How to be a Brit

decadence is the magnet that draws people here. The English, on
the other hand, leave in large numbers. Their exodus is called the brain drain
and includes a fair number of the completely brainless, too. The emigrés are
old-fashioned Imperialists who want cash and security. Similar exchanges of
population occurred after the war in the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia or
the former German regions of today’s Poland, for example — but those exchanges
were enforced, these are voluntary. England will soon be full of completely
anglicised immigrants from California, Frankfurt, Port of Spain and Jeddah
while other lands will be full of frustrated and morose Britons. Mr Enoch
Powell is barking up the wrong tree. If he wants to live among white
Englishmen, all he has to do is move to Kuwait.

LANGUAGE
     
     
    In my early days
there were stories about funny refugees murdering the English language. A
refugee woman goes to the greengrocer to buy red oranges (I mean red inside),
very popular on the Continent and called blood oranges.
    ‘I want two pounds of
bloody oranges.’
    ‘What sort of oranges,
dear?’ asked the greengrocer, a little puzzled.
    ‘Bloody oranges.’
    ‘Hm...’ He thinks. ‘I see.
For juice?’
    ‘Yes, we are.’
    Another story dates from
two years later. By that time the paterfamilias — the orange-buying lady’s
husband — has become terribly, terribly English. He meets an old friend in
Regents Park, and instead of talking to him in good German, softly, he greets
him in English, loudly.
    ‘Hallo, Weinstock....
Lovely day, isn’t it? Spring in the air.’
    ‘Why should I?’
    And on one occasion I
received a written message from an Austrian gentleman, that he wanted to speak
to me urgently ‘in the nearest convenience’.
    Those days are over. Not
only former refugees but the whole world has learnt to speak proper English.
Pronunciation is another matter; the refugee may still be the man who has lost
everything except his accent. On the other hand, Central European has become
one of the legitimate accents of English. Or the trouble with the foreign
student may be that his English is too good, too precise, too correct. ‘He
speaks English too well, he must be a bloody foreigner,’ is a frequent comment.
And a just one, too, because while the rest of the world is busy learning
English, the English themselves are busy forgetting their beautiful
mother-tongue. If you want to sound a proper Englishman use no more than eight
hundred words and, preferably, about half of them incorrectly. Most Englishmen
will tell you that ‘English has no grammar’, which is just another way of
saying that they have no grammar. Not long ago I kept seeing Post Office
vans with the attractive slogan: ‘Everyone should have a phone of their own.’
In a letter to the Guardian I remarked: ‘But I think nearly everyone do
already.’ A number of correspondents wrote in to tell me off as a pedant and a
prig, remarking that the Post Office had used good ‘colloquial’ English.
    Before the war a spade used
to be a spade — often brutally so. I remember an institution named Hospital
for Incurable Diseases. How gentle, how tactful, I thought and tried to
imagine the feelings of the patient driven through the gates. But by today a
dustman has become a refuse collector, a policeman a law enforcement officer,
the pilot of a plane a captain, a man who sells second-hand socks from a market
stall a business executive and a dog a home-protection officer.
    If you want to sound truly
English, you must learn to speak the language really badly. It will not be
difficult, there are many language schools where they teach you exactly that.
(If you are unlucky you may choose one of the old-fashioned ones and be taught
English as it should be, and not as it is, spoken.) Remember that everything is
a ‘situation’ or a ‘problem’ nowadays. In the old days a man was travelling,
today he is in a travel situation. In the past he got married, today he finds
himself in a marriage situation. In the past he went bankrupt, today he has a
liquidity problem. In the old days he was impotent, today he has a virility
problem.
    In our economic plight
rationing has already begun. This is kept a secret and for the time being only
the letter r is rationed. The modem Englishman has a certain number of r -s
at his disposal and no more. He — and that applies even to some radio
announcers — uses them foolishly. He will speak of