Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Clearly, all these sorries are not heartfelt, sincere apologies. Like ‘nice’, ‘sorry’ is a useful, versatile, all-purpose word, suitable for all occasions and circumstances. When in doubt, say ‘sorry’. Being English means always having to say you’re sorry.

  Rules of Ps and Qs

  The English may not speak much on public transport, but when they do open their mouths, the words you are most likely to hear, apart from ‘sorry’, are ‘please’ and, especially, ‘thank you’. The latter may often be shortened to ‘thanks’, ‘’anks’ or ‘’kyou’,72 or replaced with an informal equivalent such as ‘cheers’ or ‘ta’ – or even, among younger people and kidults, ‘cool’, ‘nice one’, ‘wicked’ or ‘fab’.

  According to yet another survey, we say ‘thank you’ thirteen times a day, on average – and again these are just the ‘thank-yous’ that people actually remember saying when they are asked a survey question, so the real figure is probably even higher. And this figure doesn’t include the more casual equivalents (ta, cheers, etc.), which at least a third of us are more likely to use.

  It’s worth noting that this last survey finding, about the ‘casual equivalents’, was reported by the press in typically Eeyorish fashion, with headlines about ‘The Death of Thank-you’, in line with the popular myth that as a society we are becoming less courteous, standards are declining, young people especially are all ill-mannered and obnoxious, etc., etc. In almost every survey I’ve seen, about 75 per cent of people in this country bemoan the ‘fact’ that we are becoming less polite. But think about that figure for a moment. This 75 per cent invariably feel that they themselves are still polite, that their own personal standards of courtesy have not declined in the slightest. So, either they are all considerably less courteous than they think they are, or they are mistaken: a society in which at least 75 per cent of us are still perfectly polite is hardly one that has lost its manners. I say ‘at least’ because there is no reason to suppose that the other 25 per cent – those who are not convinced that we are becoming less polite – are all a bunch of badly behaved thugs and louts either. They may simply be more observant, and perhaps less susceptible to doom-mongering headlines.73

  During the research for this book, I made a point of counting Ps and Qs. Whenever I took a bus, I would sit or stand as near as possible to the driver (outside central London, buses nowadays do not have conductors – if passengers don’t have a travel card or pre-purchased ticket, they buy their tickets directly from the driver) to find out how many of the people boarding the bus said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when purchasing their ticket. I found that the majority of English passengers mind their Ps and Qs, and most of the drivers also say ‘thank you’ when accepting money for tickets. If you want statistics, I came across a cross-cultural study showing that 70 per cent of public-transport passengers in London say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when buying tickets, compared with 50 per cent in Tokyo, 30 per cent in Hamburg and 10 per cent in New York. (It is interesting to note that, as with the ‘sorries’ in my bumping experiments, the Japanese come closest to English etiquette regarding Ps and Qs, although again this is perhaps not quite as much of an automatic ‘reflex’ for them.)

  Not only that, but many English passengers also thank the bus driver again when they get off at their stop. This practice is less common in very big cities, but in smaller cities and towns it is the norm. On a typical short bus journey from a council estate on the outskirts of Oxford to the city centre, for example, I noted that all of the passengers said ‘’kyou’ or ‘’anks’ or ‘cheers’ as they alighted from the bus – with the noticeable exception of a group of foreign students, who had also omitted the ‘please’ when buying their tickets. Many tourists and other visitors have commented to me on the politeness of English passengers, and from my own cross-cultural research, I know that this degree of courtesy is unusual. In other countries, the only circumstances in which I have found people consistently thanking bus drivers in this way were in small communities where the passengers all knew the regular drivers.

  Having said that, I should point out that there is nothing particularly warm or friendly about English Ps and Qs – they are generally muttered, usually without any eye contact or smiles. If you listen very closely, you may even sometimes hear English passengers absent-mindedly murmuring ‘thanks,’ while alighting through the doors halfway down the bus, from where the driver cannot possibly hear them – clearly just an automatic habit rather than an actual attempt to thank the driver. I caught myself doing this, and realised that my ‘thanks’ was simply a reflex, a word I just instinctively mumble as I step off a bus, even when I’ve failed to notice that I am nowhere near the driver. This prompted me to listen more carefully to fellow passengers at the central doors on subsequent bus journeys, and I heard quite a few muttering ‘thanks’– more than enough to convince me that this is not just some odd personal habit of mine, but yet another habitual oddity of Englishness. Just because we are distinctively polite and courteous in our public conduct does not mean that we are good-natured, generous, kind-hearted people. We just have rules about Ps and Qs, which most of us observe, most of the time, often without being conscious of doing so.

  Our scrupulous pleasing and thanking of bus drivers, conductors, taxi drivers and the like can also be another manifestation of the ‘polite egalitarianism’ discussed earlier – reflecting our squeamishness about drawing attention to status differences, and our embarrassment about anything to do with money. We like to pretend that these people are somehow doing us a favour, rather than performing a service for financial reward. And they collude with us in this pretence. Taxi drivers, in particular, expect to be thanked as well as paid at the end of their journey, and feel offended if the passenger simply hands over the money – although they are usually tolerant towards foreigners who ‘don’t know any better’, as one London cabbie put it when I questioned him on the subject. ‘With most English people, it’s just automatic,’ he explained. ‘They say “thanks” or “cheers” or something when they get out – and you say “thanks” back. You get the occasional rude bastard who doesn’t, but most people just automatically say “thanks.”’

