The Regal Rules for Girls

by Jerramy Fine

  As far as I’m concerned, coming to England and not mixing with English people is as pointless as a foreigner visiting America and not meeting any Americans. But if you choose wisely, your flatmates (even more than your workmates) will become some of your best friends in London, as well as introduce you to English social circles that an American would not otherwise encounter. So when it comes to selecting your accommodation—please believe me that your location (and hence your postcode) is absolutely crucial.

  British postcodes are like US zip codes, except they also contain letters. London postcodes begin with N (for north), S (south), SW (southwest), and so on.

  Among the London elite, it was once vehemently believed that the only truly suitable residential areas were located north of the River Thames and south of Hyde Park—meaning that only a few neighborhoods (primarily SW1, SW3, SW7, and SW10) were deemed acceptable living quarters. Yet in the last few years, all these gorgeously grand town houses in Kensington, Chelsea, and Knightsbridge have been snapped up by Russian oligarchs and American bankers. (Some of these places go for as much as $10,000 per square foot!) So even though these historical dwellings are absolutely beautiful, today they are rarely owned or inhabited by English people.

  This said, I suggest focusing on prospective flatshares in locations that are now quietly known as the new socially acceptable areas (meaning these are the natural stomping grounds for those upper middle-class Brits that speak in that sexy, expensively educated drawl that American girls like us find so irresistible):

  Baron’s Court—W14

  Battersea—SW11

  Clapham—SW4

  Chiswick—W4

  Fulham—SW6

  Hammersmith—W6

  Maida Vale—W9

  Marylebone—W1

  Putney—SW15

  Wandsworth—SW18

  If you can afford Notting Hill and Kensington (W11 and W8)—go for it! Prime Minister David Cameron’s family resides there, and Freddie and Ella Windsor live there whenever they’re in London, so you’d be in good company. (For those that don’t know, Lord Fredrick Windsor is thirty-eighth in the line of succession for the British throne and a major pal of Prince William’s. Lady Gabrielle Windsor is Freddie’s sister and she is thirty-ninth in line.)

  PLACES TO AVOID AT ALL COSTS MAINLY BECAUSE THEY CAN BE UGLY AND/OR UNSAFE:

  The East End

  North London

  The East End is considered edgy and trendy in a Guy Ritchie, modern gangster sort of way (and it does contain the fabulous Shoreditch House), but it’s just too far away from the traditional comforts of West London to be taken seriously by the “posh” English set.

  As for North London (please note that the word “north” is usually said with a mix of fear and bewilderment), there is nothing wrong with it—in fact, it’s perfectly pleasant, and many Americans choose to live there because it looks so neat and tidy. However, North London is mainly full of other Americans, and is wholly avoided by traditional, tweed-wearing Englishmen with ancestral homes. There are a few exceptions to this: London Mayor Boris Johnson lives in Islington and Peter Phillips (the Queen’s oldest grandson) once lived in Belsize Park. But as one floppy-haired British boy once told me, “North London is a place one knows of, but not a place one ever visits or fully comprehends.” So I suggest you heed his advice.

  Log onto flat search sites as early as you can in the morning (I’m talking inhumanly early—like 6 a.m.) and start calling asap. The demand for quality flats with normal flatmates is so high, many of the best ones are taken by 9 a.m. the same day.

  When you find flatshares in the right areas within your budget (and it can happen!), you need to call them and make a viewing appointment. This is a chance for you to the view the flat and for the other flatmates to view you. As we used to say in my sorority rush days, it’s a “mutual selection process.” While on the phone, try to get as much information as possible about who lives there (guys? girls? nationalities? professions?), as you may decide it’s not worth your time to go there in person. Due to the doors that can open in your London social life, I must stress that the quality of the people in a flatshare is even more important than the quality of the flat itself.

  When out viewing flatshares, bring your A–Z with you. Many London streets have the same name (Kensington Place, Kensington Mews, Kensington Crescent, Kensington Gardens, Kensington Park Gardens), and it’s easy to get lost if you don’t have a map pinpointing the exact location.

  Keep in mind that you will need to lower your expectations. Big-time. You’re categorically not going to find American living standards at American prices, so push any thoughts along those lines out of your mind.

  Before you open the door to a potential flat, expect the worst. Envision seventeenth-century plumbing and eighteenth-century electricity. Picture a bedroom three times smaller than your college dorm room but with ten times less storage space. Any London flat that exceeds this expectation even slightly is worth considering.

  If your only problem with the flat is that the washing machine is in the kitchen, that the fridge is smaller than the TV, that there is no dryer for your clothes, that there is moldy carpet in the bathroom, that the bathtub has no shower attachment, or that the sinks have separate hot and cold water taps5—then put down an offer immediately. If the flat’s inhabitants also happen to be polite, charming, and English—offer to pay double.

  Making Your Room Livable

  When I moved into my UK student dorm room and later into my first grown-up London flat, I had no idea how and where to go about making either of them vaguely livable spaces.

