An English professor of mathematics would say to his maid checking up the shopping list:
“I'm no good at arithmetic, I'm afraid. Please correct me, Jane, if I am wrong, but I believe the square root of 97344 is 312.”
And about knowledge. An English girl, of course, would be able to learn just a little more about, say, geography. But it is just not “chic” to know whether Budapest is the capital of Roumania, Hungary of Bulgaria. And if she happens to know that Budapest
It is so much nicer to ask, when someone speaks of Barbados, Banska Bystrica or Fiji: “Oh, those little islands ... Are they British?” (They usually are.)
How to be Rude
It is easy to be rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological character.
On a slightly higher level you may invent a few stories against your opponents. In Budapest, for instance, when a rather unpleasant-looking actress joined a nudist club, her younger and prettier colleagues spread the story that she had been accepted only under the condition that she wear a fig-leaf on her face. Or in the same city there was a painter of limited abilities who was a most successful card-player. A colleague of his remarked once: “What a spendthrift! All the money he makes on industrious gambling at night, he spends on his painting during the day.”
In England rudeness has quite a different technique. If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark “You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that.” In England you just say “Oh, is that so?” Or “That's rather an unusual story, isn't it?”
When some years ago, knowing ten words of English and using them all wrong, I applied for a translator's job, my would-be employer (or would-not-be employer) softly remarked: “I am afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.” This translated into any continental language would mean: Employer (to the commisionaire): “Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!”
In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut off without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: “We are not amused”; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was.
Terribly rude expressions (if pronounced grimly) are: “I am afraid that ...,” “unless ...,” “nevertheless ...,” “How queer ...,” and “I am sorry, but ...”
It is true that quite often you can hear remarks like: “You'd better see that you get out of here!” Or “Shut your big mouth!” Or “Dirty pig!” etc. These remarks are very un-English and are the results of foreign influence. (Dating back, however, to the era of the Danish invasion.)
How to Compromise
Wise compromise is one of the basic principles and virtues of the British.
If a continental greengrocer asks 14 schillings (or crowns, or francs, or pengoes, or dinars or leis or drachmai or whatever you like) for a bunch of radishes, and his customer offers 2, and finally they strike a bargain agreeing on 6 schillings, francs, roubles, etc., this is just the low continental habit of bargaining; on the other hand, if the British dock-workers or any other workers claim a rise of 4 schillings per day, and the employers first flatly refuse even a penny, but after a six week strike they agree to a rise of 2 schillings 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 practiced 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 in the bath room, because that is the only place where you are naked
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 non-compromising 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
