How to be a Brit

please.’

    ‘What was that?’ asked the
shopkeeper looking scared. ‘A quarter of pork brawn, please,’ I repeated, still
with a certain nonchalance. I repeated it again. I repeated it a dozen times
with no success. I talked slowly and softly; I shouted; I talked in the way one
talks to the mentally deficient; I talked as one talks to the deaf and finally
I tried baby-talk. The shopkeeper still had no idea whether we wanted to buy or
sell something. Then my friend had a brain-wave. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said in
Hungarian and started mumbling under his nose in a hardly audible and quite
unintelligible manner. The shopkeeper’s eyes lit up: ‘I see,’ he said happily,
‘you want a quarter of pork brawn. Why didn’t you say so?’
    The next stage was that I
began to understand foreigners but not the English or the Americans. The more
atrocious a foreign accent someone had, the clearer he sounded to me.
    But time passed and my
knowledge and understanding of English grew slowly. Until the time came when I
began to be very proud of my knowledge of English. Luckily, every now and then
one goes through a sobering experience which teaches one to be more humble.
Some years ago my mother came here from Hungary on a visit. She expressed her
wish to take English lessons at an L.C.C. class, which some of her friends
attended. I accompanied her to the school and we were received by a
commissionaire. I enquired about the various classes and said that we were
interested in the class for beginners. I received all the necessary information
and conducted a lengthy conversation with the man, in the belief that my
English sounded vigorous and idiomatic. Finally, I paid the fees for my mother.
He looked at me with astonishment and asked: ‘Only for one? And what about
you?’
     
     

ON NOT KNOWING FOREIGN LANGUAGES
     
    A true-born Englishman does not know any language. He does not
speak English too well either but, at least, he is not proud of this. He is,
however, immensely proud of not knowing any foreign languages. Indeed,
inability to speak foreign languages seems to be the major, if not the only,
intellectual achievement of the average Englishman.
    1. If you, gentle reader,
happen to be an alien and are in the process of turning yourself into a proper
Briton, you must get rid of your knowledge of all foreign languages. As
this includes your own mother tongue, the task does not seem an easy one. But
do not lose heart. Quite a few ex-aliens may proudly boast of having succeeded
in forgetting their mother tongue without learning English.

    2. If you are an
Englishman, you must not forget that the way foreigners speak English is an
endless source of hilarity and mirth. It is not funny that you yourself may
have been living in Stockholm, Winterthur or Lahore for forty-three years
without picking up even broken Swedish or Schwitzerdütsch or even pidgin
Punjabi; it is on the other hand always excruciatingly funny if an English-speaking
taxi-driver in Lima splits his infinitives or a news-vendor in Oberammergau
uses an unattached participle.
    3. If you — in spite of all
precautions — cannot help picking up a foreign language or two (sometimes it is
in the air and you catch it as you catch flu) — then you always refer to
the language you know as Italian, Spanish, Japanese, etc. A language you do not
know at all should always be referred to as ‘that lingo’.
     
     

ON NOT KNOWING ANYTHING
     
    One thing you must
learn in England is that you must never really learn anything. You may hold opinions — as long as you are not too dogmatic about them — but it is just bad form to know something. You may think that two and two make four; you may ‘rather
suspect it’; but you must not go further than that. Yes and no are about the two rudest words in the language.
    One evening recently I was
dining with several people. Someone — a man called Trevor — suddenly paused in
his remarks and asked in a reflective voice: ‘Oh, I mean that large island off
Africa... You know, near Tanganyika... What is it called?’
    Our hostess replied
chattily:
    ‘I’m afraid I have no idea.
No good asking me, my dear.’ She looked at one of her guests: ‘I think Evelyn
might
    Evelyn was born and brought
up in Tanganyika but she shook her head firmly:
    ‘I can’t remember at the
moment. Perhaps Sir Robert... ‘
    Sir Robert was British
Resident in Zanzibar — the place in question — for twenty-seven years but he,
too, shook his