Road rules and englishness

What do these rules tell us about Englishness? The denial rule provides yet another striking example of English social inhibition and embarrassment, and further evidence of our insularity and obsession with privacy. In the last chapter, I suggested that these two tendencies were related: that our excessive need for privacy is at least partly due to our social awkwardness, that ‘home is what the English have instead of social skills’. A rather bold claim, perhaps, but none of the data in this road-rules chapter, which has been concerned with what happens when we venture outside the privacy and security of our homes, has caused me to revise this opinion. Both the denial rule and the mobile-castle rule confirm our inability to deal with the realities of social interaction: we can only cope by practising various forms of self-delusion, pretending either that other people do not exist, or that we are still at home.

The courtesy rules, both in the public-transport and driving contexts, also remind us of the importance of politeness in English culture, but I think we are now getting closer to a more precise understanding of the subtleties and nuances of English politeness. The identification of England as a predominantly ‘negative-politeness’ culture – concerned mainly with the avoidance of imposition and intrusion – seems to me quite helpful. The important point here is that politeness and courtesy, as practised by the English, have very little to do with friendliness or good nature.

A pattern seems to be emerging as we examine different aspects of English life and culture, a recurring theme that I think may be crucial to our understanding of the English character. What I am noticing is that there is rarely anything straightforward or direct or transparent about English social interaction. We seem to be congenitally incapable of being frank, clear or assertive. We are always oblique, always playing some complex, convoluted game. When we are not doing things backwards (saying the opposite of what we mean, not introducing ourselves till the end of an encounter, saying sorry when someone bumps into us and other Looking-Glass practices), we are doing them sideways (addressing our indignant mutterings about queue-jumpers to other queuers, and our complaints about delayed trains to other passengers, rather than actually tackling the offenders). Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion. We seem perversely determined to make everything as difficult as possible for ourselves. Why, as one American visitor plaintively asked me, can’t the English just be ‘a bit more direct, you know, a bit more upfront?’ We would, as she pointed out, save ourselves and everybody else a great deal of trouble.

The problem is, I think, that when we are ‘direct and upfront’, we tend to overdo it, becoming noisy, aggressive, rude and generally insufferable. Whenever I talk to English people about my research on Englishness, and mention that we tend to be inhibited and have lots of rules about politeness, they say: ‘But we’re not inhibited and polite – look at our football hooligans and drunken louts all over the place – we’re loud and obnoxious and a disgrace’. Leaving aside what this response reveals about our penchant for national self-denigration, I would argue that our inhibited politeness and our loud obnoxiousness are two sides of the same coin. Both tendencies reflect a fundamental and distinctively English form of social dis-ease, a chronic and seemingly incurable inability to engage normally and directly with other human beings. We have developed many ingenious ways of disguising and overcoming this unfortunate disability (‘facilitators’ such as The Weather, the pub and taxi-drivers’ rear-view mirrors), but it can never be entirely eradicated.

Despite our idiopathic social handicaps, we do have some redeeming qualities. Many of the rules examined in this chapter, for example, highlight the immense importance of the concept of ‘fairness’ in English culture. This is not to say that other nations lack such a concept – what is distinctively English is our overwhelming national obsession with ‘fair play’.

Most of the remaining rules in this chapter seem to be concerned with that other great English obsession: class. The car-care rules relating to dirt, tidiness and dogginess indicate a curious but apparently consistent pattern in which we find that the top and bottom ends of the social scale have more in common with each other than either has with the middle ranks. The common factor usually turns out to be some form of disregard for social niceties or a lack of concern about ‘what the neighbours will think’. It occurs to me that this may be why the majority of the more notable and flamboyant English eccentrics have always come from either the highest or the lowest social classes. There seem to be very few examples of brazen, colourful eccentricity among the middle-middle or lower-middle classes.

Finally, the ‘road-rage’ issue sheds some new light on the question of English patriotism or, rather, our distinct lack of it. Can there be any other nation so resolutely unpatriotic, so prone to self-flagellation, so squeamishly reluctant to accept praise? This dearth of national amour-propre, this unshakeable conviction that our country has nothing much to recommend it and is in any case rapidly going to the dogs, must surely be one of the defining characteristics of the English. Although, having said that, I suspect that this trait is in fact a subcategory, a symptom or side effect of our modesty, moaning and humour rules (particularly the self-deprecation rule and the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule) rather than a defining characteristic in itself. Either way, I can confidently predict that despite all my critical comments on the English in this book, I will be taken to task when it comes out for being too positive, for painting too flattering a portrait, for ignoring or glossing over our darker side – and so on and so gloomily forth. If I sound a bit cynical and grumpy and pessimistic here, it’s probably because I’m English.

32. This is not as improbable as it might sound: cows on the line are quite a frequent problem in this country, and most regular rail passengers will have heard a similar announcement at least once.

33. If you are female, lone males may instead assume that you are chatting them up. They are therefore more than willing to break the denial rule and talk to you, but it can then be difficult to extricate yourself from the conversation. Even the ‘formal interview’ approach can be misinterpreted, so I tended to avoid speaking to unaccompanied males unless I was a) surrounded by other passengers and b) getting out at the next stop.

34. If you would like to try this yourself, I found that the best method was to pretend to be searching for something in my shoulder-bag: with my head down and hair over my eyes, I could actually still see my ‘target’ and calculate my trajectory to achieve a relatively gentle bump, while giving the impression that I was genuinely distracted by my bag-fumblings.

35. I have since been told about a cross-cultural study of pedestrians which showed that the Japanese are indeed much more skilled than other nations at avoiding bumping into each other in crowded public places – so this was not just my imagination.

36. The Mondeo example may be out of date by the time you read this, but there will be an equivalent suburban, lower-white-collar car, probably a Ford or Vauxhall, so just substitute the new name.

37. Or even, among the very class-secure, approval: I know one unquestionably upper-middle woman who actually drives a Mondeo. She says that she bought it precisely because of its Mondeo-Man associations with salesmen: ‘If the big companies buy it for their travelling salesmen, it must be a reliable car that can take a lot of abuse,’ she argues. Such confidence and admirable disdain for the opinion of others is, however, quite rare.

38. Cars purchased in large quantities (‘fleets’) by companies, generally for the use of travelling sales staff, area managers and other relatively low-grade employees.

39. The exception being very wealthy members of the upper class whose servants are responsible for their car care, and whose cars are therefore cleaned to impeccable upper-working-class standards.

40. I have noticed that those on the political left tend to believe that we have always been awful and unpleasant (citing colonialism, Victorian hypocrisy, etc., etc.), while those on the right favour the ‘going to rack and ruin’ line, harking back to an earlier age (usually the 1930s, 40s or 50s), when we still had manners, respect, dignity, hard-backed blue passports and so on.