Watching the English

GARDEN RULES

From our helicopter at the beginning of this chapter we saw that the English all want to live in their own private box with their own private green bit. Indeed, it is our insistence on the private green bit that is, ironically, largely responsible for the desecration of the English countryside, with the construction of 'relentless green suburbs' and all the environmental damage and pollution that they entail. The English simply will not live in flats or share courtyards like urban dwellers in other countries: we must have our private boxes and green bits.

However small, the green bit is at least as important as the box. Tiny scraps of land, which almost anywhere else in the world would be regarded as too insignificant to bother with, are treated as though they were grand country estates. Our moats and drawbridges may be imaginary, but every Englishman's castle has its miniature 'grounds'. Take a typical, undistinguished suburban or 'residental-area' street, with the usual two rows of smallish, nondescript semi-detached or terraced houses - the kind of street in which the vast majority of English people live. Each house will usually have a minuscule patch of garden at the front, and a larger green bit at the back. In slightly more affluent areas, the patch at the front will be a little bigger, and the house set a few feet further back from the road. In less well-off areas, the front patch will shrink to a token tiny strip, although there may still be a front gate, a path to take you the one or two steps to the front door, and a plant or smidgen of greenery of some sort on either side of the path to prove that it still qualifies as a 'front garden'. (The front garden with its path can also be seen as a kind of symbolic moat and drawbridge.)

'Your Own Front Garden, You May Not Enjoy'

In all typical streets of this kind, all of the little patches of garden, front and back, will have walls or fences around them. The wall around the front garden will be low, so that everyone can see into the garden, while the one enclosing the back garden will be high, so they can't. The front garden is likely to be more carefully arranged, designed and tended than the back garden. This is not because the English spend more time enjoying their front gardens. Quite the opposite: the English spend no time at all in their front gardens, except the time necessary to weed, water, tend and keep them looking 'nice'.

This is one of the most important garden-rules: we never, ever sit in our front gardens. Even when there is plenty of room in a front garden for a garden seat of some sort, you will never see one. Not only would it be unthinkable to sit in your front garden, you will be considered odd if you even stand there for very long without squatting to pull up a weed or stooping to trim the hedge. If you are not squatting, stooping, bending or otherwise looking busy and industrious, you will be suspected of a peculiar and forbidden form of loitering.

Front gardens, however pretty and pleasant they might be to relax in, are for display only; they are for others to enjoy and admire, not their owners. This rule always reminds me of the laws of tribal societies with complicated gift-exchange systems, in which people are not allowed to consume the fruits of their own labour: 'Your own pigs, you may not eat...' is the most famous and frequently quoted tribal example; the English equivalent would be 'Your own front garden, you may not enjoy'.

The Front-garden Social-availability Rule (and 'Sponge' Methodology)

If you do spend time squatting, bending and pruning in your front garden, you may find that this is one of the very few occasions on which your neighbours will speak to you. 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). In fact, I know of many streets in which people who have an important matter to discuss with a neighbour (such as an application for planning permission) or a message to convey, will wait patiently - sometimes for days or weeks - until they spot the neighbour in question working in his front garden, rather than committing the 'intrusion' of actually ringing his doorbell.

This social availability of front-gardeners proved very helpful during my research, as I could approach them with an innocuous request for directions, follow this with a weather-speak ice-breaker and a comment on their garden, and gradually get them talking about their gardening habits, their home improvements, their children, their pets and so on. Sometimes, I would pretend that I (or my mother or sister or cousin) was thinking of moving to the area, which gave me an excuse to ask more nosey questions about the neighbours, the local pubs, schools, shops, clubs, societies and events - and find out a lot about their unwritten social rules. In front-garden interviews, although I might sometimes focus on a specific current obsession, such as, say, the estate-agent question, I would often just soak up a whole lot of random data on a variety of subjects, and hope to make sense of it all at some later stage. This is not such a daft research method as it might sound - in fact, I think there may even be an official scientific name for it, but I can never remember the correct term, so I call it the 'sponge' method.

