How to be a Brit

by George Mikes

  So do not complain. Never complain. Whatever happens, remember the new national slogan: ‘It’s one of those things.’ When your brand-new toasting machine goes up in flames and toasts you instead of your bread, you nod: ‘It’s one of those things,’ and the matter is closed. Apart from being utterly un-English, un-Scottish and un-Welsh to complain, there is another reason for not opening your mouth. They do not even hear the complaints; their ears are not tuned to them.

  A friend of mine, a film writer, was a regular client at a famous and expensive Soho restaurant. At 2 p.m. precisely (and at 9 p.m. at dinner time), the office door opened and an elderly gentleman in morning coat came out (as he had been doing for the last thirty-seven years), went from table to table, bowed slightly and asked: ‘Did you enjoy your meal?’ For thirty-seven years hundreds of thousands of properly brought up English people replied to him: ‘Very much indeed.’ The man bowed once again, said ‘Thank you very much,’ and moved on to the next table.

  One day the lunch was so abominable that my friend (Dutch mother, Albanian father, one Irish, one Czechoslovakian grandmother) decided to tell him the naked truth. At two o’clock the door opened and the antiquated manager came out as usual. When he reached my friend’s table he bowed and asked yet again the question he had asked a million times in thirty-seven years: ‘Did you enjoy your meal, sir?’

  My friend replied: ‘Not at all. It was lousy.’

  The manager bowed with his customary, obsequious smile: ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  And moved on, satisfied.

  Bank Holidays

  It is the sign of a poor society that it has too many holidays. A poor society is often a religious society: it has given up all hope that the Government will improve its lot so it puts its hope in God. England used to have five holidays per annum and that was that. Then she added New Year’s Day because of the prevailing ‘absenteeism’ on that day: nobody worked in any case. Soon there was talk in some places of making Wednesday afternoons holidays, too: everyone slipped away to watch football matches, so nobody worked in any case. Then England started messing about with substitute, supplementary and compensatory holidays. When Christmas Day and Boxing Day fell on Saturday and Sunday, the Government decided that the following Monday was Christmas Day and Tuesday Boxing Day. (Jesus was not born on December 25 in any case; and what has modern Christmas to do with Jesus?) When New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday (as in 1977), Monday January 3 became a holiday, because what will the poor worker gain from being an absentee, whether official or not, on a day when he would have been absent anyway? There’d be no fun in it. In 1976–77 Christmas plus New Year lasted for two weeks, and this is only the dawn of the shape of things to come.

  The world looks at Britain askance. Why don’t they work? Why don’t they, at least, pretend to work? The world, as usual, does not understand. We, the noble British, have three excellent reasons for acting as we do: because we are (1) realists; (2) moral; and (3) practical.

  1. As we are a poor nation we behave like a poor nation. We are neither snobbish (not in that way) nor pretentious – so why act like a rich nation? Other poor nations have a lot of holidays, so we shall have lots and lots of holidays. We shall stop work as often as possible and become poorer still. We must be modest and give the Germans and other industrious blokes the chance of working hard, becoming richer and making the money we want to borrow from them.

  2. We are moral. We hate absenteeism and the lies it involves. One way of curing theft is to make it legal. One way of decreasing the number of violent sexual crimes is to permit rape. One way of disposing of the nasty, dishonest habit of absenteeism is to let employees off altogether.

  3. The final reason is purely practical and based on sound economic assessment. Whether we work or not makes hardly any difference. So it is only sensible to save electricity, coal, administration, fares and effort.

  Celebration of the birth of Christ

  Buses

  Bus drivers still play the happy games described in How to be an Alien (available in all the better bookshops). But the buses have become much more sociable than they used to be.

  Nowadays they travel in groups of three. You have to wait forty or fifty minutes for a bus, but then you get three at a time, so you are amply compensated. It always makes me feel happy and prosperous whenever I travel in three buses at one and the same time.

  Bus crews, on the other hand, explain that they must travel in groups of three, to protect themselves against the wrath and lynching mood of the public. ‘But why should the public be so angry?’ – I asked. ‘Because we always travel in groups of three.’

