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 welclass="underline" 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.
CONCLUSION
At the beginning, I set out to discover the 'defining characteristics of Englishness' by closely observing distinctive regularities in English behaviour, identifying the specific hidden rules governing these behaviour patterns, and then figuring out what these rules reveal about our national character. A sort of semi-scientific procedure, I suppose. Well, systematic, at least. But despite all the confident-sounding noises I was making in the Introduction, I had no idea whether or not it would work, as this approach to understanding a national character had not been tried before.