Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  But this typically English one-downmanship is not quite what it seems. The English, as I’ve said before, are no more naturally modest than any other nation, and although we obey the letter of the unwritten modesty laws, the spirit is another matter. Many of our derogatory comments about our children are in fact boasts in disguise, or at least highly disingenuous. Moaning about one’s child’s laziness and unwillingness to do homework indirectly conveys that he or she is bright enough to do well without trying. Complaining that one’s ‘impossible’ children spend all their time on the telephone or out ‘doing God knows what’ with their friends is another way of saying how popular they are. A mother’s eye-rolling mock-despair over her daughter’s obsession with fashion and make-up reminds us that the girl is exceptionally pretty. We respond with a one-down expression of exasperation at our own child’s tedious obsession with sport – really a covert boast about her athletic prowess.

  If you are genuinely distressed about your children’s habits or behaviour, it is still vitally important to adopt the correct mock-despairing tone. Real despair can only be expressed among very close friends (or anonymously on internet forums): at the school gates or at social gatherings, even if you are truly feeling desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate. Listening to these conversations, I would occasionally detect an edge of genuine hopelessness creeping into a mother’s tone as she described the transgressions of her ‘hopeless’ children. Her fellow moaners would start to look a little uncomfortable, avoiding eye contact with her and shifting uneasily about – their feet turning to point away from her, unconsciously signalling a desire to escape. Usually, the speaker would sense their discomfort, pull herself together and resume the proper tone of light-hearted, humorous, pretend distress. The unbearable lightness of being English.

  The rules of the one-downmanship game also include a strict injunction against ever criticising the other person’s child. You can denigrate your own as much as you like, but you must never say a disparaging word about your moaning-companions’ offspring (or at least never to their face). Expressions of sympathy are allowed, in response to parents’ complaints about their children’s misdeeds or inadequacies, but must be carefully phrased to avoid causing offence. A deliberately vague ‘Oh, I know’ or a bit of empathetic tutting and rueful head-shaking are the only truly safe responses, and should be immediately followed by a one-down grumble about your own children’s failings.

  None of this is as calculated or deliberately hypocritical as it might sound. Most English parents obey the one-downmanship rules automatically, without thinking. They instinctively adopt the cynical, mock-despairing tones and appropriate facial expressions. They just somehow know, without consciously reminding themselves, that it isn’t done to boast or get emotional. Even the subtle, indirect boasting – the showing-off disguised as deprecation – is not the result of careful thought. English parents do not say to themselves, ‘Hmm, I’m not allowed to boast, so let me see, how can I bad-mouth my child while still somehow conveying that he/she is a genius?’ This kind of indirectness just comes naturally to us. We are accustomed to not saying what we mean: irony, self-deprecation, understatement, obliqueness, ambiguity and polite pretence are all deeply ingrained, part of being English. This peculiar mindset is inculcated at an early age, and by the time our children go to primary school, they have usually already mastered the art of the indirect boast, and can do their own self-deprecatory trumpet-blowing.

  English children’s fear of undisguised boasting can be a handicap later on, in job interviews, when asking for promotions or pay rises and in other work situations where one is required to ‘sell oneself’ – or at least talk with some confidence about one’s skills, abilities and achievements. Even the most privileged, well-educated and articulate English teenagers are so bad at this that one private school introduced a ‘blow your own trumpet week’, in which pupils were encouraged to acknowledge their strengths and successes, without fear of ‘being seen as too confident’. Despite its jokey title, this was a fairly modest and understated exercise, in which pupils were asked, for example, to write some of their personal achievements on postcards and pin them to a tree. But this is England, so the newspapers were full of alarming headlines about ‘boasting lessons’, and quotes from the head teacher patiently denying that any unseemly boasting was involved.