  How to Get Lost in London

  Measures to confuse the foreigner and drive him to despair have developed greatly in the last thirty years, largely in the shape of new one-way streets and forbidden turnings either to the left or right. There are parts of London which even the native no longer tries to approach by car. But these methods are employed with much ingenuity in other countries as well, so I will confine this chapter to the results of my continuing research into the long-established and specifically English tricks which I first touched on thirty years ago.

  1. Some streets, like Walm Lane in Cricklewood or Farm Lane in Fulham, take a ninety-degree turn and thus become their own side streets. If you continue straight along Walm Lane (coming from Shoot Up Hill) you will in fact be in another street; in order to stay in Walm Lane you have to turn sharp left.

  2. As a number of cunning foreigners were learning how to find their way about in spite of all the hazards, the authorities stepped in by failing to put up – or perhaps by taking down – many signs which might have given away necessary information. Side streets, as a rule, are still indicated: their names are displayed somewhere near the corner, if not actually on it, and all you need remember is that the name-plate is likely to be positioned higher up or lower down than you would expect, which adds piquancy to the search if you are driving and the traffic is moving fast. But to find the name of a main thoroughfare is often well-nigh impossible. The official explanation is that everybody knows the main roads so why waste money on signs? A brilliant argument. Show me, after all, the man from Melton Mowbray, Amsterdam, or Bloomington (Illinois) who doesn’t recognize at first sight any section of the Seven Sisters Road.

  3. Private citizens help in their modest way by keeping house numbers secret. They refrain from putting numbers on their gates or front doors, they do not light numbers up, and – cleverest of all – they give names to their houses instead of numbers. The Dutch guilder may be temporarily stronger than the pound, but what Dutchman would have the flair to guess that ‘Fairy Orchard’ is to be found between numbers 117 and 121 on a street seven miles long?

  But I have to admit that my chauvinism has been badly shaken by a letter from a girl who lives in a German village. She had read the relevant chapter in my earlier book and she was frankly disdainful of our methods. Her village, she said, beats London hands down – and it does. They have had the brilliant idea of numbering their houses in chronological order. The first house to be built is therefore Number 1, although it stands halfway along the main street. The second to be built, which stands at the beginning of the street at the eastern end, is Number 2. Number 3, the third to be built, is on the opposite side and at the western end, and so on. I have long been prepared to grant that the Germans are more methodical and systematic than we are, but to find that they can beat us in creating muddle – that hurts. At that I have to cry: Halt! Britannia, awake! Decadence can go too far.

  How to Panic Quietly

  Foreign newspapers and magazines never stop sending correspondents here to investigate the ‘English disease’, to analyse our decline and our despair and panic as we cower in the economic gutter. They arrive here to find no panic, no despair. With their logical minds they know that they ought to find them; but they don’t. When they discuss the matter with the British, they expect some defence of this lackadaisical attitude, or excuses for
certain failures. But what the British say is this: ‘Yes, I quite agree, aren’t we in an awful mess?’ ‘Oh, we are hopeless,’ they say and order another double whisky. Try to discuss the pound tactfully, and they reply jovially, almost proudly: ‘Yes, I wonder how anything can sink so low,’ and they ring up their travel agent to book a skiing holiday in Switzerland. The foreign observer expects the British nation to sink into deep despondency whenever the pound falls two cents and be overjoyed when it gains half a cent. But most Britons have no idea – except on the days of greatest crisis – whether the pound has risen or fallen, and the nation is as calm as it was in 1940 when Hitler was about to cross the Channel but didn’t.

  One day you may confront one of these foreign journalists, so I should like to draw attention to a few of their stock questions and offer you the proper, British answers.

  Q. Why don’t the British panic?

  A. They do, but very quietly. It is impossible for the naked eye to tell their panic from their ecstasy.

  Q. Why don’t they work harder?

  A. They just don’t like hard work. The Germans have a reputation for hard work, so they like to keep it up. The British find it boring. Then, apart from a tiny and despicable minority, the British dislike the idea of taking part in the rat-race. They will give up certain advantages – knowingly and with their eyes open – in order to be able to stick to certain values and a way of life.

