PREFACE

MANY WRITERS HAVE observed that returning home to England, after a long spell abroad, is an ordeal; there is something about England, a sort of perpetual spiritual fog, a pervasive provinciality, a leisureliness about life, a difficulty about getting things done, a certain sanctimonious sense that England is the centre of the universe, an orderliness, a neatness, a smallness, a nineteenth-centuryness … these things, and more, create an aroma and a mood. It is a sticky mood—life here seems so much harder, just to do it. There is little deference to comfort and ease, too much deference to authority. There are a lot of dogs. Shops say: Established in 1748. People say: It can’t be done. Though the horse has virtually disappeared, roads are built, and clothes are designed, as if it still had sovereignty. George Orwell, discussing the different air of England, pointed to the essential Englishness of suet puddings, bad teeth and red pillar boxes, but one could pick almost anything—the multiplicity of electric plug sizes, for instance (where else in the civilized world could you go into fifty houses and not find one in which the plug on a newly purchased iron fitted?) or the notices on toilet paper that say please wash your hands, or the radio voice that says ‘It is very nearlah twelve and a half minutes past nine’. This is the adjunct; what is the essence?

By a curious coincidence, the author and a friend, Orsler by name, returned to England at the same time from vastly different parts of the globe. Spry, debonair, well-dressed Malcolm Bradbury had newly come from the United States; bespectacled, large-eared Michael Orsler had come from the Orient which, we may be sure, was not for him inscrutable. We returned at the time of a general election, when one party was declaring, ‘You’ve never had it so good’, and another cried, ‘You can have it even better’. Things seemed to be changing; many people had bought motor cars, to keep in their garages until roads had been built to accommodate them; the middle classes, once the guardians of propriety, had become illegal, because of income tax and motoring offences and because it was now in style to be working class; the first road to be built in England since the Romans left was shortly to be opened, and people were planning camping trips to the roadside to watch cars going by, and to drop cigarette packets on to them from overpasses. But it did not take us long to see that beneath this veneer of alteration, things were as they had always been—if not more so.

One tasted England from the moment one boarded ship. What was it? The thirties décor described in the brochures as ‘modern’, with its panels of inlaid wood, its lighting so indirect that when it went wrong no one could find it, its cubist armchairs, now well packed with dust, in which the tendons were stretched alarmingly? Was it the green basket chairs in the Winter Garden Lounge, which left patterns on the skin which weeks of scrubbing could not quite efface? Was it the teashop trio that played there (Wilf on wiolin, Untidy Bert on pianner and Reggie on double bass) who, after clomping about a bit before starting (fearing for an audience), performed ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’ and ‘Daffodil Lullaby’ to a missionary reading Exodus and an assemblage of enfantele, consumed with curiosity, while waiters came round with tea and rubber fruit cakes? Was it the stewards, largely fuddy-duddies who had, twenty years ago, retired from watching over-stuffed animals in Kensington museums, men with far-away eyes, blood-pressured cheeks, London club pates with fringes of whitish monk-hair, and lips like red rubber tubing?

One was struck, too, by the way in which the English fell into postures of command or submission, whether they needed to or not. Travelling home on an English liner, after a year of the social permissiveness of America, I noticed a curious fact. All the places at dinner were reserved; moreover, it was a reputable line and there was little doubt but that the meal would be served. Nonetheless, half an hour before the dinner gong sounded, a long, quiet and orderly queue of British persons began to form in front of the closed doors of the dining room, straggling thence throughout the bowels of the ship, and rendering access to cabins and lavatories difficult. Nothing would disturb this placid line—not the fact that its members were persistently asked by stewards to disband, nor the fact that foreigners, wanting in ingrained decency, habitually walked past the queue (which politely advanced at the pace of its oldest and slowest members) once the dining-room doors were opened. The line became a positive embarrassment to the whole ship, which, toward mealtimes, would markedly tilt and begin to circle. Even when this was pointed out, the queue refused to disperse, and eventually became twice as long—for the foreigners joined it.

Likewise, I tried to purchase, aboard the same vessel, a fountain pen, and I asked the English girl who administered the shop whether I might try some pens. ‘Sorry, sir, I can’t spend all my day wiping fountain pen nibs clean,’ said the girl; and suddenly, as I borrowed someone’s pencil, there stirred in my mind a harmonious and beautiful understanding, suddenly I was in England again, suddenly I knew why so many Americans I had met (broad-minded Americans who, fearless in the face of the notorious European lack of hygiene, had actually been to England) had been under the impression that England was an island of ceaseless fog and drizzle. They thought it foggy, I suddenly realized, because, to the spirit, it seemed like it.

