The world has changed a lot since the Hungarian-born George Mikes published his classic work How to be an Alien in 1946. What he observed about the British in those early post-war days was our habit of reserve, irony, and understatement; our determination to avert unpleasantness mainly by ignoring it. J. B. Priestley famously lamented that the difficulty of writing plays about the non-confrontational English is their refusal to “make a scene”. Mikes, in his chapter “How to be Rude”, nailed this trait beautifully.
If someone tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark, “You are a liar, Sir, and a dirty one at that.” In England you just say “Oh, is that so?” Or “That’s rather an unusual story, isn’t it?”
Turned down for a job as a translator, for which he was completely unqualified, Mikes was told, “I am afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.” He found this hilarious. In any other European country, he says, the equivalent brush-off would have taken the form of calling to the commissionaire, “Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!” The proper British way is, in the words of Arnold Bennett, “always to behave as if nothing has happened, no matter what has happened”. We esteem it our highest national virtue that we can look back on a day of total disaster and say, “Well, I think that went pretty well, don’t you?”
The question is: why do we have such a horror of directness? Why do we place value on not saying what we mean? Why do we think it’s funny? Why do we think the word “irony” gives us magical permission to confuse less devious foreigners about whether we’re serious or not? Given that it is now commonplace to be told to Eff Off by eight-year-olds, are we just finally paying the price for confusing directness with rudeness for so long? Kate Fox, by the end of Watching the English, is clearly exasperated by our stubborn refusal to assert ourselves, and is convinced that the recent rise of verbal aggression is not some strange, illogical departure from traditional reserve; it is just the flipside of the same behaviour.
We are always oblique, always playing some complex, convoluted game. When we are not doing things backwards (saying the opposite of what we mean . . .), we are doing them sideways (addressing our indignant mutterings about queue-jumpers to other queuers . . . rather than actually tackling the offenders). Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion.
She goes on:
When we feel uncomfortable in social situations (that is, most of the time) we either become over-polite, buttoned up and awkwardly restrained, or loud, loutish, crude, violent and generally obnoxious. Both our famous “English reserve” and our infamous “English hooliganism” are symptoms of this social dis-ease, as is our obsession with privacy.
This really is an affliction. Call it the absence of frankness. Call it passive aggression. If there is a chance that we can call a spade an everyday long-handled horticultural implement for the purpose of digging, we would genuinely prefer it. As for our cowardly attitude to quite straightforward confrontation, well, here is a story illustrative of the British – US divide. I was complaining recently to a New Yorker about a British man who annoys me by joshingly referring to me as “World-Famous Author” when we are out with mutual friends. He has a generally mocking and sardonic tone, this chap; when I’m around, his technique is to invent headlines. I might say, “Mm, I don’t know what to have,” and he says, “Oh. World-Famous Author can’t decide what to eat.” This gives me the utter pip. It is clearly hostile, but I feel I’m not allowed to say so. And so it goes on. “Oh, World-Famous Author gets a haircut but isn’t sure she likes it.” “World-Famous Author thinks it may be time to re-read Great Expectations.”
Now, I think I make it plain enough that this annoys me, but of course I employ the time-honoured British method of conveying my rancour: I smile along with everyone else, and say afterwards, “Well, how lovely to see you again. We ought to make this a regular occasion! What a card you are!” My New Yorker friend listened rather impatiently to the problem, then set me straight. And I’ll admit, when he did, he scared me.
“Listen,” he snapped. “What’s the name of this jerk?”
“Er, Mick,” I said.
“OK, this is what you do. Next time you see him, you take him to one side and you say, ‘Mick. Cut it out.’ ”
I laughed. “I can’t do that,” I said.
My friend did not laugh. He was serious. “Yes you can. You say, ‘Mick, cut it out, you’re being an Effing jerk, and it’s not funny.’ Trust me, he’ll stop.”
I looked at him in amazement. Could it really be as simple as that? Should I just tell him to stop? I could honestly have lived to the end of my life and not come up with such a brilliant and original strategy on my own.