  Q. But do they stick to their values? Can they stick to their values? Nearly all their traditional virtues – patience, tolerance, cool-headedness, wry humour, courtesy – are the product of richness and power. Isn’t there a real danger that with riches and power these virtues will disappear?

  A. Yes, there is a very real danger.

  Q. Then why don’t they panic?

  A. They do, but very, very quietly.

  Q. Are Trade Unions a real danger?

  A. You bet.

  Q. And what do the British do about it?

  A. There were periods in British history – indeed in the history of all nations – when one or another layer of society, or group, or individual, grew much too strong. This could be the king, or parliament, or the barons, or the industrialists, or the feudal aristocracy, or the bankers, or the clergy. Their power had to be broken. In Britain it has always been broken. On one occasion a civil war was fought, on another occasion no civil war was fought. The problem of the Trade Unions will be solved, too. Probably without a civil war, which is a pity. A civil war would at least enliven the British scene.

  Q. How would they fight a civil war?

  A. Very, very quietly.

  Q. Isn’t there a danger of extremists gaining the upper hand?

  A. Hard to tell. Probably not. The British, on the whole, are extreme moderates, passionate pacifists, rabid middle-of-the-roaders. But one cannot be sure.

  Q. Isn’t, then, a dictatorship or some other form of authoritarian regime a possibility?

  A. Unlikely. The British are too used to solving their problems in committees, in open discussions. They are used to no-confidence motions, to letters to the editor, and just to opening their mouths and speaking up. Besides, they would laugh any would-be dictator off the face of Britain. When the Russians chased away the Czar, no democracy followed because they did not chase away Czarist traditions. Or take Uganda. We keep saying: ‘You can’t expect a Westminster-type democracy there, they don’t have the tradition.’ Similarly, we don’t have the authoritarian tradition. Britain completely lacks practice in authoritarianism. They don’t know how to be dictators; they don’t know how to be slaves; they don’t know how to be afraid of authority or the police.

  Q. With all these splendid principles and lack of authoritarian traditions, isn’t there a danger that the country will go to the dogs?

  The power of the clergy

  A. The country is going to the dogs. But this has always been a country of dog-lovers. So why worry?

  On Fiddling Through

  You can be as rude about the English as you wish, they positively like it. In any case you cannot be as rude about them as they are about themselves. Years after the First World War – when I was a child in Hungary – people were still laughing about the war communiqués of the Austro-Hungarian High Command. Every rout they had suffered became an ‘orderly and planned withdrawal’; giving up whole provinces and running away became ‘straightening the lines’, and chaos and final collapse was ‘strategic reorganization’. In World War II it took me three years in London to get used to the relish – the positive joy – with which the English reported their defeats, disasters and routs. The greater the disaster, the greater the joy. By the time I got used to the disasters – and started enjoying them myself – it was too late; they had started winning victories and went on to win the war.

  It is praising the British that creates problems. Praising is ‘patronizing’, ‘slapping on the back’, and that they find offensive. Tell them ‘you are a great nation’ and most of them will laugh because no one has spoken of ‘great nations’ in Europe since the death of de Gaulle. Others will not laugh but will feel offended: who the hell are you to distribute medals? If you want to be polite, call them a ‘once great nation’ – or better still: ‘a once great nation now in decline’. If you want to flatter them, call them lazy, indolent, inefficient, inept and left behind even by Luxembourg and Andorra. Bernard Shaw made a fortune by calling the English stupid and repeating the charge for six decades, because cleverness is a virtue they particularly despise.

  When I first came here, the British were obviously unprepared – both militarily and psychologically – for the war which was about to break out. They shrugged their shoulders and reassured jumpy aliens, like myself, that ‘we shall muddle through’. Muddling through was one of the most popular phrases for years; but I do not think I have heard it even once since the outbreak of the present economic crisis. The British, as I have said, are – alas – getting cleverer. This is the Age of the Fiddle. From middle-middle class downwards everybody must have a fiddle. A fiddle helps; a fiddle solves all the problems; a fiddle is the secret of success or at least of survival. Instead of muddling through, nowadays we are fiddling through. If you come here from abroad, bring your own fiddle and you may get on top. The top cheat – the Fiddler on the Roof – is the hero of the hour.

