Englishmen as Seen by a Foreigner

In England I should like to be a cow or a baby, but being a grown-up man I viewed the people of this country. Well, it is not true that the Eng-lish wear loud check suits, with pipe and whiskers; as regards the latter, the only true Englishman is Dr Bocek, in Prague. Every Englishman wears a mackintosh, and has a cap on his head and a newspaper in his hand. As for the English woman, she carries a mackintosh or a tennis racket. Nature here has a propensity for unusual shagginess, excrescence, wooliness, spikiness, and all kinds of hair. English horses, for example, have regular tufts and tassels of hair on their legs, and English dogs are nothing more or less than absurd bundles of forelocks. Only the English lawn and the English gentleman are shaved every day.

What an Englishman is cannot be stated concisely; you would have to be acquainted, firstly with an English club-waiter, or with a booking-clerk

at a railway, or, above all, with a policeman. A gentleman, that is a meas-ured combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty.

Here the people always manage to help each other, but they never have to say to each other, except about the weather. That is possibly why Englishmen have invented all games, and why they do not speak during their games.

In the place of taverns, where one can sit, drink and talk, they have invented bars, where one can stand, drink and hold one's peace. The more talkative people (like Lloyd George) take to politics, or to authorship; an English book must have at least four hundred pages. It is, perhaps, through sheer taciturnity that the English swallow half of every word, and then the second half they somehow squash so it is difficult to understand them. I used to travel every day to Ladbroke Grove, the conductor would give me a ticket after the following conversation: "Ledbrick Grrov." – "??? Eh?" – "Ledbhuk Ghov." – "??? Eh?" – "Hevhur Hev." – "Hevhur Hev, right." I shall never learn this as long as I live.

But if you get to know them closer, they are very kind and gentle; they never speak much because they never speak about themselves. They enjoy themselves like children, but with the most solemn leathery expres-sion; they have lots of ingrained etiquette, but at the same time they are as free-and-easy as young whelps. They are as hard as flint, incapable of adapting themselves, conservative, loyal, rather shallow and always un-communicative; they cannot get out of their skin, but it is solid and, in every respect, excellent skin. You cannot speak to them without being invited to lunch or dinner; they are as hospitable as St. Julian, but they never overstep the distance between man and man.

(from Letters from Englandby K. Capek)

Дата добавления: 2015-08-13