Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  All humans have a territorial instinct, but the English obsession with our homes and mania for nest-building goes much further than this. Almost all commentators have remarked on this English home-fixation, but none has yet offered a satisfactory explanation. Jeremy Paxman comes closest to an understanding of this characteristic when he says that ‘“Home” is what the English have instead of a Fatherland,’ echoing (although he does not mention it) the sentiment of the Edwardian rhyme ‘The Germans live in Germany/The Romans live in Rome/The Turkeys live in Turkey/But the English live at home.’ But this does not entirely explain why we should be so neurotically obsessive about our homes. Attempts to attribute our home-fixation to the English climate are unconvincing – other countries have weather conditions much more likely to drive their inhabitants indoors, but do not share our fanatical nesting tendencies.

  Historical explanations can be equally misleading. Harry Mount, in How England Made the English, claims that ‘a lack of invasions since 1066 – and of civil wars for over 350 years – has led to a confidence that property rights will last forever, and so to the high percentage of home ownership in England.’ This sounds plausible, until one looks at international statistics on home ownership, in which we score a measly one per cent or so above the international average, with a much lower rate of home ownership than many countries, Europe and elsewhere, who have suffered far more recent invasions, civil wars etc. If anything the figures demonstrate the opposite of Mount’s theory: the most recently troubled, unstable, precarious countries tend to have the highest rates of home ownership.

  Within Europe, for example, Romania tops the list with 97.5 per cent, closely followed by Lithuania, Croatia and Slovakia (all with over 90 per cent); we are well below this on 64 per cent, and neutral, peaceful Switzerland has the lowest home-ownership rate of all, 44.3 per cent. Although we are indeed currently obsessed with property ownership, our home-obsession long pre-dates this. As Mount points out, the notion that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ was first invoked in English law in 1623, but this had nothing to do with what he calls ‘an affection for property ownership’. At the time, only a very tiny fraction of the English owned their homes. The popular precept enshrined into law by Sir Edward Coke was about privacy, not property, about refuge and freedom from intrusion, not ownership. The full quote from Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England makes this clear: ‘A man’s house is his castle – et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium.’ The Latin bit means: ‘and each man’s home is his safest refuge.’ Or, as William Pitt (then Prime Minister) explained in 1763, what is meant by ‘castle’ is that ‘the poorest man may in his cottage [which would have been a ‘tied’ or rented cottage] bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake . . . the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter.’ Even in 1918, nearly 300 years after the establishment of the ‘castle’ law, 77 per cent of the English did not own their homes, and as recently as 1970 there were still more renters than owners. Our current mania for ownership is of very recent origin, shared with many other countries, and should not be confused with our deep-seated, centuries-old passion for privacy.

  I think that some more helpful insights into our home-obsession can be found in the ‘rules of Englishness’ that we have identified in this and previous chapters. The moat-and-drawbridge rule represents the fifth ‘sighting’ so far of the English fixation with privacy (a preoccupation also evident in the awful-estate-agent rule, the front-garden rules and the back-garden formula) and at least the tenth or eleventh occurrence of the social-inhibition theme. My hunch at this stage is that these are likely to qualify as ‘defining characteristics’ of Englishness, and that they are closely connected. It seems to me that our home-obsession is directly related to our almost pathological need for privacy, and that this in turn is inextricably bound up with our problems of social inhibition and embarrassment – our lack of ease and skill in social interaction.

  The English seem to have three main ways of dealing with this ‘social dis-ease’: one is the ingenious use of props and facilitators to overcome our inhibitions and mask our incompetence; another is to become aggressive; the one that concerns us here is the tendency to retreat into the privacy and sanctuary of our castle-like homes, shut the door, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the issue. Home may indeed be our substitute for a Fatherland, but at another level, I would suggest that home is what the English have instead of social skills.

  The class rules reveal a new aspect of our acute class-consciousness – which I call the ‘adjacent classes problem’. We noted that it is always safest to choose one’s eccentricity from a class at the opposite end of the social scale, rather than from an immediately adjacent class. Each English class particularly despises the one immediately below it, and the prospect of being mistaken for a member of this adjacent class is therefore especially abhorrent.

  The brag-wall rule reflects another kind of typically English hypocrisy, and brings us back to the recurring theme of humour. In this case, we see the use of wit and humour as a sort of cover for breaking the modesty and anti-earnestness rules. The house-talk ‘nightmare’ rule reminds us, again, of the English penchant for moaning, but is also yet another manifestation of the modesty rule, which must surely be a strong contender for ‘defining characteristic’ status. The nightmare rule is also a hypocritical ‘cover’: a way of boasting without appearing to boast. (Hypocrisy seems to be yet another recurring theme.)

  The improvement-talk rules highlight an extreme version of the generic modesty rule, involving an exercise in competitive modesty that can only be described as ‘one-downmanship’. Other nations have rituals of polite modesty and self-deprecation (the Japanese immediately spring to mind here), but the English improvement-talk one-downmanship is distinctive for the importance of humour: it is not enough merely to speak disparagingly of one’s incompetent DIY efforts (in the way that, say, Japanese etiquette requires denigration of a gift one is offering), one must do so in a witty and amusing manner.