  The Generation Gap

  ‘Great craftsmen? Their days are over,’ said Mr S., that genius of a patisserie maker, one of the great craftsmen left in this country for whom money is nothing, quality and satisfaction of the customer is everything.

  I am no sweet-eater. Old aunts hated me as a child because I never touched the cakes they had made for me with so much care and love. I still would not touch anybody else’s chocolate cakes with a barge-pole. But Mr S. is in a class of his own. Perhaps you are not fond of Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard – excellent playwrights though they are – but still raise your hat to Shakespeare; you may not be impressed by Brasilia, yet you are awestruck by Venice; you may not be fond of pop music but you are haunted by the Ninth Symphony. In other words, Mr S. is the Shakespeare-cum-Beethoven of the Chelsea Bun.

  ‘When I retire or die,’ he went on ruefully, ‘that will be the end of my craft. Nobody will produce this sort of stuff; and if someone produced it people wouldn’t appreciate it. They would buy and enjoy frozen muck at the supermarket. Young people are no good. I have nobody, just nobody, to pass my business and skill on to.’

  ‘I thought you had a son,’ I interjected.

  Mr S. got angry.

  ‘Yes, I do have a son. He’s a good-for-nothing. A dead loss.’

  I couldn’t ask which prison he was in, so I put it more tactfully: ‘What is he doing?’

  He sighed deeply: ‘He’s a professor of mathematics at London University.’

  Is the Economy Really on the Mend?

  When I was young, I heard this joke in Budapest. A man goes to the rabbi and complains: ‘Rabbi, I am in despair. At my wits’ end. Life is unbear
able. We just cannot stand it any longer. There are nine of us – my wife and myself, her parents and five children – and we all live in one room. What can I do?’

  The rabbi tells him kindly: ‘Take the goat in.’

  The man is incredulous: ‘In the room?’

  ‘Yes, in the room. Do as you are told. Take the goat in and come back in a week’s time.’

  A week later the man comes back, half dead: ‘Rabbi, we just cannot stand it. All of us are going crazy. The goat is filthy. Loud. Dirty. It stinks. It makes a mess.’

  The rabbi told him: ‘Go home and let the goat out. And come back in a week’s time.’

  A radiantly happy man visits the rabbi a week later.

  ‘Life is beautiful, rabbi. Lovely. We all enjoy every minute of life. No goat: only the nine of us.’

  The same has happened to the British economy. The bank rate – or minimum lending rate – went up to 15 per cent. Then down to 12½. Now the country is rapturously happy and oozing optimism. How wonderful: a lending-rate as low as 12½ per cent.

  ‘Rabbi, I am in despair –’

  All that has happened is that the goat has been taken out of the British economy.

  How to Lose an Empire

  To lose an Empire is a bit of a shock. I personally did not like it at all. I am that mildly left-wing liberal who has always preached that we (it became ‘we’ for me after the war) ought to give it up. But I never expected that Attlee would follow my advice. It is very satisfactory to advocate a noble deed; but it is quite shocking to see responsible people acting on your advice.

  The change of atmosphere came very suddenly to the whole world. Before the war Hitler declared that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe and all he wanted was the return of the former German colonies. I do not remember one single voice – including African or Asian voices – declaring that the Age of Colonies was over, that all nations and tribes wished to be independent now and that the idea of imperialism was, or should be, dead. People said instead that it was quite reasonable on Herr Hitler’s part, we would see what we could do. We hinted that Hitler could have other people’s colonies – that would be only fair – but not ours. There were some whispers about the Germans having been harsh and cruel colonizers, not so decent and universally beloved as the British, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians or the Portuguese. But, I repeat, not one single voice told Hitler: ‘Colonies? No, you cannot have colonies. As a matter of fact, no one can have colonies any more.’