  Taxi Exceptions to the Denial Rule

  In return, English taxi drivers are generally courteous towards their customers – and often positively friendly, to the extent of breaking the normal ‘denial’ rules of privacy and reserve. There is a sort of standing joke among the English about the excessive chattiness of taxi drivers and, indeed, many live up to their garrulous reputation. The main popular stereotype is of the would-be-tabloid-columnist cabbie, who bores or infuriates his passengers with endless heated monologues on everything from the inadequacies of the current government or the England football coach to the latest celebrity-gossip scandal. I have come across drivers of this type and, like most English passengers, I tend to be too embarrassed either to ask them to shut up or to argue with their more objectionable opinions. We grumble about taxi drivers’ breach of the denial rule, but in typically English fashion we make a national joke out of it rather than actually tackling them directly.

  There is also, however, another type of chatty cabbie, who does not deliver tabloid monologues but rather attempts to engage his passengers in friendly conversation – usually beginning, in accordance with English protocol, with a comment on the weather, but then breaking with tradition by expressing interest in the passengers’ destination and the purpose of their journey (a railway station, for example, often prompts the question ‘Are you off somewhere nice, then?’). The questions can become more personal (or at least what the English regard as personal – such as perfectly innocuous enquiries about one’s job or family), but most such drivers are remarkably sensitive to nuances of tone and body language, and will not persist if the passenger comes over all English and gives monosyllabic answers or looks squirmy and uncomfortable. Many English people do find these enquiries intrusive, but we are nearly all too polite, or too embarrassed, to t
ell the cabbie to mind his own business – so these signals are all he has to go on.

  There is also an element of ‘cultural remission’ in conversations with taxi drivers – and with certain other professionals such as hairdressers – whereby the normal rules of reticence and discretion are temporarily suspended, and one can, if one wishes, indulge in much more personal and intimate chat than is usually permitted between strangers.

  The English Patient Rules

  A slight digression from the transport/public-places theme of this chapter, but it occurs to me that doctors might well wish that the same suspension of cultural privacy rules applied in their consulting rooms and surgeries, where the English tend to be their usual inhibited, embarrassed selves. In the 2004 edition of this book, I half-jokingly suggested that they try speaking to their patients ‘through a mirror’, either by standing behind them like a hairdresser, or by rigging up a rear-view mirror like a taxi driver, as it seems to be at least partly the lack of direct face-to-face eye contact that allows the English to shed their inhibitions in these contexts.

  This may to some extent be one of those ‘human universals’ – Catholic priests of all nationalities have long been aware of the effectiveness of the screen in promoting greater openness in confessions, and psychoanalysts’ use of the couch to avoid eye contact with their patients cannot be a coincidence, but as usual we are probably talking about a question of degree here, and it seems that the English find it particularly difficult to ‘open up’ in the absence of such tricks, and are particularly susceptible to the illusion of anonymity that they provide. In fact, if you think about it, my advice to English doctors goes against all the touchy-feely ‘communication skills’ training they now receive, in which they are told to sit close to the patient, not use their desk as a shield, lean forward, make eye contact, etc.: all measures that seem to me calculated to make the average English person clam up entirely. Which, according to doctors I asked about this, is precisely their effect on most English patients, who do not confess to the doctor what is really bothering them until they are on their way out of the consulting room, usually with their back half turned and their hand on the door-knob.

  Since this book was first published in 2004, I have been invited to speak at a few medical conferences on this subject, and at one of these a doctor told me that the best trick is to find an excuse to stand behind English patients, such as listening to their breathing or heartbeat with a stethoscope, when one has difficult or personal questions to ask. Anything to avoid the dreaded eye contact! As the stethoscope trick could be a bit implausible when a patient ‘presents with’, say, a sprained ankle or some other clearly non-respiratory/cardiac complaint, I suggested at another medical gathering that doctors could perhaps achieve the same effect by turning away to look stuff up on their computer screens – then maybe just very casually saying, without looking at the patient, ‘So, while you’re here, anything else you want to ask me about?’ or something like that. The doctors laughed, and told me that their ‘communications’ training specifically forbids focusing on their computer screens while talking with patients. Apparently this makes them look aloof and uncaring. One doctor said, ‘But you’re absolutely right, Kate. You only get that “Oh, while I’m here, it’s probably nothing, but . . .” (you know, the line where you always sit up and think, OK, here comes the real problem) when you turn away and start fiddling with the computer trying to find their notes or do their prescriptions.’

  The other doctors all nodded agreement with him, and one added, ‘Yep, spot on, often the best time to ask the really awkward questions, too, while you’re on the computer . . . exact opposite of what they tell us on the comms training, of course! Perhaps you could explain this to them, Kate? Tell them they’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘Yeah, but break it to them gently,’ joked another doctor, ‘y’know, with lots of eye contact . . .’

