Watching the English

CLASS RULES

But rather than end on that touching, encouraging note, I'm now going to talk about class. Again. Surely you didn't think we'd get through a whole chapter with just a couple of passing references to the class system?

You can probably do this bit yourself by now. C'mon, have a go: what are the main differences between a working-class funeral and a middle-class one? Or the indicators of a middle-middle versus an upper-middle wedding? Discuss with special reference to material-culture class indicators, sartorial class indicators and class-anxiety signals. Oh, all right, I'll do it - but don't expect anything very surprising: you can see, from what Jane Austen called 'the tell-tale compression of the pages', that we're nearly done here, and if we haven't got the hang of English class indicators and anxieties by now, we never will.

As you might expect, there is no such thing as a classless rite of passage among the English. Every detail of a wedding, Christmas, house-warming or funeral, from the vocabulary and dress of the participants to the number of peas on their forks, is determined, at least to some extent, by their social class.

Working-class Rites

As a general rule, working-class rites of passage are the most lavish (in terms of expenditure relative to income). A working-class wedding, for example, will nearly always be a big 'do', with a sit-down meal in a restaurant, pub 'function room' or hotel; a big fancy car to take the bride to the church; the full complement of matching bridesmaids in tight, revealing dresses; a huge, three-tiered cake; guests in glamorous, brand-new, Sunday-best outfits and matching accessories; a specialist wedding-photographer and a professional wedding-video firm; a big, noisy evening party with dancing and free-flowing booze; a honeymoon somewhere hot. No expense spared. 'Nothing but the best for our princess.'

Working-class funerals (huge, elaborate wreaths; top-of-the-range coffin), Christmases (expensive gifts; copious quantities of food and drink), children's birthdays (the latest high-tech toys, high-priced football strip and top-brand-name trainers) and other rites operate on much the same principles. Even if one is struggling financially, it is important to look as though one has spent money and 'pushed the boat out'. A day trip to Calais to buy large quantities of cheap drink (known as a 'booze cruise') is a favoured means of achieving this.

Lower-middle and Middle-middle Rites

Lower-middle and middle-middle rites of passage tend to be smaller and somewhat more prudent. To stick with the wedding example: lower- and middle-middle parents will be anxious to help the couple with a mortgage down-payment rather than irresponsibly 'blowing it all on a big wedding'. There is still great concern, however, that everything should be done 'properly' and 'tastefully' (these are the classes for whom wedding-etiquette books are written), and considerable stress and anxiety over relatives who might lower the tone or bring disgrace by getting drunk and 'making an exhibition of themselves'.

If the working-class ideal is the glamorous celebrity wedding, like Posh and Becks's, the lower-middle and middle-middle aspirational benchmark is the royal wedding - no themes or gimmicks, everything 'traditional' and every detail dainty and effortfully elegant. These bourgeois or wannabe-bourgeois weddings are very contrived, carefully coordinated affairs. The 'serviettes' match the flowers, which 'tone with' the place-cards, which in turn 'pick up' the dominant colour of the mother-of-the-bride's pastel two-piece suit. But no-one notices all this attention to detail until she draws their attention to it. The food is bland and safe, with hotel-style menus of the kind that call mash 'creamed potatoes'. The portions are not as generous as those at the working-class wedding, although they are more neatly presented, and 'garnished' with parsley and radishes carved into flower-shapes. The 'fine wines' run out too soon, calculations of glasses-per-head having been somewhat miserly, but the Best Man still manages to get drunk and break his promise to keep his speech 'clean'. The bride is mortified, her mother furious. Neither reprimands the offender, as they don't want to spoil the day with an unseemly row, but they hiss indignantly to each other and to some aunts, and treat the Best Man with frosty, tight-lipped disapproval for the rest of the afternoon.

Upper-middle Rites

Upper-middle rites of passage are usually less anxiously contrived and overdone - at least among those upper-middles who feel secure about their class status. Even among the anxious, an upper-middle wedding aims for an air of effortless elegance, quite different from the middle-middles, who want you to notice how much hard work and thought has gone into it. Like 'natural-look' make-up, the upper-middle wedding's appearance of casual, un-fussy stylishness can take a great deal of thought, effort and expense to achieve.

