent adult would like to discuss with his favourite butcher). In France they would interrupt you with some rude remark; in Italy they would howl and burst out in ribald laughter; in Greece they would set fire to the shop. But you are in England, among tolerant and understanding Britons who are waiting patiently not so much for their meat as for their turn to chat with the butcher.

  5. On entering or leaving the shop you do not greet the shopkeeper. Your first words should be: ‘Have you got …’ or ‘May I have …’ your last: ‘Thank you’. In between, as explained, you may discuss any subject from the shopkeeper’s grandchildren to Arsenal’s chances against Liverpool, but never say ‘Goodbye’ or ‘Hallo’, or ‘Cheerio’, or ‘Grüss Gott’ or ‘Ciao’.

  Sex

  I have never been so much abused for anything I have written as for the shortest chapter I have ever produced in my life, a chapter on the sex-life of the English. People kept pointing out to me that the English multiply somehow and survive as a nation. This, surprisingly, is true.

  Nowadays they also point out that London is – or was, for a time – the sex capital of the world. Let them believe it, it makes them happy.

  The sex-life of the English is in strange contradiction with their placid temperament. In everything else (e.g. queueing, driving) they are reserved, tolerant and disciplined; in their sex life they tend to be violent and crude. A surprisingly large number of Englishmen like to be flogged by ladies wearing black stockings and nothing else; they believe that those ubiquitous places where women strip and show themselves stark naked to an audience, for a modest fee, are evidence of virility; they think that the high circulation of porn magazines is a sign of high sexuality and not of high neurosis. They fail to see why sweating, topless waitresses should put you off food and sex at one and the same time.

  They also fail to see that a beautiful woman’s knee in elegant stockings is more alluring and exciting than the sight of a naked sexual organ. They are misled by their noble democratic principles which proclaim that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. They think that it applies to the female organ, too. It must not only be there; it must be seen to be there.

  ‘Again, again, my enchantress!’

  People have asked me many times – with an ironical glint in their eyes – if I still believed (as I wrote in 1946) that ‘Continental people have sex-life; the English have hot-water bottles.’ Or do I agree that things have changed and progressed? Yes, I agree, things have progressed. Not on the Continent, where people still have sex-lives; but they have progressed here because the English now have electric blankets. It is a pity that electricity so often fails in this country.

  The fact remains that England may be a copulating country but it is not an erotic country. Whenever I try to personify sex in England, Lord Longford or Mrs Whitehouse spring to mind. Girls are being taken to bed, to be sure, but they are not courted; they are being made love to but they are not pursued. Women are quite willing to go to bed but they rarely flirt with men. Ladies between the ages of eight and eighty (let’s say eighty-five) come back from Italy outraged and complaining bitterly about the crude wolf-whistles. Crude they may be, but they do make middle-aged ladies feel twenty-five years younger, wanted and desired, and these complaints are just disguised boasts. When bishops, retired brigadiers or at least young executives start wolf-whistling in this town of ours, then I may believe that London has become – well, not the sex capital of the world – but a budding sex-village.

  Another thing that has changed in the last decades is the position of homosexuals. It is a far cry from the inhuman persecution of Oscar Wilde to public demonstrations that homosexual marriages should be legalized. (I have heard of a graffito at an American University which claimed: ‘Legalize necrophilia!’ But this is not a popular movement here, as yet.)

  On Cat-Worship

  Having joked for decades about how the English worship the cat, like the ancient Egyptians only more so, I have fallen for the cat myself. It has become my sacred animal.

  It all started with a little black cat visiting me. ‘I like it here,’ she declared, and kept turning up. I thought it would be courteous to call her by a name when talking to her but I had no idea what her name was. I had to call her by the generic name of Cica, the Hungarian for pussy. (Later, she started spelling her name Tsi-Tsa because she spells everything phonetically.) I felt embarrassed at not being able to offer her anything to eat, just as one feels the need to offer a cup of coffee or a drink even to casual visitors, so I started buying cat-food. I did not know then what I know now; that this is the way of stealing somebody else’s cat.

