How to be a Brit

adjoining room; why High Court judges
collect rare birds when rare birds are rare and they cannot collect many in any
case; why it is the ambition of grown-up persons to push a little ball into a
small hole; why a great politician who saved England and made history is called
a ‘jolly good fellow.’
    They cannot grasp why
people sing when alone and yet sit silent and dumb for hours on end in their
clubs, not uttering a word for months in the most distinguished company, and
pay twenty guineas a year for the privilege.

THE NATIONAL PASSION
     
    Queueing is the national passion of
an otherwise dispassionate race. The English are rather shy about it, and deny
that they adore it.
    On the Continent, 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; most of them leave by the bus and a
lucky minority is taken away by an elegant black ambulance car. An Englishman,
even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
    The biggest and most
attractive advertisements in front of cinemas tell people: Queue here for 4s 6d;
Queue here for 9s 3d; Queue here for 16s 8d (inclusive of tax). Those cinemas
which do not put out these queueing signs do not do good business at all.
    At week-ends an Englishman
queues up at the bus-stop, travels out to Richmond, queues up for a boat, then
queues up for tea, then queues up for ice cream, then joins a few more odd
queues just for the sake of the fun of it, then queues up at the bus-stop and
has the time of his life.
    Many English families spend
lovely evenings at home just by queueing up for a few hours, and the parents
are very sad when the children leave them and queue up for going to bed.

     

THREE SMALL POINTS
     
    If you go for a
walk with a friend, don’t say a word for hours; if you go out for a walk with
your dog, keep chatting to him.
     
    There is a three-chamber
legislation in England. A bill to become law has to be passed by the House of
Commons and the House of Lords and finally approved by the Brains Trust.
     
    A fishmonger is the man who
mongs fish; the ironmonger and the warmonger do the same with iron and war.
They just mong them.



II. HOW TO BE A PARTICULAR
ALIEN
A BLOOMSBURY
INTELLECTUAL
     
    They all hate
uniforms so much that they all wear a special uniform of their own: brown
velvet trousers, canary yellow pullover, green jacket with sky-blue checks.
    The suit of clothes has to
be chosen with the utmost care and is intended to prove that its wearer does
not care for suits and other petty, worldly things.
    A walking-stick, too, is
often carried by the slightly dandyfied right-wing of the clan.
    A golden chain around the
ankle, purple velvet shoes and a half-wild angora cat on the shoulders are
strongly recommended as they much increase the appearance of arresting
casualness.
    It is extremely important
that the B.I. should always wear a three-days beard, as shaving is
considered a contemptible bourgeois habit. (The extremist left-wing holds the
same view concerning washing, too.) First one will find it a little trying to
shave one’s four-day beard in such a way that, after shaving, a three days old
beard ration should be left on the cheeks, but practise and devoted care will
bring their fruits.
    A certain amount of
rudeness is quite indispensable, because you have to prove day and night that
the silly little commonplace rules and customs of society are not meant for you. If you find it too difficult to give up these little habits — to say ‘Hullo’
and ‘How d’you do?’ and ‘Thank you,’ etc. — because owing to Auntie Betty’s or
Tante Bertha’s strict upbringing they have become second nature, then join a
Bloomsbury school for bad manners, and after a fortnight you will feel no pang
of conscience when stepping deliberately on the corn of the venerable literary
editor of a quarterly magazine in the bus.

    Literary opinions must be
most carefully selected. Statements like this are most impressive. ‘There have
been altogether two real poets in England: Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Ford. The
works of the rest are rubbish.’ Of course, you should include, as the third
really great, colossal and epoch-making talent your own friend, T. B. Williams,
whose neo-expressionist poetry is so terribly deep that the overwhelming
majority of editors do not understand it and refuse to publish it. T. B.
Williams, you may proudly claim, has never used a comma or a full stop, and
what is