As this suggests, definitions of Englishness are often sentimental. But a key part of any convincing definition must be geographical. There are features of English geography that contribute to making the English the way they are. Although Britain is related to Europe, its insular location enables aloofness and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Bill Bryson writes of the British having ‘a totally private sense of distance’, evident in the pretence that Britain is ‘a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea’.8 The English feel this more than their Welsh and Scottish neighbours: the defining feature of English consciousness of English geography is not what the land is like, but where it is – and where it very much isn’t. For most English people, Europe is somewhere close enough to fly to inexpensively – nice for a weekend of shopping, museums and meals out – but sufficiently far away to be no more than semi-relevant politically. This sense of isolation from Europe became entrenched in the reign of Henry VIII, who, in deciding to break away from the Roman Catholic Church, distanced England from the rest of Christendom.
No one in England is more than seventy miles or so from the sea. The long coast has made sea fishing an obvious way to source food; the vessels first used for this were the precursors of trade ships and of a navy that could be used to project force beyond England’s shores. But for the majority the sea is alien – a destination for the occasional day trip, if that. The temperate climate makes walking and the outdoor life easy, without there being much suggestion of sultry glamour – the possibility of sitting outside a café on a summer evening or promenading gorgeously. In Shakespeare’s Henry V a French character wonders how the English, a people who drink insipid beer (‘sodden water’, ‘a drench’, ‘barley broth’), can match a Frenchman’s ‘quick blood, spirited with wine’; he disparages England as having a ‘climate foggy, raw and dull’. When in the seventeenth century Inigo Jones tried to popularize the piazza, he failed because of the weather. In an English winter, there can be as little as eight hours of daylight, and at all times the first kiss of sunshine, though hardly unusual, is greeted with a surprised delight.
We might also remark England’s general flatness, its compactness (which made it fairly easy to centralize) and its safeness from attack. What’s more, all of England is habitable, and all of it has been inhabited: the ground is densely populated, with more than 400 people per square kilometre, around four times the rate of France, and ten times that of the United States. Today most English people live in cities and towns or amid the sprawl of suburbia. But, asked to conjure an image of England, they are likely to think of very different places: rural, idyllic, less populous and tinged with melancholy. William Wordsworth wrote of ‘the ghostly language of the ancient earth’, and we are likely to feel we have sensed this, just as we are likely to feel we recognize John Keats’s vision of an English autumn, with its twittering swallows, robin red-breast whistling a soft treble, mists and mellow fruitfulness. Edward Thomas in The Heart of England pictured the perfumed air of an old wood, a church surrounded by white and grey headstones bowing to it, creepers melting into the brickwork of village houses, and a reedy pond where the summer heat quivered and the grasses were heavy with glowing flowers. For Stanley Baldwin, England meant ‘wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on … the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening’.9
There are real locations that exert a strong pull: be it mystical, as in the case of Stonehenge, King Arthur’s Tintagel and Bede’s Jarrow; at once practical and dystopian, as with the London Underground and the M25; or visceral and tribal, be it the noisy fortress of the Kop at Anfield or goth-enticing Whitby. Then there are the magic territories of fantasy, the invented Arcadias of the picture postcard and Romantic poetry, and the numinous territories of fiction, ranging from Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden to Coronation Street and Albert Square. And then, most importantly, there are the archetypal, representative sites of Englishness: the village green, the local pub, the ivy-clad cottage, the blacksmith’s forge and, less appealingly, the threadbare bedsit and the derelict seaside town.
There is a tension between our nostalgic affection for the warm scenes that might adorn a chocolate box or a jigsaw puzzle and the realities of modern England with its clapped-out fairgrounds, shuttered cinemas, boarding houses and detention centres, unprofitable farms, sparsely attended churches, betting shops and empty cafés, generic shopping streets and malls, Pupil Referral Units, landfill sites and industrial estates, identikit housing developments and characterless urban spaces, ubiquitous CCTV cameras and piss-drenched stairwells.
In his novel England, England (1998) Julian Barnes imagines the construction on the Isle of Wight of a monstrous heritage centre containing all things English. A survey carried out for the tycoon behind the project yields a list of ‘Fifty Quintessences of Englishness’. I won’t reproduce them all, but many are places or types of place: the White Cliffs of Dover, Wembley Stadium, Big Ben, the West End and thatched cottages.10 Here we have a characteristically English act of displacement: instead of philosophy or ideology we nurse a waking dream, a space furnished not with articles of faith, but with metonyms. The ‘green and pleasant land’ poetically summoned up by William Blake – and celebrated in what is, in Hubert Parry’s setting, the most English of English hymns – is a substitute for a concrete national idea. Blake’s more sustained vision of Albion, a giant identified with a revitalized Britain, has significantly failed to achieve any such currency.
For many, the images used to evoke Englishness diffuse an air of complacency. But for others, they are comforting, psychologically and somatically. We may think of winding country roads, the Women’s Institute and perfectly tended little gardens, or red postboxes and solid breakfasts. The last two of these, along with gloomy Sundays, were highlighted by George Orwell, whose definition of Englishness was a jumble of sensations, not a set of ideas. In his essay ‘England Your England’ Orwell pictured as a characteristic fragment of Englishness ‘the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. That image was recycled by Prime Minister John Major in 1993, as he argued the need to reduce European political influence on Britain’s national life. To a remarkable degree, ideas of Englishness are nourished by the tangible and the physical.