The Counter-culture Garden-sofa Exception

There is just one minority exception to the 'your own front garden, you may not enjoy' principle, and as usual, it is one that proves the rule. The front gardens of left-over hippies, New Agers and various other 'counter-culture' types may sometimes boast an old, sagging sofa, on which the inhabitants will sit, self-consciously defying convention and actually enjoying their front garden (which, also in defiance of convention, will be unkempt and overgrown).

This 'exception' to the no-sitting-in-front-gardens rule is clearly an act of deliberate disobedience: the seat is always a sofa, never a wooden bench or plastic chair or any other piece of furniture that might possibly be regarded as suitable for outdoor use. This flaccid, often damp and eventually rotting sofa is a statement, and one that tends to be found in conjunction with other statements such as drinking herbal tea, eating organic vegan food, smoking ganja, wearing the latest eco-warrior fashions, decorating the windows with 'Say No to GMO' posters... the themes and fashions vary, but you know what I mean: the usual counter-culture cluster.

The garden-sofa sitters may be the subject of much tutting and puffing among their more conservative neighbours, but in accordance with the traditional English rules of moaning, the curtain twitchers will usually just air their grievances to each other, rather than actually confronting the offenders. In fact, as long as the sofa-sitters abide by their own clearly defined set of counter-culture rules and conventions, and do not do anything original or startling - such as joining the local Women's Institute or taking up golf - they will generally be tolerated, with that sort of grudging, apathetic forbearance for which the English seem to have a peculiar talent.

The Back-garden Formula

The back garden, the one we are all allowed to enjoy, is often relatively scruffy, or at least utterly bland, and only very rarely the pretty, colourful, cottagey profusion of roses, hollyhocks, pansies, trellises, little gates and whatnot that everyone thinks of as a typical English garden. It is verging on blasphemous to say this, but I have to point out that the truly typical English back garden is actually a fairly dull rectangle of grass, with some sort of paved 'patio' at one end and a shed of no particular aesthetic or architectural merit at the other, a path down one side and perhaps a bed of rather unimaginatively arranged shrubs and flowers along the other side.

There are variations on this theme, of course. The path may run alongside the flower-bed, or down the middle of the grass rectangle, with flower-beds along both walls. There may be a tree or two. Or some bushes or pots, or maybe climbing-plants on the walls. The edges of the flower-beds may be curved rather than straight. But the basic pattern of the conventional English garden - the 'high-walls, paved-bit, grass-bit, path, flower-bed, shed' formula - is reassuringly unmistakeable, instantly identifiable, comfortingly familiar. This pattern must be somehow imprinted on the English soul, as it is reproduced faithfully, with only minor twists and variations, behind almost every house in every street in the country. 28

Tourists are unlikely ever to see an ordinary, typical English back garden. These very private places are hidden from the street behind our houses, and even hidden from our neighbours by high walls, hedges or fences. They never feature in glossy picture-books about 'The English Garden', and are never mentioned in tourist brochures or indeed in any other publications about England, all of which invariably parrot the received wisdom that the English are a nation of green-fingered creative geniuses. That is because the authors of these books do not do their research by spending time in ordinary people's homes, or climbing onto roofs and walls at the back of standard suburban semis and peering through binoculars at the rows and rows of normal, undistinguished English gardens. (Now you know: that person you thought was a burglar or a peeping tom was me.) Aesthetically, it must be said, the duped tourists, anglophiles and garden enthusiasts who read this English Garden stuff are perhaps not missing much.

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 rules of garden-talk require that such moans be balanced by more cheerful noticing of how well the irises or columbines are doing this year.)

And it must also be said that even the average, bog-standard English garden represents considerably more effort than most other nations typically invest in their green bits. The average American garden, for example, does not even deserve the name, and is rightly called a 'yard', and most ordinary European gardens are also just patches of turf.29 Only the Japanese - our fellow crowded-small-island-dwellers - can be said to make a comparable effort, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the more trendy, design-conscious English gardeners are often influenced by Japanese styles (witness the current fashion for wooden decking, pebbles and water-features). But these avant-gardeners are a tiny minority, and it seems to me that our reputation as a 'nation of gardeners' must derive from our obsession with our small patches of turf, our love of gardens, rather than any remarkable artistic flair in garden design.

