One obvious consequence is that British homes tend to be less tidy and less clean than Russian homes. A small flat is easier to clean than a house with several rooms on two storeys, even if it is quite small. If house and garden are intermingling, there will be traces of dirt, bits of grass will wander into the house, flowers will drop their leaves. Moreover, although in Britain as in Russian, some people are naturally 'house-proud', we are culturally less inclined to worry about cleaning and scrubbing and keeping everywhere very tidy. So if you enter a house that seems not to have been dusted for a week or so, do not be surprised. Your hosts are not being rude, they simply have different standards and priorities.
As for the furnishings; as a general rule, Russians who can afford to buy new things for their flat will make sure that their furniture is new. Rich Russians make sure that everything is new.
In Britain, houses have much more of a mixture of new and old. Families inherit furniture from parents and grandparents. Sometimes they hate it and pass it on to someone else; sometimes they preserve it proudly. Many of us search deliberately for old things in antique and second-hand shops, partly because much furniture that has survived one hundred and fifty years old or more, will be hand-crafted and well-made. Also there is a pleasure in using a table that has been used, say, for two hundred years. You can feel its history in its polished surface, in its stains and marks and imperfections. It is possible to love such furniture. Part of its attraction is that it is not perfect, it is used. So if you sit down in some British homes you may be surprised to find how shabby and worn the furniture is, even though your hosts appear to have enough money to buy new furniture. The point is that they prefer what they have.
This delight in old wood, old china, old pictures and so on does not extend to electrical equipment such as fridges and washing machines, where, on the whole, new technology is to be preferred! We still have different taps for hot and cold water, and expect to put a plug in the hole in the basin, and wash ourselves or our dishes in a limited amount of water. Russians think this is ridiculous and even painful since it is easy to scald oneself on hot water unmixed with cold water. The British are used to the inconvenience, but feel very uncomfortable about washing dishes under running water. We say to ourselves: "Think of how much hot water we are wasting'.
British visitors to Russia almost always return saying how charmed they were by the clean, cared-for and friendly flats of their Russian friends. Just as often they admit to being appalled by external conditions: dirty stairways, smelly lifts, uncared-for entrances. There are two reasons. First, almost all British visitors to Russia come from the prosperous or reasonably prosperous middle-classes. They do not come from poor and ill-kept housing estates in the grimmer parts of British cities which have similar ugly external conditions. Secondly, because we are used to gardens in a temperate climate we think of the outsides of our houses as places for more flowers and bushes, a little painted gate or some other kind of cheerful display. I doubt if we would be better than Russians at living in communal conditions, except perhaps in one matter. We would provide better benches for elderly people to sit down at the entrances, for we have a good tradition about seats and benches. When someone dies who has loved a particular spot in a park or near his house, his friends will sometimes gather money to 'donate' an outdoor seat in his memory. The seat is set up for other people to enjoy the same spot or the same view, with a little notice on it remembering the dead person.
We do not have dachas and therefore we do not have a dacha culture. So what do we have instead?
If we want to be outside, we can sit or work in our own garden attached to the house. It is almost certainly much smaller than a dacha plot of land, but it is immediately accessible. If we want to do more gardening than our own gardens allow we can rent an allotment which is land owned by the local municipality for those who want to grow vegetables and fruit.
A small minority of prosperous people own a 'second home'. This second home will be a long way away - at least two or three hours by car, which by our standards is indeed a long way. The second home is usually an old (and often inconvenient) building in some beautiful part of the countryside, where it can be used as a holiday home rather than an extra place for gardening and growing vegetables. It will be inhabited during occasional weekends throughout the year and for few weeks in the summer. Many second-home owners rent out them out to other holiday makers when they are not using them to help cover the costs of this expensive luxury. Second homes are simply not available to 95% of the population, so we make different arrangements both for holidays and for weekend relaxation. (You can find out more about all these matters in the chapter on Leisure.)
Part Three. Personal Relationships
Although statistics can tell us how many people married in a certain year and how many children were born, we know nothing about the personal commitments and dilemmas faced by the men, women and children who are represented in the data. In order to give them some reality I decided to describe a few imaginary families. By this method I can discuss some of the changes in attitudes towards personal relationships and family life over the last few decades. I also try to explain why these changes have taken place.
Chapter 1. Fictional Families: The Taylors and Others
The fictional family, the Taylors, first appeared in Understanding Britain. In Understanding Britain Today I bring their story into the twenty-first century. To begin, here is a summary of the story of Carol and Bill Taylor and their children up to 1991.
Bill and Carol Taylor were both in their early fifties in 1991. They had three children: Sarah, then aged 28, Peter aged 26 and Kate aged 23. The family were not 'typical' - for how can any family be 'typical'? - but as a reasonably prosperous middle-class family living in the south of England they were probably quite like many of the families whom Russians would have met in England at the time. Bill and Carol had met in 1959 when he was 22 and she was 20. They married two years later and lived first in a rented flat in an inner London suburb. Bill was an engineer dealing with problems of noise and stress. He and Carol, who had trained as a nurse, brought up their children on a housing estate in a pleasant outer suburb of West London. Later they moved twice before reaching their present home in which they were still living in 1991, although all three children had moved out.