  One day I was caught red-handed. In a little supermarket I had a tin of cat-food in my hand when a nice-looking blonde lady came up to me, threw a glance at the object in my hand and asked me somewhat pointedly if I was the gentleman who lived in that little red-brick house round the corner. I admitted I was he. ‘My cat keeps visiting you,’ she said firmly. ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I started feeding her not realizing that I was not supposed to do so. Too late now. She expe
cts to be fed.’ ‘That’s all right,’ said the kind lady. ‘We can share her from now on.’ She added: ‘This would have been a tragedy two years ago. I have a son who just adored that cat. But he is fourteen now and he has reached an age when he is more interested in girls than in cats.’ ‘That’s perfect timing,’ I told her, ‘because I have reached an age when I’m getting more interested in cats than in girls.’

  So we shared Tsi-Tsa. That’s how I got hold of half a cat. Friends started guessing which half of her belonged to me. The Tsi or the Tsa? There were some ribald suggestions that it was the Tsa. Then difficulties arose in her original home: a new tenant on the ground floor kept locking the door against her and she could not get in and out. She got fed up with that and moved over to me completely.

  By this time I was a great admirer of her sovereign views, her incorruptibility, her coolness to human flattery; her aloofness; her arrogance; her playfulness (when she wanted to play); her affectionate nature (when she needed affection). Some people asked me why I kept a cat. But I did not keep a cat. It never occurred to me to keep a cat. She has chosen me and moved in. You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people because cats find humans useful domestic animals.

  A dog will flatter you but you have to flatter a cat. A dog is an employee; the cat is a free-lance.

  I was hurt when some cat-lovers started making derogatory remarks: ‘You have only one cat?’ they asked. Then Ginger turned up. I had to call him Ginger because once again I did not know his name. He claimed to be terribly hungry, so I had to feed him. It turned out eventually that he was no stray, he belonged to a lady next door, he has a good home but a voracious appetite. So he turns up for his breakfast every morning and knocks on my door with his paw when he arrives. As Tsi-Tsa is madly jealous, Ginger is fed in the patio. He is generous and sometimes he arranges breakfast-parties for other cats. Always the same two cats are invited and they eat together in a pleasant and friendly manner. It is all rather formal. I was told by neighbours – who know all the cats in the neighbourhood – that one of the guests is actually Ginger’s son, the other his sister-in-law.

  Other cats know about these feasts. They keep turning up and looking at me with an air of expectancy. I resist becoming the useful domestic animal of more and more cats but I know I am fighting a losing battle. The stray cats of Fulham have got my name and address.

  Some friends believe that I am overdoing things with Tsi-Tsa. Not quite so much as Dezsö Szomory, a brilliant but eccentric and misanthropic Hungarian writer of an earlier generation. He hated human beings but loved and respected his cat. He promised an article for Christmas to a newspaper but failed to deliver it on time. A frantic editor rang him up several times. In the end he put a sheet of paper on his desk but before he could start writing his cat lay down on the paper, as cats are wont to do. To move the cat was out of the question but the article was really urgent by now. So he wrote the article around the cat. (The manuscript, I am told, is still preserved in Budapest.)

  I have not done that as yet but I see the point. Whenever Tsi-Tsa sits on my chair – at the desk or at the table when I want to eat – I move her chair gently and get another chair for myself. I have been late for appointments, failed to go shopping and missed planes because Tsi-Tsa was sitting on my lap. ‘But why don’t you throw her down?’, quite a few astonished people have asked me. But I am equally astonished by such questions. You don’t throw a fellow being down. You don’t treat her that way just because she happens to be a cat. That would be real racial discrimination: the human race discriminating against the feline race.

  ‘May I introduce my sister-in-law?’

  On How Not to be Reserved

  ‘The trouble with the English,’ a Cypriot restaurant owner in Islington told me, ‘is that they are not reserved enough.’

  ‘You mean that they are much too reserved,’ I corrected him.

  ‘That’s what I thought for a long time, too. I concentrated all my energies on making them less reserved, less stiff. On making them relaxed; at least on one single occasion; at least in my own restaurant.’

  ‘But you never succeeded,’ said I.

  ‘Alas, I did. On New Year’s Eve this restaurant was chock-full, I had to send clients away. The atmosphere, the ambiance was marvellous. People started talking to one another across the tables, even flirting with one another. At midnight glasses were raised, strange people drank champagne together, they embraced and kissed. They sang Auld Lang Syne in chorus and started dancing – everybody in the restaurant, not a single soul stayed at the tables. I never thought this was possible in this country. I was really happy. And even that was not all. They marched round and round the tables, then it became much too hot and someone had the bright idea of leading the lot of them out and they danced round and round the square. I have never seen a happier and more hilarious crowd even in Nicosia than those dancers in the square.’