For class-anxious upper-middles, especially the urban, educated, 'chattering' class, concern is focused not so much on doing things correctly as on doing them distinctively. Desperate to distinguish and distance themselves from the middle-middles, they strive not only to avoid twee fussiness, but also to escape from the 'traditional'. They can't have the 'same old conventional Wedding March' or the 'same old boring hymns' as the mock-Tudor middle-middles or, God forbid, the inhabitants of semi-detached Pardonia. They choose obscure music for the bride's entrance, which no-one recognizes, so the guests are still chattering as the bride makes her way up the aisle - and little-known, difficult hymns that nobody can sing. The same principle often extends to the food, which is 'different' and imaginative but not necessarily easy or pleasant to eat, and the clothes, which may be the latest quirky, avantgarde fashions, but are not always easy to wear or to look at.

Older couples - and the upper-middles tend to marry later - will often have a register-office wedding (in some cases under the misapprehension that belief in God is required for a church ceremony) or even an 'alternative' secular ceremony at which they exchange vows they have written themselves. Curiously, the gist of these is usually much the same as the traditional church marriage-vows, only rather more long-winded and less well expressed.

Upper-class Rites

Upper-class weddings tend to be more traditional, although not in the studied, textbook-traditional manner of the lower- and middle-middles. The upper classes are accustomed to big parties - charity balls, hunt balls, large private parties and the big events of The Season are a normal part of their social round - so they don't get as flustered about weddings and other rites of passage as the rest of us. An upper-class wedding is often a quite muted, simple affair. They do not all rush out to buy special new 'outfits' as they have plenty of suitable clothes already. The men all have their own morning suits and, as far as the women are concerned, Ascot may require something a bit special but, 'One goes to so many weddings - can't be expected to keep ringing the changes every time,' as one very grand lady told me.

The Sour-grapes Rule

If they cannot afford a big wedding (or funeral, Christmas, birthday, anniversary) the upper-middles and upper classes will often make a rather sour-grapey virtue of this, saying that they 'don't want a big, flashy production, just a simple little family party with a few close friends', rather than running up credit-card debts like the working classes, or dipping reluctantly into savings like the lower- and middle-middles. The English modesty rule, with its associated distaste for ostentatious displays of wealth, serves the impecunious higher echelons well: anything they cannot afford can be dismissed as 'flashy' or 'vulgar'. Big, glamorous weddings are regarded as decidedly 'naff', as Jane Austen pointedly reminds us by describing her upper-class heroine Emma Woodhouse's wedding as a small, quiet one in which 'the parties have no taste for finery or parade', and having the ghastly, pretentious, jumped-up Mrs Elton exhibit typically middle-class poor taste when she complains that the proceedings involved 'Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!'

Lower- and middle-middles can use the same modesty principle to good effect by calling the extravagant celebrations they secretly envy 'wasteful' and 'silly', and talking disparagingly about people with 'more money than sense'. The 'respectable' upper-working class sometimes use this line as well: it emphasises their prudent respectability and makes them sound more middle-class than the more common working-class approach, which is to express sniffy contempt for the 'stuck-up' 'showing off' of big, 'fancy' celebrations. 'She had to have a big posh do in a hotel,' said one of my informants, referring to a neighbour's silver wedding anniversary. 'This [their local pub, where our conversation took place] wasn't good enough for her. Stuck-up cow.'

RITES OF PASSAGE AND ENGLISHNESS

Poring over the rules in this chapter, trying to figure out what each one tells us about Englishness and scribbling my verdicts in the margins, I was struck by how often I found myself scribbling the word 'moderation'. This characteristic has featured significantly throughout the book, but in a chapter focusing specifically on our 'high days and holidays', our carnivals, festivals, parties and other celebrations, its predominance is perhaps a little surprising. Or maybe not. We are talking about the English, after all. By 'moderation', I don't only mean the English avoidance of extremes and excess and intensity, but also the need for a sense of balance. Our need for moderation is closely related to our concern with fair play. Our tendency to compromise, for example, is a product of both fair play and moderation, as are a number of other English habits, such as apathy, woolliness and conservatism.