To see Englishness in microcosm, you need only go to a pub. There is perhaps no English (or British) institution more mythologized. One is expected to have strong views about what is desirable in a pub: intimacy, little nooks, real ales or gassy lagers or decent wine by the glass, sports-related mementoes, casually friendly staff, pickled onions in jars and equally pickled regulars, ‘reassuringly’ disgusting urinals or toilets scented with lavender, old panels of etched glass, hearty pies, a jukebox, a fug of slowness or an air of barely suppressed violence. (Clearly, no one person looks for all these things.) Orwell pictured his ideal pub, which was ‘always quiet enough to talk in’, sold aspirin and stamps, and had a snack counter offering cheese, pickles and mussels; the middle-aged women behind the bar called customers ‘dear’, but never ‘ducky’.11 Warmth was a crucial part of what he looked for. Most people expect the atmosphere of a pub, even in an age of gargantuan Pubcos and giant screens showing the football, to be much warmer than that of, say, a benefits office or a doctor’s waiting room. At their best, and also at their worst, pubs are social hubs. Only the middling sort of pub, blandly undistinguished and inspiring no loyalty, is unimportant as a social centre. Pubs are sanctuaries, for many of their patrons more spacious and less stifling than home.
Precisely because of their sacrosanct quality – often exaggerated, it is true, and often abused – pubs are the setting not for a suspension of good manners, but for an amplified and even parodic version of them. We still expect there to be a queue. It may not look orderly, but within its apparent disorder there is at least an approximation of orderliness. We expect bar staff to know whose turn it is to be served. We may make a point of le
tting people order before us because we believe it is by rights their turn, and are likely to feel aggrieved if others – on either side of the bar – show less concern for these matters. Most important is the buying of rounds: a form of turn-taking that is essentially a matter of fairness, in which that fairness should nonetheless not be observed with an explicit strictness; it is a casual kind of equality, which all the same has certain rules. Kate Fox notes some of the key principles: ‘the person who buys the round must also act as waiter’, ‘the correct time to say “It’s my round” is when the majority of the glasses are about three-quarters empty’, ‘any sign of miserliness, calculation or reluctance to participate wholeheartedly in the ritual is severely frowned upon’.12
Here we see, in miniature, the principle that good manners are essentially a matter of making little sacrifices. Contrary to the old maxim, good manners do not cost nothing: they involve small amounts (usually very small, but usually noticeable) of delay, boredom and physical discomfort. Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that in the absence of moral rules enforced by a sovereign, life was destined to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. The words are Hobbes’s most quoted phrase. To avoid such a fate, and to achieve what Hobbes calls ‘commodious living’, we make concessions.13
A good pub has that quality of commodiousness, even when it is not actually a roomy physical space. And whether good or bad, the pub is a place where we find flesh and blood, evangelism of several different hues, the desire for ownership, a private sense of distance, a territorialism that can look a lot like insularity, an inclination to play fair, a close concern with precedent, and also evidence that there is perennially something ‘little’ about Englishness, a lack of larger ambitions and designs, a delight in the local. It is an education in Englishness and in English manners. Look around an English pub on a busy Friday night, and think of Burke: ‘Manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us.’
16
Island Man and his discontents
‘They do things differently there’
The English know that some of the norms of their society are odd. Nevertheless, when abroad, they marvel at matters far less strange. On their travels, they prove squeamish yet also gregarious, pushy but more often docile, lacking in savoir faire and desperate to parade what little of it they possess, emotionally vacant yet forever on the brink of some grand epiphany. They come home with trinkets, undrinkable beverages and anecdotes of how ‘They do things differently there.’ What happens in England may be in many cases quite close to what happens in Armenia, Chile, Thailand or Angola, but differences in behaviour are palpable.
National character, which was once studied earnestly, is no longer a respectable subject. The standard academic line is that the attributes identified as national characteristics are illusions and distortions. If we refer to them uncritically, we are guilty of peddling stereotypes. Yet in private many of us remark on national differences, and manners are often used to illustrate national character. The eighteenth-century French political thinker Montesquieu wrote of the honesty of Spaniards, the Chinese weakness for cheating and desire for material gain, and the capriciousness of the Japanese. His countrymen suffered from what he called ‘unfortunate vivacity’: manners were disorderly, the cult of wit allowed virtue to be mocked, and inconsistency was the norm. By contrast the English were restless, at once the most and least patriotic of people, and consequently willing to settle elsewhere, taking surprisingly little of their native country with them.
