Rules of Ps and Qs

The English may not speak much on public transport, but when they do open their mouths, the words you are most likely to hear, apart from ‘sorry’, are ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ (the latter often shortened to ‘’anks’ or ‘’kyou’). During the research for this book, I made a point of counting these Ps and Qs. Whenever I took a bus, I would sit or stand as near as possible to the driver (outside central London, most buses nowadays do not have conductors – passengers buy their tickets directly from the driver) to find out how many of the people boarding the bus said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when purchasing their ticket. I found that the majority of English passengers mind their Ps and Qs, and most of the drivers and conductors also say ‘thank you’ when accepting money for tickets.

Not only that, but many passengers also thank the bus driver again when they get off at their stop. This practice is less common in very big cities, but in smaller cities and towns it is the norm. On a typical short bus journey from a council estate on the outskirts of Oxford to the city centre, for example, I noted that all of the passengers said ‘’kyou’ or ‘’anks’ as they alighted from the bus – with the noticeable exception of a group of foreign students, who had also omitted the ‘please’ when buying their tickets. Many tourists and other visitors have commented to me on the politeness of English passengers, and from my own cross-cultural research, I know that this degree of courtesy is unusual. In other countries, the only circumstances in which I have found people regularly thanking bus drivers were in very small communities where they knew the driver personally.

Having said that, I should point out that there is nothing particularly warm or friendly about English Ps and Qs – they are generally muttered, usually without eye contact or smiles. Just because we are distinctively polite and courteous in our public conduct does not mean that we are good-natured, generous, kind-hearted people. We just have rules about Ps and Qs, which most of us observe, most of the time. Our scrupulous pleasing and thanking of bus drivers, conductors, taxi drivers and the like is 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.

And they collude with us in this pretence. Taxi drivers, in particular, expect to be thanked as well as paid at the end of their journey, and feel offended if the passenger simply hands over the money – although they are usually tolerant towards foreigners who ‘don’t know any better’, as one London cabbie put it when I questioned him on the subject. ‘With most English people, it’s just automatic,’ he explained. ‘They say “thanks” or “cheers” or something when they get out – and you say “thanks” back. You get the occasional rude bastard who doesn’t, but most people just automatically say “thanks”.’