The NSPCG Rule

Our ordinary back gardens may not be particularly beautiful, but almost all show evidence of interest, attention and effort. Gardening is probably the most popular hobby in the country - at the last count, over two-thirds of the population were described as 'active gardeners'. (Reading this, I couldn't help wondering what 'passive gardening' might consist of - would being irritated by the noise of other people's lawn-mowers count, like passive smoking? - but the point is clear enough.)

Almost all English houses have a garden of some sort, and almost all gardens are tended and cared for. Some are tended more carefully and expertly than others, but you rarely see a completely neglected garden. If you do, there is a reason for it: the house may be unoccupied, or rented by a group of students (who feel it is the landlord's responsibility to do the garden); or occupied by someone for whom neglecting the garden constitutes some sort of ideological or lifestyle statement; or by someone who is very poor, deprived, disabled or depressed and has more serious problems to worry about.

This last category may be grudgingly forgiven, but you can be sure that the others will be the subject of much muttering and tut-tutting among the neighbours. There is a sort of unofficial National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Gardens, for whose members the neglect of a garden is on a par with the mistreatment of animals or children.

The NSPCG rule, perhaps as much as our genuine interest in gardening, may explain why we feel obliged to devote so much time and effort to our gardens.30

Class Rules

The garden historian Charles Quest-Ritson boldly rejects the rather pretentious current vogue for studying gardening as an art form, and garden history as a branch of the history of art. Gardening, he says 'has little to do with the history of art or the development of aesthetic theories... It is all about social aspirations, lifestyles, money and class'. I am inclined to agree with him, as my own research on the English and their gardens suggests that the design and content of an English person's garden is largely determined - or at least very strongly influenced - by the fashions of the class to which he or she belongs, or to which he or she aspires.

'Why,' asks Quest-Ritson 'do hundreds of middle-class English women have a white garden and a potager and a collection of old-fashioned roses? Because these features are smart, or may have been smart about ten years ago - not because their owners think they are beautiful or useful, but because they make them feel good, better than the neighbours. Gardens are symbols of social and economic status'. I would soften this slightly, and suggest that we may not be quite as conscious of the socioeconomic determinants of our flower-beds as Quest-Ritson implies. We may genuinely think that our class-bound choices of plants and designs are beautiful - although this does not make them any less socially determined.

Class Indicators and the Eccentricity Clause

Our taste is influenced by what we see in the gardens of our friends, family and neighbours. In England, you grow up learning to find some flowers and arrangements of flowers 'pretty' or 'tasteful' and others 'ugly' or 'vulgar'. By the time you have your own garden, you will, if you are from the higher social ranks, 'instinctively' turn up your nose at gaudy bedding plants (such as zinnias, salvia, marigolds and petunias), ornate rockeries, pampas grass, hanging baskets, busy lizzies, chrysanthemums, gladioli, gnomes and goldfish ponds. You will, on the other hand, be likely to find box hedges, old-fashioned shrub roses, herbaceous borders, clematis, laburnum, Tudor-revival/Arts-and-Crafts patterns and York stone paths aesthetically pleasing.

Garden fashions change, and in any case it would be a mistake to be too precise and attempt to classify a garden socially on the basis of one or two flowers or features. The 'eccentricity clause' applies here as well, as Quest-Ritson observes: 'Once a garden-owner has acquired a reputation as a general plantsman, it is quite permissible for him to express a tenderness for the unfashionable, the plebeian and the naff'. I would say that being firmly and unequivocally established as a member of the upper- or upper-middle classes would be enough, with or without plantsmanship, but the point is much the same. The odd garden gnome or zinnia does not necessarily result in automatic demotion, but may be tolerated as a personal idiosyncrasy.