Our benignly indifferent, fence-sitting, tolerant approach to religion is a product of moderation + fair play, with a dash of courtesy, a dollop of humour, possibly a pinch or two of empiricism. (Oh dear, I seem to have slipped from 'equation' to 'recipe' in mid-sentence. This does not bode well for the final diagram.)

The other principal themes emerging from this chapter are pretty much the usual suspects, but we can now see even more clearly how many of the unwritten rules governing our behaviour involve a combination of two or more defining characteristics. The one-downmanship rules of kid-talk, for example, are clearly a product of modesty and hypocrisy (these two seem to go together a lot - in fact, we very rarely find modesty without an element of hypocrisy) with a generous slosh of humour.

The invisible-puberty rule is a more straightforward example of English social dis-ease. Pubescents and adolescents are essentially in an acute phase of this dis-ease (triggered or exacerbated by raging hormones). Our reluctance, as a society, to acknowledge the onset of puberty is a form of 'denial' - ostrichy behaviour that is in itself a reflection of our own social dis-ease. Social dis-ease can be 'medicated' to some extent with ritual, but our pubescents are denied any official rites of passage, and so invent their own. (The Gap-Year ordeal provides ritual medication, in the form of appropriate initiation rites, but rather late, and only for a privileged minority.)

The Freshers' Week rules involve a combination of social dis-ease - medicated with both ritual and alcohol - and that distinctively English brand of 'orderly disorder', a reflection of our need for moderation. The exam and graduation rules combine modesty with (as usual) an equal quantity of hypocrisy, with the addition of a large dollop of Eeyorishness, seasoned with humour and a hint of moderation.

Our matching rites seem to trigger a rash of social dis-ease symptoms. The money-talk taboo is social dis-ease + modesty + hypocrisy, with class variations. At weddings, we find again that the symptoms of social dis-ease can be effectively alleviated with humour, and the painful 'natural experiment' of funerals shows us how bad the dis-ease symptoms can get without this medication, as well as highlighting our penchant for moderation again. The tear quotas involve a combination of moderation, courtesy and fair play.

The celebration excuse and its associated magical beliefs are another example of social dis-ease medicated with alcohol and ritual. The Christmas moan-fest and bah-humbug rule combine Eeyorishness with courtesy and hypocrisy, while the Christmas-present rules blend courtesy and hypocrisy again. The New Year's Eve orderly-disorder rule is about moderation again, and its close relation fair play, as well as the now very familiar attempts to control social dis-ease symptoms with alcohol and ritual - also evident in most of the minor calendricals. Holidays involve more of the same, and highlight our need to limit excess and indulgence - our need for moderation.

The class rules governing our rites of passage are about class-consciousness, of course, but also involve the usual close relation of this trait, hypocrisy - and in particular that special English blend of modesty and hypocrisy, which all the social classes seem to exhibit in equal degree.

The intimate, private transitional rites represent one of our very few genuine escapes from our debilitating social dis-ease. (The other main escape is sex, also a private matter.) Our fanatical obsession with privacy may be a symptom of our social dis-ease, but we also value privacy because it allows us some relief from this affliction. At home, among close family, friends and lovers, we can be warm and spontaneous and really quite remarkably human. This is the side of us that many visitors to this country never see, or only catch rare glimpses of. You have to be patient to witness it - like waiting for giant pandas to mate.

63. Incidentally, only 56 percent believe in opinion polls.

64. Victor Turner later re-defined 'rites of passage' to exclude calendrical rites, focusing only on transitions in which an individual is socially transformed, but as van Gennep invented the term I feel he should get to decide what it means, and I'm using his rather broader definition.

65. By which I mean an ordinary Anglican funeral - the kind the vast majority of us have, and most English readers will have attended at some point. I do realise that there are many other sorts, but there is not space here to cover all the funeral practices of minority faiths, which in any case could not be described as typically English.

66. We seem to have a habit of re-naming festivals after the main symbols associated with them, rather than the events they are supposed to commemorate - Remembrance Day is more widely known as Poppy Day, for example, after the red paper poppies we wear to remember the war-dead. The organisers of Comic Relief had the good sense to pre-empt us by calling their national charitable fund-raising day Red Nose Day, after the red plastic noses we are encouraged to buy and wear, rather than trying to call it Comic Relief Day.