  ‘Then what are you complaining about?’

  ‘Only half of them came back.’

  On the National Passion

  Quite a few people told me that I was mistaken when I made fun of the English queueing habit. It was simply a war-time expediency, it was explained to me, and it would disappear in no time.

  It is still with us and will remain with us forever because it corresponds to an inner need, it is a way of self-expression. Other nations need occasional outbursts of madness and violence; the English need occasional excesses of self-discipline. Other nations, under unbearable stress, shout, howl, get into brawls, run amok; the English queue up for a cup of tea.

  Demonstrations in other countries are violent affairs, with baton charges and mass arrests. Such things have occurred here, too, in the past. Today, if you are bored, you arrange a demo. It may be about the fraternal visit of some objectionable eastern potentate, or it may just as likely be a protest against the late delivery of the morning mail, or the exclusion of dachshunds from comprehensive education. It may be a demo by citizens because too few of their relatives are allowed into the country, or a demo by Enoch Powell’s supporters against letting in too many. It may be a demo by bread delivery men against the low price of bread or by housewives against the high price of bread. Whether it is a demo by stamp-collectors for more special issues or by pacifists for the abolition of nuclear weapons, it does not matter, the picture will always be the same: a peaceful, smiling crowd marching, carrying boards with slogans and accompanied by a large number of bored policemen. All they will achieve is a gigantic traffic jam but that’s better than nothing. Indeed, judging by some demonstrators’ looks at frustrated motorists, it must be quite satisfactory.

  In shops the English stand in queues; in Government offices they sit in queues; in churches they kneel in queues; at sales time, they lie in queues all night in Oxford Street.

  I was queueing myself once at the snack-bar of Hurlingham Club. The queue was long. In front of me there was a patient and silent middle-aged English couple and in front of them three crazy foreign women talking to one another in loud voices and with atrocious German accents. They had forgotten to collect their cutlery when joining the queue and they had forgotten to collect their salad from a side-table, so they were rushing backward and forward, cackling ‘I am so sorry’ with what they must have believed to be impeccable English manners. When they broke the sacred order of the queue once again, the taciturn Englishman started losing his temper and was obviously about to say something rather strong, when his wife warned him: ‘Don’t, Giles, they’re not English.’

  That settled it. The man calmed down and took no further notice of the three irritating females. As they were not English one could not expect them to behave. Perhaps one could train hedgehogs, chimpanzees or foreigners to queue up in an orderly fashion, but it is not worth the trouble.

  Yes, I do see the tormenting need in the English for frequent bouts of self-discipline. So I used to be puzzled by the behaviour of football fans. How did their nauseating vandalism fit my theory? I had
to investigate, and my findings are not at all surprising: 97.2 per cent of all supporters of Manchester United are foreigners, mostly Dutch and Albanians. Of the rest, 2.8 per cent are Irish and Czechoslovakian, which leaves just a handful of English supporters. After the defeats of their Club these two or three English people queue up for cigarettes, then for sandwiches, then for beer, and having let off steam in true English fashion, they go home to queue up for their supper. The rest? No, Giles, they are not English.

  ‘Ssh – I think she’s probably foreign’

  On Not Complaining

  You must never complain. Complaining is very un-English. If you are kept waiting half an hour in a shop by the Knights of the Barter; if a bus conductor or a Labour Exchange official is rude to you; if a waiter brings your food ice-cold – you keep your mouth shut. Sometimes in a shop, in offices or some other public place an offensive or sarcastic remark may be made about you in the third person, but you just don’t hear it. The stiff upper lip is the British way. Only the Dutch and the Albanians (with a few odd Irish, Czechoslovaks and suchlike thrown in) will make a row, protest loudly or call for the manager.

  Should you be so misguided as to complain, or at least murmur, public opinion will instantly turn against you: ‘Who does he think he is?’

  The waiter may pour tomato juice down your collar and you exclaim ‘Ouch!’ Someone will be sure to remark: ‘It’s difficult to please some people.’