Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  58. Including one particularly good sociological study: Bikers: Culture, Politics and Power by Suzanne McDonald-Walker.

  PART TWO

  BEHAVIOUR CODES

  HOME RULES

  Some of the rules of Englishness do not require years of participant-observation research to discover. The privacy rules, for example, are so obvious that you could spot them from a helicopter, without even setting foot in the country. Hover above any English town for a few minutes, and you will see that the residential areas consist almost entirely of rows and rows of small boxes, each with its own tiny patch of green. In some parts of the country, the boxes will be a greyish colour, in others, a sort of reddish-brown. In more affluent areas, the boxes will be spaced further apart, and the patches of green attached to them will be larger. But the principle will be clear: the English all want to live in their own private little box with their own private little green bit.

  THE MOAT-AND-DRAWBRIDGE RULE

  What you cannot see from your helicopter, you will learn as soon as you try to visit an English home. You may have the address and a map, but you will have great difficulty in finding the house you are looking for. The Hungarian humorist George Mikes claimed that ‘An English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners’, citing the indisputable facts that our streets are never straight, that every time a street bends it is given a different name (except when the bend is so sharp that it really makes two different streets), that we have at least sixty confusing synonyms for ‘street’ (place, mews, crescent, terrace, rise, lane, gate, etc.), and that street names are in any case always carefully hidden. Even if you manage to find the correct street, the numbering of the houses will be hopelessly inconsistent and idiosyncratic, further complicated by many people choosing to give their houses names rather than numbers.

  I would add that house numbers and names are usually at least as well camouflaged as the street names, indicating that an obsession with privacy, rather than a specific conspiracy to confuse Hungarians, is the real reason for all this muddle. We could not, even if we wanted to, demolish and redesign our muddled towns on a ‘sensible’ American grid system – but if we wanted to make it easier for others to find our house, we could at least paint the name or number reasonably clearly and in a position where it might be visible from the street.

  But we do not. Our house numbers are at best highly discreet, and at worst completely obscured by creepers or porches, or even left off altogether, presumably on the assumption that our number may be deduced from those of our immediate neighbours. During the research for this book, I made a habit of asking taxi drivers why they thought this might be. They spend so much of their time crawling along, peering out of their side windows in search of a well-hidden or non-existent number, it struck me that they must at least have pondered the question, and perhaps come up with some interesting theories.

  I was right about the pondering. Their initial response was almost always ‘Bloody good question!’ or words to that effect. The trouble was that it often seemed to be a cue for them to launch into a rant and moan about faded, camouflaged and absent house numbers – generally ending with something like ‘Anyone would think they were doing it on purpose!’ which, as far as I was concerned, was where we’d started. Trying a more devious tack, I would then ask the drivers if their own houses were clearly labelled. At this, most of them looked a bit sheepish and admitted that, no, come to think of it, their own house numbers and names were not particularly conspicuous. Why not? Why had they not painted their house number or name in big, bold lettering on the front door or gatepost? Well, it would look a bit odd, a bit flash; it would stand out, it would be drawing attention; and, anyway, they practically never took taxis, and their house was not hard to find, and all their friends and family knew where they were – and other lame excuses (much the same excuses, in fact, as those I received when I put this question to non-taxi-driving householders).

  Apart from reminding me that there is an element of typically English reserve in our reluctance to display our house numbers, as well as a fixation with privacy, my initial taxi-driver interviews were not terribly helpful, but I persisted, and eventually one gave a succinct and astute response. He explained: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle, right? He can’t actually have the moat and drawbridge, but he can make it bloody difficult to get to.’ From then on, I thought of the English practice of concealing our house numbers as ‘the moat-and-drawbridge rule’.

  But an Englishman’s home is more than just his castle, the embodiment of his privacy rules, it is also his identity, his main status-indicator and his prime obsession. And the same goes for English women. This is why a house is not just something that you passively ‘have’, it is something that you ‘do’, something that you ‘work on’.

