The Outgoing Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 26

means that nobody would sport a notice in the back of their car reading “My Child is on the
Honor Roll,” as some Americans do. More satirically-minded Britons might display notices
reading “My Child is a Hooker” or “I Married an Incurable Alcoholic,” but “My Child is
on the Honor Roll” is desperately, distinctively American. If you were caught making this
kind of pathetic boast in Britain or Ireland, you would probably need to emigrate immedi-
ately, or at least have emergency cosmetic surgery to disguise your appearance. (Speaking
of signs in cars, an effective way of alarming your neighbours if you live in an up-market
suburb called, say, Sandyfield, is to drive around with a poster in the back window of your
vehicle reading “Say No to Sandyfield Sewage Plant.” If you are looking to buy a cheaper
house in the area or dispose of some particularly annoying neighbours, this should do the
trick.)
When I hear Americans proudly recounting their children's achievements, I make a point
of telling them that I am training up my small daughter to be a pickpocket, and hope she
will be adept enough at the trade to avoid joining her three elder brothers in jail. There
are, however, plenty of Americans who share this distaste for drooling in public over their
offspring. The positive side of such praise is that Americans are not afraid to encourage
their children and boost their self-assurance. By and large, they are a supportive people. In
working-class Britain, at least when I was growing up there, praising one's children was
thought to make them soft, and thus unfit for the tough life that lay ahead of them. It was
the kind of soppy thing posh people did.
The Irish are particularly allergic to boasting, and tend to downplay their attainments.
Until recently, Ireland was a fairly impoverished place, so that mentioning your villa in
Umbria would have been thought tasteless when others were struggling to survive. It is
because other people might be short of food that it is customary in Ireland even today to
refuse the offer of a meal or even a cup of tea, and then be persuaded to accept. Truly hero-
ic citizens might even refuse the offer of a Guinness. Britain, by contrast, has a history of
affluence; but much of that wealth was bound up with its imperial power, and the nation's
ruling class was not slow to recognise that power is likely to produce a backlash if exer-
cised too haughtily. This did not stop the British from torturing and massacring their colo-
nial subjects from time to time, but they did so in a modest, unassuming kind of way, as
though they were offering them a much-sought-after service.
Among the more emotionally constipated of Britons is the Duke of Edinburgh, who was
once asked in the course of a television interview how he felt about having had to abandon
a promising naval career to spend the rest of his days walking two paces behind his wife.
“Feel about it?” barked the Duke. “I don't go around psychoanalysing myself, you know.”
It is not quite the response one would expect from a guest on Oprah . Introspection for the
Duke is a form of illness. Aristocrats like him regard the whole notion of an inner life as a
shameless middle-class self-indulgence. Rather than morbidly picking over your finer feel-
ings, you just get on with things. The positive side of this ethic is a rather stiff kind of