My suspicion is that we have to accept what very, very strange and perversely indirect people we are before we can understand where the Universal Eff-Off Reflex has come from. It is so brutally defensive, so swingeingly final, that it clearly comes, itself, out of a sense of affront and outrage. People don’t expect to be spoken to directly; it is interpreted as sheer hostility. I keep thinking of an incident twenty years ago when I was travelling by train to the seaside with my sister and her children. We were in the buffet compartment, consuming crisps and drinks, when a woman came in with a dog. “Oh, that’s charming!” announced my sister, folding her arms and pulling a face. “What a thing to do in a place where food is served. Stop eating, children. I suppose I’ll have to throw all this food away now, won’t I? And just because certain people can’t read signs!” Now, this scene would play out very differently today, because what happened next was that I went over and spoke to the woman. It was, for me, an unusually assertive thing to do, but I felt it was necessary to act, if only to prevent more of this pointed harrumphing. “Excuse me,” I said, “there’s a notice above the door that says you can’t bring dogs in here.” The woman – who would nowadays, of course, tell me to Eff Off – said she was sorry and took the dog away. What has always intrigued me about this incident, however, was that my sister was horrified by what I had done. “That was so rude,” she said. “Going over and speaking to that woman was so rude.”
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The Universal Eff-Off Reflex is generally agreed to be something new in the world of manners. I wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph while preparing this book, and I received a number of letters and emails afterwards about rudeness, a high proportion of which dealt with the holy shock of being told to Eff Off by someone they’d never met. Some people say Eff Off all the time, of course – and this is shocking and worrying enough in itself, but what I’m really interested in here is the way we are getting less and less prepared to accept criticism or admonishment, or ever to say sorry. An overtaking car endangers your life. You flash your lights. The driver makes the wanker signal at you. A pedestrian steps out in front of a bus. The bus brakes abruptly, spilling its passengers on the floor, and toots its horn. The pedestrian turns his back, holds up a finger, and saunters away. No one is ever in the wrong, it seems. If you point out to someone that he is in the wrong, you must be prepared for the consequences, which may include violence, but will automatically include Eff Off.
This is not just at street level, either. We are all Teflon people, on whom criticism cannot stick. Abuse is becoming accepted as the quickest and smartest way of dealing with criticism in all areas of life. I had an interesting experience in 2004 when my book Eats, Shoots & Leaves received a mauling in the New Yorker, and my London publisher riposted on my behalf that the author of the critical article was “a tosser”. Now, I loved my publisher for doing this, of course. He was defending my honour. He is a famously maverick character. And although I have never read the article, I have heard enough about it to suspect that the chosen epithet actually had some merit in this case. But good grief, how embarrassing. Meanwhile, ripostes of this sort made by public figures are reported in the news, and quoted as if they were witty or thoughtful. In April 2005, when the football manager Harry Redknapp was heckled and booed at Portsmouth, he was reported as saying, “If people have got nothing better to do than shout abuse at me, they must have sad lives, and I feel sorry for them.” And I repeat, this was on the news.
So there are several things contributing to the Universal Eff-Off Reflex. The state of manners is driving some of us to be direct, which makes us uncomfortable enough in the first place. And this directness is whacked straight back at us by people who are never in the wrong, who interpret directness as sheer hostility, and who say Eff Off so much in their normal conversations anyway that it springs automatically to their cherry-red lips. The prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple (whom we shall meet again in chapter six) notes, in his book Life at the Bottom (2001), that Eff Off is a favourite tattoo among the people he meets.
Why anyone should want these words indelibly imprinted on his skin is a mystery whose meaning I have not yet penetrated . . . but I recall a patient who had the two words tattooed in mirror writing upon his forehead, no doubt that he might read them in the bathroom mirror every morning and be reminded of the vanity of earthly concerns.
But why don’t people take the criticism on board? Why doesn’t telling-off work? I’m sure it used to. In the past, if someone was so offended by your actions that they broke the directness taboo, you would take it to heart. You felt ashamed.