  The ‘non-specific praise’ requirement raises a misunderstanding about English ‘reserve’ and politeness that needs to be addressed. There is a distinctively English form of bland, insipid politeness, which is primarily concerned, even when paying compliments, with the avoidance of offence or embarrassment rather than with actually giving pleasure or expressing positive feelings. This reserve, which foreigners often interpret as coldness or standoffishness, must be understood in the light of the crucial distinction the English make between friends and acquaintances, and between friends and close friends. It is not that the English are cold or incapable of being open and expressive, it is just that we find it more difficult than many other cultures to be uninhibited among people we do not know well – and this reticence in turn means that it takes us longer to get to know people well enough to shed our inhibitions. A vicious circle resulting in, among many other problems, misuse of alcohol and chronic overuse of the word ‘nice’.

  The awful-estate-agent rule highlights not only the extent to which our identity is bound up with our homes, but also, again, the importance of humour in English culture. Estate agents are an intrusive threat to our sense of identity, so we ‘neutralise’ their power by making fun of them. This is to some extent a universal human coping mechanism: in all cultures, people who are perceived to be threatening tend to be the subject of such defensive jokes, but the use of this strategy does seem to be more marked, and more frequently employed, among the English than elsewhere. We use humour to deal not only with the threatening or unfamiliar but with any and every social or practical difficulty, from the most trivial problems to issues of national importance.

  Both the front- and back-garden rules confirm the English preoccupation with privacy. The front-garden rules also highlight the related themes of social inhibition and politeness: if home equals self, the front garden is our ‘public face’ – formal and carefully arranged in the horticultural equivalent of
a blank social smile.

  The counter-culture garden-sofa exception underlines the now familiar themes of ‘orderly disorder’ and ineffectual but socially therapeutic moaning – but it also brings to light a rather more amiable quality: a distinctive English capacity for tolerance. Admittedly, our tolerance of counter-culture sofas and other odd behaviour tends to be grudging and stoical rather than warm and open-hearted – but even this passive, grumbling forbearance is worth noting, and perhaps worthy of commendation. It may be the quality responsible for the relatively good race relations in this country (the key word here is ‘relatively’, of course: race relations in England are, as Jeremy Paxman puts it, ‘by and large, not bad’ only in comparison with other much less tolerant nations).

  The back-garden formula, as well as dispelling a few rose-tinted myths about The English Garden, highlights the quiet, restrained aspects of Englishness, our dislike of flashy extremes, our predilection for moderation, for domesticity, for the comfortingly tame and familiar. The NSPCG rule also indicates a strong tendency to comply with unwritten social rules and expectations, a sense of duty and obligation. Finally, the class rules, the eccentricity clause and the ironic-gnome rule remind us of the convoluted nature of English class distinctions, and also the complexities of the rules governing English eccentricity. We find that contrived eccentricities, such as ironic gnomes, can backfire: idiosyncrasies and unconventional tastes are applauded only if they are seen to be genuine, unaffected – products of authentic nuttiness, not manufactured foibles.

  I am now starting to see some patterns, which may lead to the development of a diagram that will encapsulate not only the defining characteristics of Englishness, but also the relationships and interactions among these core qualities. I am not good at diagrams – I tried to do one once of a particular kind of social network I was studying, and it looked like the webs produced by spiders on LSD – but, if the next few chapters help to clarify the ‘grammatical’ relationships between rules of Englishness, it should be possible even for me to represent these on a chart of some sort.

  59. For stats-junkies: We now spend £8.5bn a year on DIY, considerably more per head than any other European country. Census data show that at least half of our adult males, and nearly a third of adult females are regular, active DIYers.

  60. As former prime minister John Major called them, in a rather sickly, sentimental speech, for which he was of course much mocked.

  61. Of course, we may soon be forced to accept that this insistence on private boxes with private gardens is economically as well as environmentally unsustainable.

  62. If you don’t believe me, try looking out of the window of a train next time you are travelling anywhere in England: I can guarantee that almost all of the back gardens you see will be variations on this ‘formula’. An Anglophile American friend was reluctantly converted to my theory when she tried this experiment.

  63. Although the English passion for gardening has been catching on in some other European countries – particularly in Germany, where I am told that translations of English gardening books are very popular.

  64. For stats-junkies: in the latest national census survey, 52 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women reported that they had spent time gardening in the four weeks prior to the census date.

  RULES OF THE ROAD

  If home is what the insular, inhibited English have instead of social skills, how do we cope when we venture outside our castles? The quick answer, as you might expect, is ‘not very well’. But after more than twenty years of participant observation in railway stations, on buses and on the streets, I should be a bit more specific than that, and try to decipher the unwritten codes of conduct involved. I’m calling these ‘rules of the road’ for shorthand, but I’m really talking about every kind of transport – cars, trains, aeroplanes, taxis, buses, bicycles, motorbikes, feet, etc. – and every aspect of the process of getting from A to B.