  NEST-BUILDING RULES

  Which brings me to the English mania for ‘home improvements’, or ‘DIY’. When Nikolaus Pevsner described ‘the proverbial Englishman’ as ‘busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands’, he hit the proverbial nail on the head. Never mind football, this is the real national obsession. We are a nation of nest-builders. Almost the entire population is involved in DIY, at least to some degree. In a survey conducted by some of my colleagues a while ago, only two per cent of English males and 12 per cent of females said that they never did any DIY.

  We updated this research more recently, when SIRC was commissioned by the tea company who make PG Tips to do a study on home-improvers. (This was not quite as daft an idea as it sounds: we found that any DIY task requires the consumption of vast quantities of tea.) In terms of numbers, we found that nothing much had changed, except that the proportion of women involved in DIY is probably now even higher. And, if anything, the English were even more obsessed with their nest-building.59

  I was not directly involved in the SIRC DIY study, but it was conducted in a manner of which I approve – not by ticking boxes on a telephone-questionnaire survey, but by actually going out and spending time in the temples of the DIY faith (Homebase, Wickes, B&Q, etc.), talking at length to DIYers about their motives, fears, stresses and joys. My colleague Peter Marsh, a devout DIYer himself, reasoned that some special temptation would be needed to persuade these fervent nest-builders to interrupt their Sunday-morning pilgrimage to talk to our researchers. His ingenious solution was tea and doughnuts – a familiar, established part of the DIY ritual – offered free from the back of a van parked strategically in the DIY-store car parks.

  It worked a treat. Stopping For Tea is such an integral element of the DIY routine that nest-builders who would never have allowed a conventional researcher with a clipboard to intrude on their twig-gathering were more than happy to hang around the SIRC van, gulping mugs of tea, munching doughnuts, and telling our researchers all about their home-improvement plans, hopes, worries and disasters.

  The Territorial-marking Rule

  The most common motive for DIYing among our car-park sample of typical nest-builders was that of ‘putting a personal stamp on the place’. This is clearly understood as an unwritten rule of home ownership, and a central element of the moving-in ritual, often involving the destruction of any evidence of the previous owner’s territorial marking. ‘You’ve got to rip something out when you move in,’ one young man explained. ‘It’s all part of the move, isn’t it?’

  He was right. Watch almost any residential street in England over a period of time, and you will notice that shortly after a For Sale sign comes down, a skip appears, to be filled with often perfectly serviceable bits of ripped-out kitchen or bathroom, along with ripped-out carpets, cupboards, fireplace-surrounds, shelves, tiles, banisters, doors and even walls and ceilings.

  This is a ‘rule’ in a stronger sense than an observable regularity of behaviour: this kind of obsessive territorial marking is, for the majority of English people, an obligation, something we feel compelled, duty-bound to do: ‘You’ve got to rip something out . . .’

  This can be a problem for thos
e who move into brand-new ‘starter homes’ or other new houses, where it would clearly be ludicrous to start ripping out virgin bathrooms and untouched kitchens. Yet we found the DIY temples full of such people, eager to add whatever ‘personal touches’ they could to mark their bland new territory. Even if you can’t rip anything out, you’ve got to do something: a house that has not been tinkered with barely qualifies as a home.

  CLASS RULES

  The English obsession with home-improvements is not just about territorial marking, of course. It is also about self-expression in a wider sense: your home is not just your territory, it is your primary expression of your identity. Or, at least, that is how we like to think of it. Almost all of our DIY-temple sample saw themselves as exercising their creative talents, and other interviews with nest-builders in furniture shops, department stores and homes confirm that, although DIYing may be, for some, merely an economic necessity, we all see the arrangement, furnishing and decorating of our homes as an expression of our unique personal taste and artistic flair.