  The Self-deprecating Insult Rule

  Speaking of privileged schoolchildren and the English art of indirectness, here is a quote I came across in a posh magazine from a mother whose daughter was in the same house as Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge, married to Prince William) at Marlborough, a very grand private boarding school: ‘There was always something slightly galling about having your children at school with the Middletons. Every pristine item of clothing would have a beautifully sewn-in name tape, for instance. It was unthinkable that they would end up resorting to marker pens on labels like the rest of us. There were huge picnics at sports day, the smartest tennis racquets, that kind of thing. It made the rest of us all feel rather hopeless.’

  To anyone who understands English class-indicators, this mother’s apparently humble statement – all self-denigrating and full of admiration for the Middleton family’s perfections – is not only an indirect boast, but also a subtle snobby put-down. Even if you are not English, if you’ve read the rest of this book, you should have no trouble deciphering the coded insults:

  •You will know, as this mother clearly does, that caring about every item of clothing being ‘pristine’, with perfectly sewn-in name tapes, is a middle-middle or even lower-middle indicator. Even the word ‘pristine’ is a sneer: only the suburban bourgeoisie regard it as a term of approbation, and fuss about having everything ‘pristine’ or ‘spotless’. Remember the lines from Betjeman’s satirical poem. ‘You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes/And I must have things daintily served’? (Or if you want a more modern example, think of the desperate social-climber Hyacinth Bucket, in the television comedy Keeping Up Appearances, and her constant fretting over such dainty details.)

  •Upper class and secure-upper-middle mothers (‘the rest of us’, as this mother is careful to remind us, twice) would be carelessly indifferent about such trivia and perfectly happy to send their children back to Marlborough with crumpled clothes and their initials roughly scrawled in marker pen on their clothing labels. To say that the Middleton family would find this ‘unthinkable’ puts them firmly in their petit-bourgeois place.

  •This mother’s professed feeling of inferiority over the Middletons’ big lavish picnics at school sports days, their expensive brand-new tennis racquets and ‘that kind of thing’, is utterly disingenuous. Worse than just insincere praise, this is yet another veiled insult: such ostentatious displays of wealth are clear nouveau-riche indicators.

  •So, far from making this mother and ‘the rest of us all’ feel ‘rather hopeless’ by comparison, the Middletons’ immaculate clothes, dainty name tapes, fancy picnics and high-priced sports equipment would in fact have made them all feel rather smugly superior.

  •The repetition of ‘the rest of us’ (with the addition of ‘all’ the second time, just in case we missed the point) is a dead giveaway. What this mother is really saying is that among the truly upper/upper-middle Marlborough parents, the Middletons were not regarded as ‘PLU’ (People Like Us) but as jumped-up nouveau social-climbers. But this is England, so she says it in code: this quote is an exquisite example of English irony, in which every line is a snobbish put-down, cleverly disguised as a self-deprecating compliment.

  The only thing that she and the other snooty Marlborough mothers may genuinely have found ‘slightly galling’ about the middle-class Middletons is that their daughter married the heir to the throne.

  The Invisible-puberty Rule

  The English, as a culture, tend to regard children as something of a tiresome encumbrance, and adolescents as a positive nuisance. Adolescents are seen as somehow both vulnerabl
e and dangerous: objects of concern, but also potentially threatening; in need of protection, but also in need of restraint – and just generally troublesome. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that only minority faiths celebrate the onset of puberty in any significant way. The advent of this awkward, embarrassing, hormonally challenged phase of life is not widely regarded as a matter for celebration. The English prefer to bury their heads in the sand and try to pretend that it isn’t happening. The C of E does offer a ‘confirmation’ ceremony at the appropriate age (traditionally between eleven and fourteen), but this is even less popular than christening, and there is no secular equivalent, so the vast majority of English children have no official rite of passage to mark their transition to adolescence.

  Deprived of their rightful rites, English adolescents tend to invent their own unofficial initiation rituals – which usually involve getting into trouble for illegal drinking, experimenting with illicit recreational drugs, shoplifting, graffiti-spraying, joy-riding, etc. – or find other ways of drawing attention to their new sexual status: we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, for example.