  The only way I can describe my London dorm is Orwellian mental institution meets abandoned crack house. (If you don’t believe me, I have photo proof.) With its eerie green lighting, long dirty hallways, and exposed wiring, the place could easily have passed as a film set for a 1950s horror movie. The crazy part is that at the time I thought I was just incredibly unlucky and had simply been allotted the worst dorm in the country. But the longer I’ve lived in England, the more I’ve come to realize that this standard of student living is considered normal. A rite of passage, even. (One of my English friends told me how her dorm room was heated with a radiator that only worked if you deposited 10 pence every fifteen minutes.)

  And although my dorm room had been furnished with an electric kettle and a heated towel rack (both of which I had lived more than two decades without needing or missing), I had not been provided with a desk of any kind. I was, after all, just a student living in a student residence hall—why would I need one?

  So I had to purchase, among many other things, a desk. I also needed to go shopping for things like clothes hangers, sheets, towels, and halogen lamps. And I needed a new radio and a curling iron because both of mine had short-circuited seconds after being exposed to the high-voltage UK electricity. If I had been in America, I would have just driven to Target. However, now that I was in London, I clearly didn’t have a car, and more critically, England has nothing even vaguely similar to Target (much less Bed Bath & Beyond).

  So here are the British alternatives:

  IKEA

  You’re probably already overly familiar with IKEA. They offer great quality, a great selection, and everything is very cheap and very stylish—but you pay for it in the end. You walk into IKEA and are tempted to buy everything in sight—until you get to the warehouse and realize you have to load the heavy items onto your cart by yourself, get them home (on the tube or via a very expensive taxi), and worst of all, put them all together piece by piece with things that you’ve never touched in your life, like hammers and screwdrivers. Instead of using a screwdriver, I tried to use a butter knife, and by the time I had (a) figured out where to buy a hammer and (b) finished hammering that stupid student desk together, I vowed that next time I would pay to have a desk custom made rather than go through the experience ever again. So when shopping at IKEA, take heed: buy only small items (like plants and posters) that you can carry hom
e, or factor in the cost of a taxi, because IKEA charges a fortune to deliver. Also make sure you have a strong British boy at hand to help you construct any furniture that inevitably will emerge from the box in thirty-two pieces. (That said, it’s probably good to have a strong British boy on hand for a variety reasons—not all IKEA-related…)

  www.ikea.com/gb/en/

  Argos

  Argos is like a really bad version of Sears. They have a catalogue and they have a weird “store” that you can go to where you point to things (like clock radios and curling irons) in their catalogue and the employees fetch them for you from some mysterious backroom. No browsing at Argos. But it’s cheap, they have most basic items in stock, you can order online, and best of all—they deliver.

  www.argos.co.uk

  John Lewis

  John Lewis is a British institution. Everyone loves to love John Lewis. They are kind of like a JCPenney with an upscale Target in the basement. And weirdly, they are the only store in the UK that offers a wedding registry service. Most Americans find John Lewis (and their sister store, Peter Jones) to be a bit odd to begin with, but eventually they realize it really is the only affordable UK department store that can be counted on for quality. John Lewis recently launched a great new website and they deliver—so no expensive taxis required. www.johnlewis.com

  1 Except when it comes to taking your money; you’ll notice that these transactions usually happen at lightning speed.

  2 Prince Harry attended Sandhurst instead of a traditional university. Prince William attended Sandhurst after graduating from St. Andrews—so he essentially has two undergraduate degrees.

  3 This is slang for Oxford or Cambridge.

  4 Do not get overly excited and tell the immigration officials that you hope to look for a permanent job or they might decide to send you right back to America on the next plane.

  5 This is actually disturbingly common. The simple pipe that allows one to mix both hot and cold water so you don’t have to scald yourself every time you wash your hands or face is still very much considered a modern luxury. Double-paned windows are considered equally decadent.

  TWO

  LANGUAGE, MANNERS, AND BEHAVIOR

  (Because you don’t have to marry a lord to act like a lady)

  Parable #1

  One of my best English friends (let’s call her Hattie) is a girl from a meager yet loving English background. She studied art history at university, landed a job in one of London’s oldest, most respectable auction houses, and now heads up all global marketing for one of the most famous companies in the world. She is good-looking, endearingly kind, incredibly well mannered, and clearly one smart cookie. Over the years, her working-class accent had vanished into something softer and convincingly appropriate for the upper-class clientele she worked with at the auction house, and when I first met her I was convinced she had been educated at one of England’s prestigious girls boarding schools.

  One Friday night, Hattie and I were barhopping on the King’s Road and we met, as we often did on that road, a lovely group of floppy-haired, rosy-cheeked, upper-class English boys. They all wore pink shirts (with sleeves rolled up just below the elbow, never above) and gold signet rings bearing their family’s crest. They bought us round after round of gin and tonics, and before the night commenced, one of the boys (let’s call him Edward) had asked Hattie to accompany him to dinner the next evening and to a hunt ball1 in the countryside the following weekend. She was ecstatic (as I would have been!) and went shopping for a ball gown immediately.