Now, you may remember that Norbert Elias identified shame as one of the twin engines of the civilising process. Shame is now such a quaint, bygone concept that one feels almost embarrassed to bring it up. “Have you no shame?” is a question merrily kicked aside; indeed, shamelessness is not only a highly regarded modern attribute, but the sine qua non of most successful TV and entertainment formats, which compete to push shamelessness to ever further limits. Things used to be different. My own childhood, and the childhood of many others of my generation, was marked by episodes of this red-hot, moiling state of self-blame, and I am not going to say it never did me any harm. I am obliged to admit, on the contrary, that it left me so psychologically flailed, scorched, eviscerated, and hobbled that it’s a miracle I can drag myself about.
I can appreciate, therefore, why modern parents would want to shield their own children from such a terrible awareness of personal worthlessness. But surely they go too far? Modern parents from all classes seem genuinely to believe they are doing the right thing by protecting their children from blame or accountability of any sort. Every time the little chaps get themselves on a hook, the parents gently lift them down and tell them to run along and forget about it. While working-class parents pride themselves on how quickly they can march to the school and pin a teacher against a blackboard, middle-class people spend a lot of time worrying, “Is it right to tell off other people’s children?” and wringing their hands amid the shards of their favourite Chinese jardinière. This is one of the big etiquette dilemmas of our times. Families arrive at your house and you wait for the parents to say, “Remember, children, this is Uncle Robert’s house, and it has lovely things in it that don’t belong to you. So please be very good and don’t touch anything.” But they don’t do this. They say, “Say hi to Bob, kids. Yes, darling, this is the man we call Fatty Bob, how clever you are to remember. Now, why don’t you all run off and see how many things beginning with the letter H you can collect for mummy? All right, Freddie, you can use a screwdriver. Take your sticky drinks with you, darlings, that’s right.” Later, if you confront a child with its bad behaviour, the parents will step in at once. “Fatty Bob didn’t mean to be nasty to you, darling. He’s just a bit materialistic, which means he prefers things to people. We prefer people to things, don’t we? Besides, Fatty Bob shouldn’t leave such irreplaceable heirlooms just lying about, should he? Silly Fatty Bob.”
So what is shame? Why is it socially useful? Elias defines shame as an “anxiety” and explains it as a sophisticated act of self-division, when a person is forced to judge his own behaviour against an internal moral censor (“the sector of his consciousness by which he controls himself”). The idea is that we import a sense of social opinion, internalise it, and measure ourselves against it. But he isn’t talking about judging oneself on a scale of good – bad. Interestingly, what Elias sees in shame is that we place ourselves on a scale of superior – inferior, which is probably much, much harder to take. “It is a conflict within his own personality; he himself recognizes himself as inferior . . . This is what makes him so defenceless against gestures of superiority by others which somehow trigger off this automatism within him.”
Saying sorry involves the same sort of process. Taking Erving Goffman’s “splitting” description of apology, it seems that this division now takes place a lot less than it used to. People have been brought up not to split under any circumstances – least of all when an apology is demanded. Quite the reverse. Under attack, the individual personality wastes no time bolstering its defences. It circles the wagons and starts firing. Not a second is allowed for self-examination. Where this comes out in a most peculiar way is in our dealings with people who, we feel, are obliged to apologise on behalf of the company they represent, but who don’t see how they are personally involved. My favourite story from the many sent in by Daily Telegraph readers concerned a man buying a book. He had entered a reputable bookshop and been treated in an off-hand manner when he asked for help. Then, having located the book, he paid for it with his credit card. The assistant put the bill in the bag, and he said, “I’d like to put the bill separately, please,” at which he was told, “Well, you know where it is; you can do that yourself.” He felt aggrieved, and said so. “I’ve been in this shop for five minutes and spent thirty pounds, and no one has been polite to me.” At which the assistant retaliated, “Just because you spent thirty pounds doesn’t mean you’ve bought my soul.”
