How to Be English Read Free Page A

sturdy working-class image of allotments made them seem old-fashioned. Policymakers had a housing crisis on their hands, and then a balance of payments crisis followed by an energy crisis.
    Maybe that is what went wrong for the allotments movement in the 1950s. Official policy turned against romantic enthusiasm for growing things. Whatever happened, something has now shifted back: and we appear to be going through another period of the most English brand of radicalism of them all – the idea of going Back to the Land.
I discovered at last, that even in all that labyrinth of the new London by night, there is an unvisited hour of almost utter stillness, before the creaking carts begin to come in from the market gardens, to remind us that there is still somewhere a countryside. And in that stillness, I have sometimes fancied I heard, tiny and infinitely far away, something like a faint voice hailing and the sound of horse hoofs that return.
William Cobbett

THERE’S SOMETHING IN the English soul that believes apologies should always be reciprocated. It is important somehow not to be out-apologised, and it is quite possible for the English – especially the middle classes – to pre-empt apologies with agonising politeness when someone treads on their toes or runs into them in the street. Though, of course, they would be deeply offended if the person failed to apologise back.
    Where does this delicacy come from? It isn’t really that the English are any more tentative or nervous than other nations – quite the reverse. But they do hate confrontation, which the pre-emptive, polite apology is designed to avoid. And so the English grasp at opportunities to diffuse or avoid dangerous incidents which risk developing into unseemly fracas. This can give the impression to outsiders that the English are a formal nation. Actually, they can be a good deal less formal than their continental neighbours. It’s just that they don’t like the intimacy of a stand-up row. It is just so embarrassing.
    Puritanism, along with the British stiff upper lip, which appears to have been invented by the Duke of Wellington, perhaps during the long summer evenings of the Peninsular Campaign, have won out over old English spontaneity. But this was not always the case. ‘English girls are divinely pretty and they have one custom which cannot be too much admired,’ wrote Erasmus on a visit to London at the end of the fifteenth century. ‘When you go anywhere on a visit, the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away. They kiss you when you return. Once you have tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you could spend your life there.’ This is not a view of London that has been passed down through history.
    An unfortunate side effect of the culture of the pre-emptive apology is that the English tend to suffer poor service or poor food in silence – not because they don’t resent it (the English moan on with the best of them in the privacy of their own kitchens), but because they don’t like to complain.
    The great English comedienne Joyce Grenfell played the ultimate cringe-making complaint scene as the manager of a small guest house in Brighton, in the 1953 film
Genevieve
. Hot baths are to be procured only between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, she explains to her arriving guests. The room is decorated in brown and opens out on to a deafening chiming clock. When the young couple storm off, the manageress is mortified and turns to the other guests with English horror.
    â€˜No one’s ever complained before,’ she says.
    One old lady stares up at the disappearing couple and asks: ‘Are they Americans?’
    How to apologise in English, according to Bloomsbury International English courses:
Sorry.
I’m so / very / extremely / terribly sorry.
How careless of me!
I shouldn’t have …
It’s all my fault.
Please don’t be mad