  Clearly, not enough doctors are adopting this highly effective ‘taxi driver’ approach, as English patients’ inhibitions about visiting or talking to doctors have recently been blamed for the fact that we have far lower cancer survival rates than other developed nations, despite free access to skilled doctors and cutting-edge treatments. A survey by the British Heart Foundation found that we also wait on average ninety minutes (often much longer) before calling the emergency services when we experience heart-attack symptoms. Even seriously ill English patients in hospital are often reluctant to complain or ‘make a fuss’ about their ailments. I have spent quite a lot of time in hospital over the past decade or so (as a patient, but the silver lining was the chance to do ‘undercover’ participant-observation research), and have lost count of the number of times I witnessed variations on the following exchange during the doctors’ ward-rounds:

  DOCTOR: So, how are you today?

  ENGLISH PATIENT (clearly very ill): Not too bad, thanks.

  DOCTOR (frowning, concerned): Are you sure? It says here in your notes ‘Patient complains of severe abdominal pain’.

  ENGLISH PATIENT (highly offended): I wasn’t complaining! Why did they put that? I mean, I might have said my guts hurt but I didn’t complain! And I only said it because they asked – I wasn’t making a fuss or anything!

  DOCTOR (reassuring, slight sigh, has heard this before): No don’t worry, sorry, ‘complains’ is kind of a technical term here – it doesn’t mean you were making a fuss, I promise.

  After the doctor had moved on, these English patients would often engage in moaning-rituals with fellow patients, complaining about their pain, the lousy hospital food and many other discomforts – and, indignantly and repeatedly, about the medical jargon in which their dignified response to a question had been classified as ‘complaining’. As with our moans about trains and buses, we seem perversely disinclined to address our complaints to anyone who might actually be able to help.

  These participant-observation findings were confirmed in many informal interviews with both English doctors and foreign doctors working in English hospitals. When I asked foreign doctors (especially Americans) ‘Have you noticed any differences between English patients and patients in your country?’ almost all of them commented on our squeamishness about complaining.

  Some commentators attribute our reluctance to visit doctors or complain about illness to tough English stoicism and the ‘stiff upper lip’, but I would suggest that embarrassment and inhibition, and unwritten rules about ‘making a fuss’, are the more likely explanations. Now I come to think of it, these factors, rather than any exemplary fortitude or ability to suffer in silence, are also perhaps the most likely explanations for our ‘stiff upper lip’ reputation. Much of what looks like stoicism could just be social dis-ease.

  QUEUING RULES

  ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, “Come forth!” And he came third, and got sent to the back for pushing.’74

  In 1946, the Hungarian humorist George Mikes described queuing as our ‘national passion’. ‘On the Continent,’ he said, ‘if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives they make a dash for it . . . An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’ In an update over thirty years later, in 1977, he confirmed that this was still the case. After more than another thirty years, nothing much seems to have changed – and foreigners are still bemused by our queuing habits. An Italian participant in one of SIRC’s discussion-groups echoed Mike’s description: ‘The queue for the bus, for example . . . everybody stands in a line and gets on one by one in order. It drives me crazy – it is so slow! Here in Italy we stand near the sign and when the bus comes we all get on – quickly!’ But English queuing is not quite as simple as Mikes makes it sound.

  I saw a headline in a Sunday newspaper, bemoaning the fact that the English had ‘lost the art of queuing’. Puzzled, as this was not what my own observation fieldwork had shown, I read on. It turned out that the author had been in a queue, someone had tried to jump it and both she and the other
queuers had been outraged and disgusted – but no one had had the courage to tackle the queue-jumper in a sufficiently forceful manner (they just humphed and tutted), so he had got away with it. Far from constituting any sort of evidence for its loss, this struck me as a perfectly accurate description of the English art of queuing.

  The Indirectness Rule

  The English expect each other to observe the rules of queuing, feel highly offended when these rules are violated, but seem unable to express their annoyance in a straightforward manner. In other countries, this is not a problem: in America, where a queue-jumper has committed a misdemeanour rather than a cardinal sin, the response is loud and prescriptive: the offender is simply told, ‘Hey, you, get back in line!’ or words to that effect. On the Continent, the reaction tends to be loud and argumentative; in some other parts of the world, queue-jumpers may simply be unceremoniously pushed and shoved back into line – but the end result is much the same. Paradoxically, it is only in England, where queue-jumping is regarded as deeply immoral, that the queue-jumper is likely to get away with the offence. We huff and puff and scowl and mutter and seethe with righteous indignation, but only rarely do we actually speak up and tell the jumper to go to the back of the queue.

  Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. I had to, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t suffer as well. Sorry to sound so grumpy, but my queue-jumping experiments were the most difficult and distasteful and upsetting of all the rule-breaking field experiments I conducted during the research for this book. Far worse than bumping, much worse even than asking people the price of their house – just the thought of queue-jumping was so horribly embarrassing that I very nearly abandoned the whole project rather than subject myself to such an ordeal. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hesitated and agonised and procrastinated, and then even when I thought I had managed to steel myself, I would lose my nerve at the last minute, and slink humbly to the back of the queue, hoping no one had noticed that I had even been considering jumping it.