  When we met for cocktails the following week, I begged her to tell me every last detail. But as soon as I mentioned the ball, her face fell.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I was found out,” she said sadly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It was all going so well until the ball itself,” she said. “I mean, our dinner the other night was amazing. Then Eddie and I drove out to Berkshire together… I met his sister and some more of his friends. They all seemed to like me.”

  “But then what?”

  “I slipped.”

  “Slipped on what? Did you fall down?”

  “No! Nothing like that… It happened at the ball. During the formal dinner. We were talking about Florence and… you know how much I love Italy because of the art… and I guess I just wasn’t thinking because I accidentally… I accidentally… said pasta the wrong way.”

  I stared at her incredulously. “You mean you pronounced it like an Italian instead of an English person?” (Believe it or not, in certain UK circles, there is nothing more uncouth than pronouncing foreign words correctly.2)

  Hattie nodded. “They all stopped talking and just stared at me. And suddenly they knew I wasn’t the person they thought I was. They knew that I wasn’t like them. They knew I hadn’t grown up like them. The rest of the night was really weird between us and I haven’t heard from Eddie since.”

  It was a heartbreaking story. Through the misuse of a single word, Hattie’s working-class roots had been revealed and Edward never called her back. It didn’t matter that she made lots of money and dressed beautifully. It didn’t matter that her manners were impeccable and that she had a career most girls would kill for. Hattie’s linguistic faux pas gave the game away.

  Class Counts

  People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have been known to marry chorus girls! Some have even married Americans.

  —HRH PRINCE PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH

  The English are delightfully self-effacing, refined, and complex, but due to the class system that is engrained in the psyche of their culture, if you don’t play by the rules of the game, you can feel ostracized very quickly.

  I had been in England less than a month when, through a mutual friend and an immense stroke of luck, I fell in with a dazzling English crowd. Their characters seemed to be taken straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel;3 they were the epitome of the Bright Young Things; their parties even appeared in the back pages of Tatler!4 And by some cosmic miracle, I (a farm girl from the backwaters of Colorado) was along for the ride.

  My new English chums all looked and sounded and acted exactly the same. Same accents (upper-class), same fashion sense (the more faded and worn your clothes appeared, the more money you had), same skin (glowingly and annoyingly clear).

  In their young minds, the past reigned superior: They liked old houses, old furniture, old wine, old money, old families. In fact, I noticed what seemed to be an almost fanatical preoccupation with genealogy. Unlike the American mind-set, which is primarily about what you can one day become, for these kids the focus seemed to be much more about what you had been.

  I realize the very concept of a class system is hard for most Americans to grasp—after all, it’s been drummed into our heads since birth that all people are created equal. But class pervades every single aspect of English life, so if you’re going to immerse yourself in the country, you must be aware of the antediluvian mind-set that you’re dealing with.

  While American social divides are primarily about income, the English define themselves by a nonnegotiable set of qualities that have nothing to do with raw cash and everything to do with one’s language, style, and manners. (Apparently there was a time when you could tell a man’s rank, school, and era simply by how he folded his handkerchief.) If you pay close attention, you’ll soon find that vocabulary, pronunciation, accents, etiquette, and clothes mean more than you ever dared to imagine…

  Watch What You Say

  I’ll never forget the day I found myself having real conversations with real English people that didn’t involve buying a train ticket or saying thank you for my change. I was overjoyed, but at the same time, I quickly realized how innocent Americans are when it comes to language—how tiny, linguistic nuances in our conversations mean relatively nothing to us—but mean everything to the Brits. In a country where status is not determined by pure economics, I cannot overemphasize t
he importance the English place not only on what you say, but how you say it and with what accent—it is the most vital social signifier in the country.

  An English aristocrat who speaks with upper-class pronunciation (clipped and plummy with lengthened vowels) and uses upper-class vocabulary, will always be considered and treated as an aristocrat, even if he is bankrupt, in prison, working in a factory, living in a mental institution, or living on welfare.

  Conversely, a working-class Brit who has become a self-made billionaire, with private jets, expensive cars, and houses all around the world—will always be considered and treated like a member of the lower working class because he speaks with a working-class accent—no matter how much money he has and continues to make. Even if he changes his accent to something more neutral, one word of working-class terminology will automatically give him away—making it virtually impossible to ever truly shift his standing in the social order.

  FOUR SURE SIGNS OF UK UPPER-CLASS SPEECH:

  The word “real” has two syllables.

  They pronounce “house” to rhyme with “mice.”

  They say “gel” rather than “girl.”

  “White wine” sounds like “wait wain.”

  If you want to know what an upper-class English accent sounds like, just watch any movie starring Hugh Grant or Rupert Everett and listen to their voices. This accent is what’s known as “BBC English,” “the Queen’s English,” “Oxford English,” or “Upper Received Pronunciation” (URP) and is generally considered to be the prestige English accent, as it has been the accent of those with power, money, and influence since the early twentieth century.

  (If you want to know what a working-class accent sounds like, watch something like The Full Monty, Layer Cake, or Snatch. There is nothing wrong with this accent—however, this book will focus primarily on the haunts and habits of those who speak with the URP.)