  Speaking of cars, I should mention that I can’t drive. I did try to learn, once, but after a few lessons the driving instructor and I agreed that it was not a good idea, and that I could save a lot of innocent lives by sticking to public transport. From a research point of view, this apparent handicap has proved a blessing in disguise, as it means that I get to spend a lot of time observing English behaviour and conducting devious little field-experiments on trains and buses, and interviewing captive taxi drivers about the quirks and habits of their passengers. And whenever I do travel by car, some long-suffering friend or relative is always doing the driving, which leaves me free to scrutinise their behaviour and that of other road users.

  PUBLIC TRANSPORT RULES

  But I’ll start with the rules of behaviour on public transport, as these more graphically illustrate the problems faced by the English when we step outside the security and privacy of our homes.

  The Denial Rule

  Our main coping mechanism on public transport is a form of what psychologists call ‘denial’: we try to avoid acknowledging that we are among a scary crowd of strangers, and to maintain as much privacy as possible, by pretending that they do not exist – and, much of the time, pretending that we do not exist either. The denial rule requires us to avoid talking to strangers, or even making eye contact with them, or indeed acknowledging their presence in any way unless absolutely necessary. At the same time, the rule imposes an obligation to avoid drawing attention to oneself and to mind one’s own business.

  It is common, and considered entirely normal, for English commuters to make their morning and evening train journeys with the same group of people for many years without ever exchanging a word. The more you think about this, the more utterly incredible it seems, yet everyone I spoke to confirmed the story.

  ‘After a while,’ one commuter told me, ‘if you see the same person every morning on the platform, and maybe quite often sit opposite them on the train, you might start to just nod to each other when you arrive, but that’s about as far as it goes.’

  ‘How long is “a while”?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, maybe a year or so – it depends. Some people are more outgoing than others, you know?’

  ‘Right,’ I said (wondering what definition of ‘outgoing’ she could possibly have in mind). ‘So, a particularly “outgoing” person might start to greet you with a nod after seeing you every morning for say, what, a couple of months?’

  ‘Mm, well, maybe,’ my informant sounded doubtful, ‘but actually that would be a bit, um, forward – a bit pushy. That would make me a bit uncomfortable.’

  This informant – a young woman working as a secretary for a PR agency in London – was not an especially shy or retiring person. In fact, I would have described her as quite the opposite: a friendly, lively, gregarious extravert. I am quoting her here because her responses are typical – almost all of the commuters I interviewed said that even a brief nod constituted a fairly drastic escalation of intimacy, and most were highly cautious about progressing to this stage because, as another typical commuter (a man in his late thirties, commuting daily from Skipton into Leeds) explained, ‘Once you start greeting people like that – nodding, I mean – unless you’re very careful, you might end up starting to say “good morning” or something, and then you could end up actually having to talk to them.’ I recorded other commuters using expressions such as ‘tip of the iceberg’ and ‘slippery slope’ to explain their avoidance of premature nodding, or even making eye contact with other commuters (eye contact in public places in England is never more than a fraction of a second: if you do accidentally meet a stranger’s eye, you must look away immediately – to maintain eye contact for even a full second may be interpreted as either flirtation or aggression).

  But what would be so awful, I asked each of my informants, about a brief friendly chat with a fellow commuter? This was clearly regarded as an exceptionally stupid question. Obviously, the problem with actually speaking to a fellow commuter was that if you did it once, you might be expected to do it again – and agai
n, and again: having acknowledged the person’s existence, you could not go back to pretending that they did not exist, and you might end up having to exchange polite words with them every day. You would almost certainly have nothing in common, so these conversations would be highly awkward and embarrassing. Or else you would have to find ways of avoiding the person – standing at the other end of the platform, for example, or hiding behind the coffee kiosk, and deliberately choosing a different compartment on the train, which would be rude and equally embarrassing. The whole thing would become a nightmare; it didn’t bear thinking about.

  I laughed at all this at first, of course, but after a little soul-searching realised that I have often practised much the same kind of contact-avoidance myself, and actually with rather less justification. How can I laugh at the fears and elaborate avoidance strategies of English commuters when I employ much the same tactics to save myself from a mere half-hour or so of potentially uncomfortable interaction on a one-off journey? They could be ‘stuck with’ someone every day for years. They’re right: it doesn’t bear thinking about. Best not even to nod for at least a year, definitely.

  The one exception to my utterly typical English behaviour on public transport is when I am in ‘fieldwork mode’ – that is, when I have burning questions to ask or hypotheses to test, and I am actively looking for ‘subjects’ to interview or upon whom to conduct experiments. Other forms of fieldwork, such as simple observation, are entirely compatible with squeamishly English contact-avoidance – in fact, the researcher’s notebook serves as a useful barrier-signal. But to interview people or conduct field-experiments, I have to take a deep breath and try to overcome my fears and inhibitions. When interviewing the English on public transport, I have to overcome their inhibitions as well. In a sense, all my field-interviews with commuters and other bus, train and tube passengers were also experiments in rule-breaking, as by speaking to them at all I was automatically in breach of the denial rule. Whenever possible, therefore, I tried to minimise the distress (for both of us) by taking advantage of one of the exceptions to the denial rule.