To gauge the social class of a garden owner, it is therefore better to look at the general style of the garden, rather than becoming too obsessed with the class-semiotics of individual plants - particularly if you can't tell an old-fashioned rose from a Hybrid Tea. As a rule-of-thumb, gardens lower down the social scale tend to be both more garish (their owners would say 'colourful' or 'cheerful') and more regimented in appearance (their owners would call them 'neat' or 'tidy') than those at the higher end.

Higher-class gardens tend to look more casual, more natural, less effortful, with more faded or subtle colours. Like the 'natural look' in make-up, this effect may require a great deal of time and effort to achieve - perhaps more than the pastry-cut flower-beds and disciplined rows of flowers of the lower-class garden - but the effort does not show; the impression is of a charming, uncontrived confusion, usually with little or no earth visible between the plants. Excessive fretting and fussing about the odd weed or two, and over-zealous manicuring of lawns, are regarded, by the upper classes and upper-middles, as rather lower class.

The wealthier uppers, of course, have lower-class gardeners to do their fretting and manicuring for them, so their gardens may sometimes look rather too neat - but if you talk to them, you will find that they often complain about the perfectionism of their gardeners ('Fred's a dreadful fusser - has a fit if a daisy dares to rear its ugly head on "his" lawn!') in the same patronising way that some businessmen and professionals mock the tidiness of their super-efficient secretaries ('Oh, I'm not allowed near the filing cabinet - I might mess up her precious colourcoding system!').

The Ironic-gnome Rule

Leaving aside the proletarian neatness of nanny-gardeners, if you do spot an unexpectedly and unmistakably plebeian feature in such a garden, it is worth asking the owner about it. The response will tell you much more about the owner's class than the feature itself. I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden (I said something intelligent like 'Oh, a gnome'). The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was 'ironic'. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tongue-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden - I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a 'smart' garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class. A subtle but clearly very important distinction. Needless to say, I was not invited back.

This man's reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was 'ironic' had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have boldly admitted to a passion for garden gnomes (and eagerly pointed out other examples of the genre dotted about his otherwise effortlessly elegant garden) or said something like 'Ah yes, my gnome. I'm very fond of my gnome.' and left me to draw my own conclusions. The upper classes do not care what a nosey anthropologist (or indeed anyone else) thinks of them, and in any case do not need ironic gnomes to emphasise their status.

HOME RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

Can the unwritten rules of English homes and gardens help to clarify, refine or expand our 'grammar' of Englishness? Have we found or confirmed any more candidates for 'defining characteristic' status? Given that our homes and gardens are two of our principal obsessions, it would be surprising if an analysis of their underlying rules did not yield some helpful insights into our national character.

All humans have a territorial instinct, but the English obsession with our homes and mania for nestbuilding goes much further than this. Almost all commentators have remarked on this English home-fixation, but none has yet offered a satisfactory explanation. Jeremy Paxman comes closest to an understanding of this characteristic when he says that '"Home" is what the English have instead of a Fatherland'31, but this does not entirely explain why we should be so neurotically obsessive about our homes. Attempts to attribute our home-fixation to the English climate are unconvincing - other countries have weather conditions much more likely to drive their inhabitants indoors, but do not share our fanatical nesting tendencies.

I think that some insights into our home-obsession can be found in the 'rules of Englishness' that we have identified in this and previous chapters. The moat-and-drawbridge rule represents the fifth 'sighting' so far of the English fixation with privacy (a preoccupation also evident in the awful estate agent rule, the front-garden rules and the back-garden formula) and at least the ninth or tenth occurrence of the reserve/social inhibition theme. My hunch at this stage is that these are likely to qualify as 'defining characteristics' of Englishness, and that they are closely connected. 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, reticence 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. Home may indeed be our substitute for a Fatherland, but at another level, I would suggest that home is what the English have instead of social skills.