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Deference is a topic for another chapter. What I think marks out the Universal Eff-Off Reflex is contained in the name: it’s a reflex. It’s as if you touch someone lightly on the shoulder and snick, snack, the next thing you know, your hand has been severed at the wrist. It is startling partly because it’s so primitive, so animal. Through shielding children from feelings of low self-worth, we have created people who simply will not stand to be corrected in any way. “Excuse me, I think you dropped this,” you say. “Eff Off,” they say, with heat. “There ought to be an apostrophe on that sign.” “Eff Off.” A contestant on a quiz who is told, “The answer to ‘Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?’ was Jane Austen” will not bite a lip and look embarrassed. He will say, “I didn’t know that because it’s not a thing worth knowing!” – and get a little cheer from the audience for sticking up for himself.
But the last aspect of the Universal Eff-Off Reflex I want to consider is just why so many of us are speaking up anyway. “Don’t cycle on the pavement, you hooligan!” we shout, even though experience now tells us that it’s dangerous, and our built-in inhibition begs us not to. Moreover, we are beginning to realise that if we appeal for other people to agree with us, they will either make themselves scarce or concentrate very hard on a bit of urgent texting. Whatever happened to our famous controlling characteristic of “negative politeness” – of minding one’s own business?
Back with George Mikes, he wrote several follow-up books to How to be an Alien, including How to be Inimitable (1960). All the books are collected in How to be a Brit. This is how he describes British non-confrontational habits forty-five years ago, in his chapter, “On Minding One’s Own Business”:
If a man happens to be standing on your foot in the bus, you must not ask him to get off, since it is clearly his business where he chooses to stand; if your neighbour’s television or radio is blaring military marches till midnight, you may not remonstrate with him because it is his business what he pleases to listen to and at what time; if you are walking peacefully in the street and someone pours two gallons of boiling water over your best bowler through his bathroom overflow . . . you should proceed without uttering a word – however short – because it is obviously the other fellow’s business when he has his bath and how hot he likes it.
I have an awful feeling that I used to agree with this. Now, however, it is unrecognisable as British behaviour. Personally, I have turned into a bug-eyed mad person who must either speak up or explode – which is as much of a departure from previous norms as the Eff-Off Reflex is. For example, I was recently in a check-out queue, being served by a young woman. From his place at the next till, an odious boy of about seventeen was loudly and unselfconsciously telling her the story of a friend who had discovered the decomposing body of an old woman in her house. “She hadn’t been seen for seven days,” he said, at the beginning, with all the relish of the fat boy in Dickens who wants to make your flesh creep. As he absently scanned somebody else’s shopping – Whiskas, Double Gloucester, etcetera – it became obvious that no detail was going to be omitted from his grisly tale.
I didn’t know what to do. This situation offended me on so many levels. For a start, the two of them were ignoring their customers. Yet the woman who was being served by the boy (and who had far more right than me to be offended) seemed unconcerned. If anything, she was amused. The girl at my till just rolled her eyes at me, as if to say, “What can you do?” Again, I don’t think she was remotely bothered by the content of the story, or struck by its inappropriateness; she merely thought the boy was a bit of a tosser. So he had just described the bluebottles buzzing in the curtained window, and the door being broken down, and the smell coming out, when I finally broke. “Stop telling that story, for pity’s sake!” I said. The boy stopped. His customer pulled a face and shrugged. Looking back, I suppose I’m lucky that nobody actually laughed. As far as I was concerned, I could not possibly mind my own business in this situation. I had to say something. But having done so, I have never felt so alone and alienated in my life.
Drugs are probably the only solution, unfortunately. Strong, mood-altering drugs will ultimately stop me from Speaking Up. It was the same with being a stickler for punctuation, of course. It’s the same urge to correct the world, and drag it into line; and it is bound to be met with the same consternation. Look into the eyes of someone who is telling you to Eff Off and what you will often find there, along with aggression, is pure surprise. “What’s up with her?” the look says. “Where did that spring from?” For the boy at the check-out, when I yelled at him, it was as if a tin of beans had suddenly jumped up from the conveyor belt and biffed him in the eye; unaware of anyone else within ear-shot, he believed he was having a private conversation. Why couldn’t I mind my own business? Why had I broken the basic rules of “negative politeness”? Why had I been so rude?