  And it is, but only up to a point. The more closely I researched this question, the more it became clear that the way in which we arrange, furnish and decorate our homes is largely determined by social class. This has little or nothing to do with wealth. Upper-class and upper-middle-class homes tend to be shabby, frayed and unkempt in a way no middle-middle or lower-middle would tolerate, and the homes of the wealthiest working-class nouveaux-riches are full of extremely expensive items that the uppers and upper-middles regard as the height of vulgarity. The brand-new leather sofas and reproduction-antique dining chairs favoured by the middle-middles may cost ten times as much as the equivalent items in the houses of upper-middles, who despise new leather and ‘repro’.

  In the homes of the middle-middles and below, the ‘lounge’ (as they call it) is more likely to have a fitted carpet (among the older working classes, this may be a patterned carpet). The higher castes prefer bare floorboards, often part-covered with old Persian carpets or rugs. The contents of lower-middle and some upper-working ‘front rooms’ will often be obscured by net curtains (useful as a class-indicator, but otherwise something of an annoying obstacle to peeping-Tom researchers) but they are likely to be dominated by huge flat-screen television sets and, among the older generations, may also boast carefully displayed ‘collections’ of small objects (spoons, glass animals, Spanish dolls, figurines or other ‘collectables’) from package holidays or mail-order catalogues.

  Younger lower-middles and upper-workings may have less fussy tastes – their ‘lounges’ are often uncluttered to the point of dentist’s-waiting-room bleakness (perhaps aspiring to, but never approaching, stylish minimalism). They will compensate for this lack of visual interest with an even bigger wide-screen television, which they call the TV or telly and which is always the focal point of the room (and, incidentally, currently shows at least six programmes every week about homes and home-improvement). Many upper-middle homes also have big televisions, but they are usually hidden in another sitting room, sometimes called the ‘back room’ or ‘family room’.

  Among the more well-off upper-middles, many of their rooms are likely to be painted with Farrow & Ball, Little Greene or Sanderson paint, in ‘heritage’ colours. The more insecure upper-middles will somehow find an opportunity to tell you this – and explain at tedious length exactly why these high-class paints are so much better than ordinary cheap Dulux. They will try to avoid mentioning the considerable difference in price, as it is unseemly to mention money or to appear to boast about one’s wealth – although such boasts can be subtly disguised as moans about the ‘silly’ prices charged by the posh-paint manufacturers.

  Coasters or drink mats (little mats for putting drinks on to stop them damaging the tables) are another fairly useful class-indicator: you are less likely to find these in upper-middle or upper-class houses, nor will you often see them in lower-working-class homes. Coasters/drink mats are mainly the preserve of the middle-middle and lower-middle classes, and those among the upper-working class who aspire to middle-class status.

  Matching and Newness Rules

  Lower-middle and working-class lavatories, which they call toilets, used to have matching coloured loos and basins (which they still call bathroom suites) and even matching coloured loo paper. Those of the upper-middles and above have always been plain white, although you will sometimes see a wooden loo seat.

  At the highest and lowest ends of the scale (upper-middle and above, lower-working and below) you will find old, threadbare and mismatched furniture, while the classes in between favour brand-new ‘suites’ of matching ‘settees’ and armchairs, ‘sets’ of matching dining tables and chairs, and yet more ‘suites’ of bedroom furniture with matching bedspreads, cushions and curtains. (These carefully co-ordinated furnishings may involve cottagey-chintzy flowers, Ikea ‘simplicity’, or television-inspired ‘themes’ but the principle is the same.) The upper echelons, proud of their eclectic antiques, look down their noses at matching ‘suites’; the lower echelons, ashamed of their ill-assorted cast-offs, aspire to them.

  In fact, an English person’s social class can be gauged immediately from his or her attitude to expensive brand-new furniture: if you think it is ‘posh’, you are no higher than middle-middle at best; if you think it is ‘naff’, you are upper-middle or above. An upper-class Tory MP once sneered at fellow Tory Michael Heseltine by remarking that Heseltine had ‘had to buy all his own furniture’ – the put-down implication being that only nouveaux have to buy their furniture: genuinely upper-class furniture is inherited.