The class rules reveal a new aspect of our acute class-consciousness - which I call the 'adjacent classes problem'. We noted that it is always safest to choose one's eccentricity from a class at the opposite end of the social scale, rather than from an immediately adjacent class. Each English class particularly despises the one immediately below it, and the prospect of being mistaken for a member of this adjacent class is therefore especially abhorrent.

The brag-wall rule reflects another kind of typically English hypocrisy, and brings us back to the recurring theme of humour. In this case, we see the use of wit and humour as a sort of cover for breaking the modesty and anti-earnestness rules. The house-talk 'nightmare' rule reminds us, again, of the English penchant for moaning, but is also yet another manifestation of the modesty rule, which must surely be a strong contender for 'defining characteristic' status. The nightmare rule is also a hypocritical 'cover': a way of boasting without appearing to boast.

The improvement-talk rules highlight an extreme version of the generic modesty rule, involving an exercise in competitive modesty that can only be described as 'one-downmanship'. Other nations have rituals of polite modesty and self-deprecation (the Japanese immediately spring to mind here), but the English improvement-talk one-downmanship is distinctive for the importance of humour: it is not enough merely to speak disparagingly of one's incompetent DIY efforts (in the way that, say, Japanese etiquette requires denigration of a gift one is offering) one must do so in a witty and amusing manner.

The 'non-specific praise' requirement raises a misunderstanding about English 'reserve' and politeness that needs to be addressed. 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 stand-offishness, 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 other problems, chronic over-use of the word 'nice'.

The awful estate agent rule highlights not only the extent to which our identity is bound up with our homes, but also, again, the importance of humour in English culture. Estate agents are an intrusive threat to our sense of identity, so we 'neutralize' their power by making fun of them. This is to some extent a universal human coping mechanism: in all cultures, people who are perceived to be threatening tend to be the subject of such defensive jokes, but the use of this strategy does seem to be more marked, and more frequently employed, among the English than elsewhere. We use humour to deal not only with the threatening or unfamiliar but with any and every social or practical difficulty, from the most trivial problems to issues of national importance.

Both the front- and back-garden rules confirm the English preoccupation with privacy. 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.

The counter-culture garden-sofa exception underlines the now familiar themes of 'orderly disorder' and ineffectual but socially therapeutic moaning - but it also brings to light a rather more amiable quality: a distinctive English capacity for tolerance. 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. It may be the quality responsible for the relatively good race relations in this country (the key word here is 'relatively', of course: race relations in England are, as Jeremy Paxman puts it, 'by and large, not bad' only in comparison with other much less tolerant nations).

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. The NSPCG rule also indicates a strong tendency to comply with unwritten social rules and expectations, a sense of duty and obligation. Finally, the class rules, the eccentricity clause and the ironic-gnome rule remind us of the convoluted nature of English class distinctions, and also the complexities of the rules governing English eccentricity. 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.

I am now starting to see some patterns, which may lead to the development of a diagram that will encapsulate not only the defining characteristics of Englishness, but also the relationships and interactions among these core qualities. I am not all that good at diagrams - I tried to do one once of a particular kind of social network I was studying, and it looked like the webs produced by spiders on LSD - but if the next few chapters help to clarify the 'grammatical' relationships between rules of Englishness, it should be possible even for me to represent these on a chart of some sort.

26. This observation is borne out by the latest statistics. In France, Italy and Germany, over half the new homes built in the 1990s were apartments, in England only 15% were apartments. Nearly 70% of English people own the homes in which they live, well above the European average.

27. If you want more figures: we spend ?8,500 million every year on DIY.

28. If you don't believe me, try looking out of the window of a train next time you are travelling anywhere in England: I can guarantee that almost all of the back gardens you see will be variations on this 'formula'. An anglophile American friend was reluctantly converted to my theory when she tried this experiment.

29. Although the English passion for gardening now seems to be catching on in some other European countries. It is particularly popular in Germany at the moment, where I am told that translations of English gardening books are selling well.

30. For stats-junkies: in the most recent national government census survey, over 60 per cent of the population reported that they had spent time gardening in the four weeks prior to the census date.

31. Echoing (although he does not mention it) 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.'