Watching the English

by Kate Fox

Which brings me to the English mania for ‘home improvements’, or ‘DIY’. When Nikolaus Pevsner described ‘the proverbial Englishman’ as ‘busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands’, he hit the proverbial nail on the head.

Never mind football, this is the real national obsession. We are a nation of nest-builders. Almost the entire population is involved in DIY, at least to some degree.

In a survey conducted by some of my colleagues a while ago, only two per cent of Engl...

we found that any DIY task requires the consumption of vast quantities of tea.)

was not directly involved in the SIRC DIY study, but it was conducted in a manner of which I approve – not by ticking boxes on a telephone-questionnaire survey, but by actually going out and spending time in the temples of the DIY faith (Homebase, Wickes, B&Q, etc.), talking at length to DIYers about their motives, fears, stresses and joys.

The most common motive for DIYing among our car-park sample of typical nest-builders was that of ‘putting a personal stamp on the place’.

Watch almost any residential street in England over a period of time, and you will notice that shortly after a For Sale sign comes down, a skip appears, to be filled with often perfectly serviceable bits of ripped-out kitchen or bathroom, along with ripped-out carpets, cupboards, fireplace-surrounds, shelves, tiles, banisters, doors and even walls and ceilings. This is a ‘rule’ in a stronger sense than an observable regularity of behaviour: this kind of obsessive territorial marking is, for the majority of English people, an obligation, something we feel compelled, duty-bound to do: ‘You’ve got to rip something out …’

The English obsession with home-improvements is not just about territorial marking, of course. It is also about self-expression in a wider sense: your home is not just your territory, it is your primary expression of your identity.

although DIYing may be, for some, merely an economic necessity, we all see the arrangement, furnishing and decorating of our homes as an expression of our unique personal taste and artistic flair. And it is, but only up to a point. The more closely I researched this question, the more it became clear that the way in which we arrange, furnish and decorate our homes is largely determined by social class. This

has little or nothing to do with wealth.

the considerable difference in price, as it is unseemly to mention money or to appear to boast about one’s wealth – although such boasts can be subtly disguised as moans about the ‘silly’ prices charged by the posh-paint manufacturers.

This trick is ‘smart’ in both senses of the word (posh and clever): visitors are highly likely to use the downstairs loo at some point, and to be impressed by your achievements, but by displaying them in the loo you are making a joke out of them (taking the piss, even) and thus cannot be accused of either boasting or taking yourself

too seriously.

into a house, but also how you should talk about it – or, rather, to be more precise, how you should moan about it.

There is a modesty rule implied here as well. The more grand or desirable your new residence, the more you must emphasise the troubles, inconveniences and ‘nightmares’ involved in its acquisition and improvement.

Even if you are not convinced, and indeed even if you are boiling with envy, resentment or righteous indignation, the correct response is to express sympathy: ‘How infuriating!’ ‘You must be exhausted!’ ‘What a nightmare!’ At one level, this ritual moaning is, of course, an indirect boast – an excuse to talk about one’s new property and convey its attractions without appearing to crow.

The moaners, by emphasising the mundane practical details and difficulties of home-buying or moving, are focusing on problems they and their listeners have in common, matters with which we can all identify, and politely deflecting attention from any potentially embarrassing disparity in wealth or status.

A person busy in his or her front garden is regarded as socially ‘available’, and neighbours who would never dream of knocking on your front door may stop for a chat (almost invariably beginning with a comment on the weather or a polite remark about your garden).

But I am being unfair. The average English garden, however unoriginal and humdrum, is actually, on a mild sunny day, a rather pleasant place to sit and drink a cup of tea and chuck bits of bread about for the birds and grumble quietly about slugs, the weather forecast, the government and the neighbours’ cat.

the sentiment of the Edwardian rhyme ‘The Germans live in Germany/ The Romans live in Rome/The Turkeys live in Turkey/ But the English live at home.’

Within Europe, for example, Romania tops the list with 97.5 per cent, closely followed by Lithuania, Croatia and Slovakia (all with over 90 per cent); we are well below this on 64 per cent, and neutral, peaceful Switzerland has the lowest home-ownership rate of all, 44.3 per cent.

The popular precept enshrined into law by Sir Edward Coke was about privacy, not property, about refuge and freedom from intrusion, not ownership.

‘A man’s house is his castle

‘and each man’s home is his saf...

It seems to me that our home-obsession is directly related to our almost pathological need for privacy, and that this in turn is inextricably bound up with our problems of social inhibition and embarrassment – our lack of ease and skill in social interaction.

The English seem to have three main ways of dealing with this ‘social dis-ease’: one is the ingenious use of props and facilitators to overcome our inhibitions and mask our incompetence; another is to become aggressive; the one that concerns us here is the tendency to retreat into the privacy and sanctuary of our castle-like homes, shut the door, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the issue.

There is a distinctively English form of bland, insipid politeness, which is primarily concerned, even when paying compliments, with the avoidance of offence or embarrassment rather than with actually giving pleasure or expressing positive feelings.