Some little time later, I was comparing notes with Orsler in the comfort of a Suffolk public house. Orsler, then (as now) a rumbustious and guffawing youth, sensitive withal to racial characteristics, confirmed my observations and added his own. Returning from the Orient, he had noted masters of plantations quail before stewards once aboard ship. ‘Everything we wanted, even if it was legitimate, we were made ashamed of wanting, even if it was available. We wanted coffee. I pressed The Bell. The Steward came in, smelling: ‘Was it you who rung?’

‘“We’d like coffee,” I said.

‘“No coffee at this hour,” he said, “Coffee is served each night after dinner.”

‘I started to protest. “Now, what would you like?” he asked, “I haven’t got all …”

‘“I’ll have a beer,” I said smartly, “Tomato juice for my wife. Fresh orange juice for the baby.”

‘“No fresh fruit at the moment,” said the steward.

‘“Make it fizz,” I said.

‘“No tomato juice,” said the steward. “That’ll be one and four.”

‘“May I sign?” I asked.

‘“No,” he said. “We don’t encourage passengers.”

‘“Oh,” I said.’

Orsler paused for a moment, with an intimate smile of recollection lighting his rubicund features, owlish in their glasses, and then he commented:

‘People say you really know you’re back in England when you get off the boat and see how small everything is—the cars, the goods trains, the houses. But that’s not it. It’s when, as I did, you rush to the booking office and try to get a ticket, and there are two minutes before your train leaves, and there are twenty people waiting at the L to M window, so you go to the M to O window and ask for a ticket to London. You can see porters closing all the doors on the train, and men throwing the last fragile parcel violently into the brake van. The booking clerk, with his bottom against the stove, says: “Next window.” You say: “But there are twenty people at the next window and the train’s just going.” And he says: “Well, it can’t be ’elped, can it?” That’s it, the home that raised us.’

We agreed; and I remarked that the English supposed that one only went abroad because one had to and returned as soon as one could. We were interrupted in this thought by an old countryman who, to our certain knowledge, had never in his life been more than five miles away from the village, and this only to go to the market town to buy new yorks to put round the knees of his corduroys. Nevertheless, ‘Back home again, eh, bor?’ he cried. ‘Ah, you got to go a long way to beat ole England, eh?’ This set up a train of thought which culminated in the concept of phogey, a concept to define that phase of the English mind in which the artificial stands superior to the real, the traditional to the new, the mannered to the frank—that stout spirit of British phlegm which maintains protocol, and pooh-poohing, rudeness and possessiveness, provinciality and superiority, and makes living in England like walking through syrup. The phogey is half fogey, half phoney—phoney because there is a whole tradition and structure of pretence in him. After all, in the modern world, one does not have to be a phogey—one chooses to be. Add a touch of the word foggy and you have our meaning. Thus this is a new phenomenon (it was natural to be nineteenth-century in the nineteenth century, but it takes hard work to be so in the twentieth) and a new concept. Of course, it will quickly pass current as what was always known.

For the phogey is the man who, living in what the Americans call ‘the modern world of today’, wishes really that it were yesterday and contrives to pretend that it is. Social change has taken place; some of it he approves of, some of it he complains of, and most of it he ignores. He thinks that things are as they always were; and he has institutions that make it seem so. The primary institution, the one that preserves all the others, is, of course, class. The classless society may be here; but nobody knows about it. People go on having class in the old, well-tried way. It is there, at the heart of us all, and we have all made sure of our own way of having class in a classless society. For the phogey believes in authority. The English, unlike the Americans (who think a plumber the equal of a university professor), are masters of deference, artists, too, at putting people in their places. And knowing one’s place, whatever it is, is the essential English gift; it comes from an ancient sense of order and a faith that one’s own place, whatever it is, has been worth getting to. Authoritarianism by consent is a sound British principle, which is why people are happy to stand in line at bus stops, or call their bosses ‘guv’. This is the famous British politeness, used by that race to be rude with to other people. Yet change had come, the world was not the same; the signs of doubt and disorientation were already evident. How, then, would the British cope with it?

‘It needs, of course, a book,’ said Orsler. ‘Two,’ I said, and undertook to oblige. We agreed that such a book could not evade—however improper it might be to speak of it—the subject of class, and how to have it in this changing world. (For, suspicious though we may be, there is undoubtedly something in all of us that yearns for the safety and stability of it all.) Thus came the following—an attempt to assist those who, in the new time of flux, might, for the first time ever, be feeling the need for assistance and guidance. So here is a book for the new uncertainty, a book that will assist those who want more class to have it, and those who do not to find a path through the new affluence that besets us. I did consult, as one does these days, a sociologist or two: and I am grateful to Bryan Wilson and Howard Higman for many felicitous suggestions. But above all I am grateful to the dedicatee, Orsler himself, without whom, one suspects, the fifties would never have been understood at all.