  But they are not formally ‘welcomed’ as fully fledged members of our society until after they have struggled through puberty, when the next official rite of passage, the eighteenth-birthday celebration, marks their transition to adulthood. For some, there is a mini rite of passage at seventeen, when they pass their driving test and get a driving licence, but eighteen is the age at which the English are officially entitled to vote, get married without parental consent, have homosexual sex, watch X-rated films and, most importantly for many, buy alcoholic drinks. Most will have been unofficially drinking, having whatever kind of sex they choose and watching ‘adult’ films (not to mention online pornography) for some years; many will have left school at sixteen and may be working full time; some may even be married or cohabiting, pregnant or with a baby of their own. But the eighteenth birthday is still regarded as an important landmark, and an excuse to have a big noisy party, or at least to get even more drunk than on an average Saturday night.

  There may now, however, be a slight shift in the right direction. Although I doubt that my laments about ‘invisible puberty’ had anything to do with this, I am very pleased to report that a fairly new ritual, consisting of a big end-of-primary-school party/disco/prom, for eleven-year-olds moving on to secondary school, has become increasingly popular in English primary schools since this book was first published in 2004. Whatever one may think of the Hollywood-style extravagance and glitz involved in a small minority of these events, they are at least a step towards some kind of puberty rites for our ritual-deprived pubescents. Bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs are often very lavish affairs – and what some see as the excessive indulgence and glamour of these mini-proms seems to me no different from these ceremonies, or indeed from the highly elaborate and festive puberty rites held at or around the time of a girl’s first menstruation in many other cultures, such as the four-day Navajo Kinaalda ceremony, or the eight-stage Apache Na’ii’ees or Sunrise Dance, to take just a couple of random examples. There is a reason that most cultures have these rituals: puberty is an important transition, and our pubescent youngsters are certainly aware of this, even if we choose to ignore it. They need to feel special and important and a bit ‘grown-up’ for a day, and we should be applauding any attempt to give them some kind of formal ceremony to mark and celebrate the beginning of their transition to adulthood. Those who disapprove of the primary schools’ new final-year parties and proms are free to come up with something better – but of course they never do: they just grumble and carp in the usual Eeyorish manner.

  The same applies, I think, to Sweet Sixteen parties, another ritual ‘coming of age’ celebration – already widespread in the US and with many equivalents in other countries, such as the quinceañera at fifteen in Latin America – that has recently become more popular in this country. Most of our Sweet Sixteens are fairly modest affairs, in no way resembling the ‘My Super Sweet Sixteen UK’ extravaganzas featured on the television show of that title, which are the preserve of a tiny minority of very rich, very spoiled brats. Again, perhaps it would be unwise to condemn all of the new coming-of-age parties on the basis of such an unrepresentative sample.

  The Gap-year ‘Ordeal’

  Among the educated classes, the eighteenth-birthday rites are now often followed by the ‘gap year’, a passage between school and university involving a more prolonged ‘liminal’ period, in which it is customary for young people to spend some months travelling abroad, as their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalents did in the Grand Tour, but now often incorporating some kind of charity work (helping Peruvian villagers to build a school, working in a Romanian orphanage, digging a well, saving a rainforest, etc.) and generally seeing the Real (i.e. poor) World and having meaningful, character-building Experiences. The gap-year trip is seen as a sort of initiation ordeal – a less arduous version of the custom in some tribal societies of sending adolescent males off into the jungle or wilderness for a time to endure a few pains and hardships and prove themselves worthy of official incorporation into adult society.