This reserve, which foreigners often interpret as coldness or standoffishness, must be understood in the light of the crucial distinction the English make between friends and acquaintances, and between friends and close friends. It is not that the English are cold or incapable of being open and expressive, it is just that we find it more difficult than many other cultures to be uninhibited among people we do not know well – and this reticence in turn means that it takes us longer to get to know people well enough to shed our inhibitions. A vicious circle resulting in, among many other problems, misuse of alcohol and chronic overuse of the word ‘nice’.

Estate agents are an intrusive threat to our sense of identity, so we ‘neutralise’ their power by making fun of them. This

The front-garden rules also highlight the related themes of social inhibition and politeness: if home equals self, the front garden is our ‘public face’ – formal and carefully arranged in the horticultural equivalent of a blank social smile.

Admittedly, our tolerance of counter-culture sofas and other odd behaviour tends to be grudging and stoical rather than warm and open-hearted – but even this passive, grumbling forbearance is worth noting, and perhaps worthy of commendation.

The back-garden formula, as well as dispelling a few rose-tinted myths about The English Garden, highlights the quiet, restrained aspects of Englishness, our dislike of flashy extremes, our predilection for moderation, for domesticity, for the comfortingly tame and familiar.

We find that contrived eccentricities, such as ironic gnomes, can backfire: idiosyncrasies and unconventional tastes are applauded only if they are seen to be genuine, unaffected – products of authentic nuttiness, not manufactured foibles.

all this dedicated reading is about contact avoidance, not studious braininess. In our desperate need to avoid any interaction with strangers on public transport, the English have elevated the use of ‘barrier signals’ to a fine art.

smoking is increasingly seen as a lower-class habit, allowing non-smokers to regard themselves as both morally and socially superior. The

Of course, smoker solidarity and friendly encounters between smokers are common in other cultures as well – the point here is the dramatic contrast with normal English behaviour.

In open parks and on random street corners, smokers are considerably more reticent and inhibited.

The rule of thumb seems to be that the further you are from a no-smoking area, the less effective your cigarette will be as a facilitator of social interaction. English smokers seem to need that immediate reminder of their ‘outlaw’ status to give themselves permission to break unwritten social rules.

In fact, at one level, our reserve is a form of courtesy

The apology is reflex – an automatic, knee-jerk response, not a considered admission of guilt. This is a deeply ingrained rule: when any inadvertent, undesired contact occurs (and to the English, almost any contact is by definition undesired), we say ‘sorry’.

According to the recent survey mentioned above, we say ‘sorry’ on average eight times a day, with a significant minority who say ‘sorry’ at least twenty times a day – and of course these are just the ‘sorries’ that people actually remember saying when they are asked a survey question. I suspect that the real total, including all the unconscious, reflex ‘sorries’, is even higher.

When in doubt, say ‘sorry’. Being English means always having to say you’re sorry.

We just have rules about Ps and Qs, which most of us observe, most of the time, often without being conscious of doing so.

Our scrupulous pleasing and thanking of bus drivers, conductors, taxi drivers and the like can also be another manifestation of the ‘polite egalitarianism’ discussed earlier – reflecting our squeamishness about drawing attention to status differences, and our embarrassment about anything to do with money. We like to pretend that these people are somehow doing us a favour, rather than performing a service for financial reward.

There is also an element of ‘cultural remission’ in conversations with taxi drivers – and with certain other professionals such as hairdressers – whereby the normal rules of reticence and discretion are temporarily suspended, and one can, if one wishes, indulge in much more personal and intimate chat than is usually permitted between strangers.

Some commentators attribute our reluctance to visit doctors or complain about illness to tough English stoicism and the ‘stiff upper lip’, but I would suggest that embarrassment and inhibition, and unwritten rules about ‘making a fuss’, are the more likely explanations.

An Italian participant in one of SIRC’s discussion-groups echoed Mike’s description: ‘The queue for the bus, for example … everybody stands in a line and gets on one by one in order. It drives me crazy – it is so slow! Here in Italy we stand near the sign and when the bus comes we all get on – quickly!’ But English queuing is not quite as simple as Mikes makes it sound.

I saw a headline in a Sunday newspaper, bemoaning the fact that the English had ‘lost the art of queuing’. Puzzled, as this was not what my own observation fieldwork had shown, I read on. It turned out that the author had been in a queue, someone had tried to jump it and both she and the other queuers had been outraged and disgusted – but no one had had the courage to tackle the queue-jumper in a sufficiently forceful manner (they just humphed and tutted), so he had got away with it. Far from constituting any sort of evidence for its loss, this struck me as a perfectly accurate description of the English art of queuing.

queuing, feel highly offended when these rules are violated, but seem unable to express their annoyance in a straightforward manner.

Paradoxically, it is only in England, where queue-jumping is regarded as deeply immoral, that the queue-jumper is likely to get away with the offence.