Yet even when the English settle in far-flung places they want a few familiar comforts: Marmite, Marks and Spencer underwear, BBC radio. One can dismiss this as a cliché, but observation bears it out. And be they settlers, travellers or tourists, the English retain a capacity for being taken aback by the smallest quirks of other cultures. To see this, you need only look at the travel writing section in an English bookshop, which will be packed with whimsical stories of bemusement. The amateur English anthropologist, having toiled red-faced over several continents, reports back with an album of insights – akin to those in the advertisements that bill HSBC, sensitive to cultural differences, as ‘the world’s local bank’.1
For instance, eye contact during conversation is in some cultures highly desirable, but in others (such as among Native American Indians) is interpreted as over-familiar or hostile. In an Arab country it is an insult knowingly to show another person the soles of your feet. Shaking your head, which may seem a straightforward if not very charming way of signalling disagreement, is an affirmative gesture in some countries (Albania for one). Talkativeness is seen as a bad thing in many societies, and appears to be regarded with particular suspicion in Estonia, a country in which compliments are rare and unelaborate. In some cultures menstruating women must stay away from the sick, and among the Tlingit of Alaska they traditionally wear broad-brimmed hats to keep them from looking up at the sky and polluting it.
I know from experience that in Japan it is considered rude to blow your nose in front of another person – ruder than urinating in the street at night after a drinking session. I also know that a formal meeting there begins with the presentation of business cards; both hands should be used in offering one’s card. The Japanese language has complex grammatical mechanisms for expressing politeness. Where English-speakers utter thanks, the Japanese are apt to offer apologies, although the modern sankyuu and the rather flat arigato are today replacing the traditional, polished sumimasen.2
For my sense of Chinese manners, I am reliant on second-hand information. Sir Robert Hart, who spent more than fifty years in China after going there in 1854 to work as an interpreter, characterized doing business with the Chinese as a matter of ‘flowers and thistles’: the ‘flowers’ were presents given to ease the passage of a transaction, and the ‘thistles’ were the extortions exacted by officials who felt that they had not been given enough flowers. Modern accounts of doing business in China make much of guanxi; literally meaning ‘relationships’, the word signifies a systematic approach to networking, the patient building and maintenance of rapport. The word comes up repeatedly in Peter Hessler’s Country Driving (2010), a travelogue that is also a trenchant analysis of contemporary China. Hessler records many Chinese quirks. As he gets to know the countryside north of Beijing, he grows close to a local couple. He is intrigued when their son returns from elementary school with a list of ‘rules of daily behaviour’: there are twenty such rules, which include twenty-eight prohibitions couched in the form ‘Do not…’ Some of the instructions seem superfluous (‘Don’t drown’), but others are familiar: ‘On public buses, give your seat to pregnant women.’ Of the twenty rules, only one is specifically academic.3
German books on the subject of manners, such as Adolph Knigge’s, place a lot of emphasis on the techniques of friendship. No surprise to anyone who has spent much time in Germany is the preoccupation with titles: in particular, the formal use of people’s job titles, which might involve addressing one’s head of department as Herr Fachbereichsleiter. Austrians are even more pernickety about this; to outsiders the insistence of qualified business administrator Tobias Huber on being addressed as Herr Diplom-Betriebswirt Huber may seem ridiculous, but omitting such titles can cause offence.
Perhaps we smile at this. But there is much about English ways that looks weird to outsiders: the parent-on-parent sports contests in schools, the pre-teen debating style of elected politicians, the capacity for being both patriotic and embarrassed by patriotism, the tendency to keep items one might like to brag about (awards, glitzy photos) in the loo. Trying to unravel the national character, a foreigner may observe that the English drink a lot of tea and breed ugly dogs, boil their vegetables till they turn to mush and express their grievances by calling radio talk shows. They recoil from extremes and fetishize obscure sports – cricket being a model for ethics, with its cult of the ‘straight bat’ and ‘not batting for the other side’. They rarely mind that their window
s don’t close properly, fortify their homes with knick-knacks, favour archaic systems of measurement (Fahrenheit, acres, inches, pints), and regard the unextreme vagaries of English weather as an inexhaustible topic of conversation. Their underwear is bad. They enjoy booze and low-budget sitcoms, quizzes and terrible jokes. Suspicious of intellectuals and just about anything that ends in -ism, they take pride in a no-nonsense approach to life.
If foreigners look elsewhere for the essence of Englishness, they see it embodied in an assortment of rituals, ceremonies, traditions, uniforms, institutions and titles. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about this in English Traits (1856), a book that, though the work of a Massachusetts native, influenced English thinking about what it meant to be English. ‘They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown,’ Emerson noted, adding that ‘The middle ages still lurk in the streets of London.’4 London, and elsewhere: a tourist dowsing for signs of antique Englishness will be struck by the countless little festivals and community traditions, from the Shrovetide football at Ashbourne in Derbyshire and the annual cheese-rolling at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire to the bun-throwing on royal occasions at Abingdon in Oxfordshire and, in the Essex villages of Great Dunmow and Little Dunmow, the presentation of a flitch of bacon to couples happily married for more than a year and a day.
All this baggage is a sign of the English delight in the past, which is sometimes more truly a resistance to change, and also of the English love of snug expressions of local or social affiliation. A respect for old ceremonies co-exists with a scepticism about them: the mystery of tradition is somehow rather wonderful, but traditions don’t need to be understood scientifically, can always be doctored to suit the moment, and are best explained with a benign shrug of the shoulders.
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