  Among the English upper and upper-middle classes, this has often already been achieved by banishing one’s offspring to character-building boarding schools for their entire adolescence. Until relatively recently, the upper class and aristocracy were determinedly anti-intellectual (a trait they shared, along with a penchant for sport and gambling, with the working classes), and rather looked down upon the middle classes’ reverence for higher education. Their sons might go to university, but this was not regarded as essential – a spell in the army or at agricultural college or something would do just as well – and academic achievement was even less important for their daughters. The young Lady Diana Spencer never seemed particularly ashamed of her total lack of academic qualifications, joking cheerfully in public speeches about her dismal O-level results and how ‘thick’ she was. A middle-class girl would have been mortified. These attitudes are changing, particularly among the lower or less wealthy echelons of the upper class, whose offspring must now compete with the university-educated middle classes for the best jobs. Upper-class and even aristocratic or royal post-adolescents (including Diana’s sons Princes William and Harry in 2000 and 2004) now find themselves bonding, team-building and comparing mosquito bites with middle-class teenagers on worthy gap-year adventures.

  Gap-year initiates of all classes are expected to come back from their Experience transformed into mature, socially aware, reliable adults, ready to take on the enormous challenge and responsibility of living in a university hall of residence, doing their own laundry and occasionally having to open a tin of beans when they come back from the pub to find that the cafeteria is shut. First-year university students who have ‘done a gap year’ regard themselves as superior to those who have come ‘straight from school’ – more grown-up and worldly wise. They have a tendency to talk rather smugly about how much older they feel, compared to the immature, silly, un-gap-yeared freshers.

  In some less privileged sections of English society, a spell in prison or in a young offenders’ institution at around the same age is regarded as having a similar character-building, maturing effect – and graduates of this initiation-ordeal often exhibit much the same sense of smug superiority over their childish, uninitiated peers. In fact, if you look past the superficial ethnographic dazzle of accent and jargon, the similarities in the talk and manner of those who have ‘been Inside’ and those who have been gap-yeared are quite striking.

  Student Rites

  Freshers’ Week Rules

  For the privileged university-goers, the eighteenth-birthday rites, A-level exams and possibly gap-year ‘ordeal’ are followed by another important rite of passage known as Freshers’ Week. This initiation ritual follows the classic pattern identified by van Gennep – pre-liminal separation, liminal transition/marginalisation and post-liminal incorporation. The initiates are first
separated from their families, their familiar surroundings and their social status as schoolchildren. Most arrive at university accompanied by one or both parents, in cars crammed with objects from their old life (clothes, books, CDs, duvet, favourite pillow, posters, photos, teddy-bear) and specially purchased objects for their new life (shiny new kettle, mug, bowl, plate, spoon, towel and so on).

  Once they have helped to unload all this, parents become something of an embarrassing encumbrance, and are dismissed by the fresher with unceremonious haste and impatient reassurances: ‘Yes, yes – I’ll be fine. No, don’t help me unpack, I can manage. Don’t fuss, OK? Yes, I’ll ring you tomorrow. Yes, all right. Bye now, bye . . .’ The fresher may in fact be feeling anxious and even tearful at the prospect of parting, but knows without being told that it is not done – indeed, deeply uncool – to display these feelings in front of other freshers.

  The fresher initiates barely have time to Blu-tac a few posters to their walls before the ‘liminal’ phase begins and they are hurled into a disorienting, noisy, exhausting succession of parties and fairs and events, staged by a bewildering variety of student clubs and societies – sporting, social, theatrical, artistic, political – all competing to sign them up for an impossible number of extra-curricular activities. These ‘official’ events are interspersed with pub-crawls, late-night pizzas and bleary-eyed, rambling coffee-sessions at three in the morning (as well as endless queuing to register for courses, obtain student identity cards and sign incomprehensible forms). This week-long ‘liminal’ phase is a period of cultural remission and inversion, in which the initiate’s senses are disturbed by alcohol and sleeplessness, social borders and categories are crossed and blurred, former identity is challenged and disrupted, and acceptance in the new social world is sought through pledges of affiliation to student clubs and societies. By the end of the week, the initiate has achieved a new social identity: he or she is incorporated as a student into the student ‘tribe’ – and finally allowed to rest a bit, calm down, start attending lectures and participating in normal student life.