How to be a Brit

Welsh, the Irish and — more
or less — the Australians and the Americans are neither English nor foreigners:
they are the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the Australians and the Americans,
but they are as ludicrous as foreigners. Bloody foreigners are rarely called
bloody foreigners nowadays, some say because the English have become more
polite; my own feeling is that the word ‘bloody’ has changed its meaning and is
no longer offensive enough. You may have become a ‘visitor’ or even a
‘distinguished European’, but turn to the Oxford Dictionary and you will find
(or should find, if that publication is really as accurate as it is supposed to
be) that ‘distinguished European’ is a synonym for bloody foreigner.
    It has still never occurred
to one single Englishman that not everybody would regard it as a step up, as a
promotion, to become English; that in the last decade or two quite a few of
these bloody foreigners started regarding the English as the laughing stock of
Europe and looking down upon the present generation with pity; that, indeed,
many of them thank Almighty God for letting them belong to more prosperous and
successful nations. No; the pound is still ‘sterling’, hundred mark-notes are
still strange pieces of paper with some Teutonic nonsense printed on them. And
if Britannia does not rule the waves, very well, that is only and exclusively
because the waves and the world do not deserve it any more.

OLD AND NEW
     
    Understatement is still in the air. It is
not just a speciality of the English sense of humour; it is a way of life. When
gales uproot trees and sweep away roofs of houses, you should remark that it is
‘a bit blowy’. I have just been listening to a man who got lost in a forest
abroad for a week and was scrutinised by hungry wolves, smacking their lips.
Was he terrified? — asked the television interviewer, obviously a man of
Italian origin. The man replied that on the seventh day, when there were no
rescuers in sight and the sixth hungry wolf joined the pack, he ‘got a bit
worried’. Yesterday, a man in charge of a home where six hundred old people
lived, which was found to be a fire risk where all the inhabitants might burn
to death, admitted: ‘I may have a problem.’ (Mind you: he may have a
problem. What about the six hundred? Their’s not to make reply, Their’s not to
reason why, Their’s but to burn and die.)
     
    * * *
     
    Britain is still a
class-ridden society. As soon as a man opens his mouth, we can tell in what
sort of school he missed his education. Aliens have a tremendous advantage
here: they may be beyond the pale; but they are beyond class too.
    But the class system has
changed. Britain has a working class which does not work; a ruling class which
does not rule; and a middle class which is not in the middle but is sliding
fast to the bottom.
     
    * * *
     
    Before the war you could
place a man by his clothes. The rich — particularly at weekends — went around
in rags; the working class wore cloth caps; prostitutes wore foxes round their
necks and smoked cigarettes in the street; wives of rich brewers wore mink
coats and wives of dustmen were dressed as today only Eliza Doolittle is in
revivals of My Fair Lady. Today mink has become vulgar and the Marks and
Spencer era has abolished class differences in dress. There are tricks, of
course, and there is Dior, of course, but by simply looking at a woman you can
no longer tell whether her husband is a struggling property developer or a rich
dustman.
    Not long ago my blue
raincoat was taken away in the Garrick Club by mistake by one of our noble
lords — keys in the pocket and all — and I was left with the other man’s blue
raincoat — keys in the pocket and all. The noble lord wrote me a letter of
apology: ‘My only excuse is that a Marks and Spencer raincoat resembles a John
Collier raincoat to such an extent….’
     
    * * *
     
    Before the war people came
here to settle only when they were driven to do so: refugees and immigrants.
(In hose days immigrants could be white. But we were white Negroes, really.
Today a Negro, as a rule, is black, except that no black man may be called a
Negro.) No one settled in this country who was not forced to. Today,
fellow-aliens from happy and prosperous countries flock here: Germans,
Americans, Swedes, Arabs and many others. The British are poor — slightly
beggarly, even — but well-mannered, good-humoured, tolerant and civilised.
Their elegant