There is one positive aspect to all this. It’s quite a feeble one, but worth mentioning. Even though there were hundreds of complaints from BBC viewers about the swearing at the Live8 concert, the word Eff every day loses some of its shock power. I would still be horrified to hear my mum say it, and I always apologise to her if I let it slip out when I’m talking to her, but it’s clearly the case that through sheer constant over-use, “Effing” is becoming a meaningless intensifier and will soon hardly be worth saying. There is a hilarious section about gossip in Watching the English, in which the three ways an English man can react to news are anatomised:
In each case, Kate Fox explains, “expletives” must be used. In other words, he can say:
And they say the language of Shakespeare and Milton is dead. Television, as always, delights in accelerating the process of social change by normalising the entertainingly shocking. In the first five minutes of a recent Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the famously robust chef said:
You are Effing useless, this is Effing disgusting, this is Effing frozen in the centre, it’s as authentic as an Effing Chinese takeaway, that was Effing dire, you’re giving the customer Effing food poisoning, I am so Effing glad the customers can’t see what’s going on, I don’t know where to Effing start.
Well, strike that man’s head a glancing blow with a frying pan, but I suppose he is ultimately serving the greater good, even if he doesn’t know it. Blue Peter viewers wait for the day a children’s TV presenter says with a big smile, “And now it’s time to make an Effing model car park out of an Effing corn-flake packet!” At that point, all-clear sirens will sound throughout the land and the reign of Eff will be officially over. By great good fortune, the word that is far more shocking than Eff – you probably know the one I mean – can’t really step up to take its place, being an incontrovertible noun with far less scope for use as a verb, adverb, adjective and intensifier. Tee hee. Those Effing Eff people may know Eff All about grammar, but grammar will ultimately Eff them in the end.
Wasn’t it amusing, incidentally, that when Jerry Springer briefly visited the UK to make a British version of his show, he was reportedly astonished by the amount of foul language he heard? Perhaps, in common with many other Americans, he thought that in Britain we talked like something out of Mary Poppins. He thought we said things like, “Stripe me pink, I am proper peeved and no mistake. Do you know, I’d like to give that scallywag a piece of my mind. Heavens, yes indeedy.” In fact, of course, it’s easier to shield yourself from bad language in America than it is here. There is an old joke about an English tourist asking a New York taxi-driver, “Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Carnegie Hall, or shall I just go and Eff myself?” Nowadays the joke works better with an American asking the way to Piccadilly Circus.
In the meantime, however, the Universal Eff-Off Reflex looks set to stay and I am clearly destined to keep running foul of it. Each of us is inside a bubble, after all. Most of us grow more grumpy and misanthropic every day. Pascal said, “I have discovered that all human misery comes from a single thing, which is not knowing enough to stay quietly in your room.” Sometimes I have a little dream that it is eight o’clock on a fine wintry morning, and as I leave my house to walk to the station, I notice I’m feeling rather light-hearted. No one about. No cars. No noise except the faraway hum of a milk float. Mm. Nice. The street is clean as if washed by recent rain. I walk briskly, humming to myself, cross a quiet road and arrive at the station in good time for the 8.49. As I buy my paper (putting coins in a slot), I notice that the concourse is empty, utterly empty, and I begin to think well, this is a bit too good to be true, but never mind, they cleared Times Square for Tom Cruise that time, didn’t they? And Vanilla Sky was rubbish. I buy a ticket (no queue), board the train (no other passengers), and feel blissfully happy.
Now, this may be a dream, I think, as the train begins to move. This may even be – and that distant milk float was rather a giveaway – a long-forgotten episode of The Avengers that has somehow lodged in my brain and is now repeating itself as a kind of benign near-death experience as I lie unconscious at the bottom of some stairs. Either way, I don’t care. Somehow, overnight, other people have been eradicated, expunged, annihilated, or just ordered to stay indoors and keep out of my bloody way. And you know how it feels? It feels right.