  Thanks to the influence of the upper-middle-class interior designers who dominate the many home-improvement programmes on television, some formerly clear class-indicators are no longer so reliable. Middle-middle, lower-middle and even working-class homes may now have wooden floors rather than fitted carpets (and even the naffest of nouveaux riches now avoid the deep-pile variety). Coloured bathroom suites have been so comprehensively mocked and vilified on every home-improvement show that people of all classes now regard them as dated and in poor taste. To the untrained eye, many middle-middle, lower-middle and upper-working-class homes may now be hard to distinguish from those of the upper-middle classes.

  Look more closely, however, and you will see that the ‘matching and newness’ rules still apply. Only the upper-middles and above seem consistently free of the irresistible urge to match. Some television-designer-inspired, upwardly mobile middle-middles may strive for a more ‘eclectic’ look – eschewing the three-piece suite, for example, in favour of less obviously matched sofas and chairs, but they tend to betray their origins by adding carefully matched (and brand new) cushions, often with a perfectly ‘toning’ rug and precisely ‘co-ordinating’ curtains to complete the effect. They may have avoided the most glaring signs of petit-bourgeois matching, but it all still looks new, neat, pristine, effortful and ‘designed’. If a room looks like a photograph from a catalogue, even if the floors are wood and the principal items of furniture are not matching sets, its owners’ origins are no higher than middle-middle.

  When it comes to bathrooms, however, even some upper-middles have been seduced by the fashion for ‘wet rooms’, and you may see brand-new wet rooms, or bathrooms with trendy ultra-modern wash-basins and other fashionably avant-garde fittings, in some otherwise poshly shabby homes. The true upper classes, and most of the upper-middle intelligentsia, have so far resisted these trends – and tend to look down upon them as flashy and pretentious.

  The Brag-wall Rule

  Another helpful class-indicator is the siting of what Americans would call your ‘brag wall’. In which room of your house do you display prestigious awards you have won, or photographs of yourself shaking hands with famous people? If you are middle-middle or below, these items might be proudly on show in your sitting room or entrance hall or some other very prominent place. For the upper-middles and above, however, the only acceptable place to exhibit such things is the downstai
rs loo.

  This trick is ‘smart’ in both senses of the word (posh and clever): visitors are highly likely to use the downstairs loo at some point, and to be impressed by your achievements, but by displaying them in the loo you are making a joke out of them (taking the piss, even) and thus cannot be accused of either boasting or taking yourself too seriously.

  The Satellite-dish Rule

  From the outside of an English house, even if you are not familiar with the class-semiotics of plants and flowers, which I will come to later, you can sometimes make a quick broad-brush class assessment based on the presence (lower class) or absence (higher class) of a satellite dish. This is not an infallible indicator, and has become much less reliable with the advent of cable – although many people classify entire neighbourhoods by counting satellite dishes – but a house with a satellite dish can still be classified at the lower end of the social scale until proven otherwise by the presence of unequivocal upper-middle or upper-class features.

  A satellite dish on a very grand old house in an upper-class area could, however, be a sign of nouveau colonisation. But to be sure, you would have to go inside and look for brand-new leather sofas, fancy Jacuzzi baths and multiple giant televisions. If instead you found faded colours, priceless but threadbare Oriental rugs, shabby damask sofas covered with dog hair and cracked wooden loo seats, you would revise the occupants’ social class upwards, and assume that they had some suitable reason for watching satellite television – work in broadcasting or journalism, perhaps (check for BAFTAs in the downstairs loo), a liking for obscure foreign-language programmes or an eccentric passion for basketball or old sit-coms or some other aspect of popular culture.

  Having said that, a lot of the lowbrow television channels that previously required satellite are now available on cable, so the higher classes can now indulge without defacing their houses with a ‘chavvy’ satellite dish. And continue to pretend that they only watch highbrow programmes.