How to be a Brit

if the British dock-workers or any workers
claim a rise of 4 shillings per day, and the employers first flatly refuse even
a penny, but after six weeks strike they agree to a rise of 2 shillings per day
— that is yet another proof of the British genius for compromise. Bargaining is
a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues — the
difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent,
the latter in Great Britain.

    The genius for compromise
has another aspect, too. It has a tendency to unite together everything which
is bad. English club life, for instance, unites the liabilities of social life
with the boredom of solitude. An average English house combines all the curses
of civilisation with the vicissitudes of life in the open. It is all right to
have windows, but you must not have double windows because double windows would
indeed stop the wind from blowing right into the room, and after all, you must
be fair and give the wind a chance. It is all right to have central heating in
an English home, except the bath room, because that is the only place where you
are naked and wet at the same time, and you must give British germs a
fair chance. The open fire is an accepted, indeed a traditional, institution.
You sit in front of it and your face is hot whilst your back is cold. It is a
fair compromise between two extremes and settles the problem of how to burn and
catch cold at the same time. The fact that you may have a drink at five past
six p.m., but that it is a criminal offence to have it at five to six is an
extremely wise compromise between two things (I do not quite know between what,
certainly not between prohibition and licentiousness), achieving the great aim
that nobody can get drunk between three o’clock and six o’clock in the
afternoon unless he wants to and drinks at home.
    English spelling is a
compromise between documentary expressions and an elaborate code-system;
spending three hours in a queue in front of a cinema is a compromise between
entertainment and asceticism; the English weather is a fair compromise between rain
and fog; to employ an English charwoman is a compromise between having a dirty
house or cleaning it yourself; Yorkshire pudding is a compromise between a
pudding and the county of Yorkshire.
    The Labour Party is a fair
compromise between Socialism and Bureaucracy; the Beveridge Plan is a fair
compromise between being and not being a Socialist at the same time; the
Liberal Party is a fair compromise between the Beveridge Plan and Toryism; the
Independent Labour Party is a fair compromise between Independent Labour and a
political party; the Tory-reformers are a fair compromise between revolutionary
conservatism and retrograde progress; and the whole British political life is a
huge and noncompromising fight between compromising Conservatives and compromising
Socialists.

HOW TO BE A HYPOCRITE
     
    If you want to be really and
truly British, you must become a hypocrite.
    Now: how to be a hypocrite?
    As some people say that an
example explains things better than the best theory, let me try this way.
    I had a drink with an
English friend of mine in a pub. We were sitting on the high chairs in front of
the counter when a flying bomb exploded about a hundred yards away. I was truly
and honestly frightened, and when a few seconds later I looked around, I could
not see my friend anywhere. At last I noticed that he was lying on the floor,
flat as a pancake. When he realized that nothing particular had happened in the
pub he got up a little embarrassed, flicked the dust off his suit, and turned
to me with a superior and sarcastic smile.

    ‘Good Heavens! Were you so
frightened that you couldn’t move?’

ABOUT SIMPLE JOYS
     
    It
is important
that you should learn to enjoy simple joys, because that is extremely English.
All serious Englishmen play darts and cricket and many other games; a famous
English statesman was reported to be catching butterflies in the interval
between giving up two European states to the Germans; there was even some
misunderstanding with the French because they considered the habit of English
soldiers of singing and playing football and hide and seek and blind man’s buff
slightly childish.
    Dull and pompous foreigners
are unable to understand why ex-cabinet ministers get together and sing ‘Daisy,
Daisy’ in choir; why serious business men play with toy locomotives while their
children learn trigonometry in the