I am not saying that English drivers are paragons of automotive virtue, or somehow magically endowed with any more saintly forbearance than other nations, just that we have rules and customs that prescribe a certain degree of restraint. When frustrated or angry, English drivers are inclined to shout insults at each other just like anyone else, and the language used is no less colourful, but we mostly tend to do this from behind closed windows, rather than winding them down or getting out and 'making a scene'. If someone does lose their temper to the point of stand-up ranting and raving, or physically threatening behaviour, this is a noteworthy incident, deplored and tutted over in indignant tones for days, cited as evidence of a 'road-rage epidemic', a decline in moral standards, etc. - not, as it would be almost anywhere else, an annoying but relatively unremarkable event.
Fair-play Rules
English driving behaviour can be seen as an extension of our queuing behaviour, in that the same principles of fairness and good manners apply. As with queuing, people do 'cheat', but breaches of automotive fair-play rules provoke the same righteous indignation as pedestrian queue-jumping. Like pedestrian queuers, drivers are acutely aware of 'potential' cheats, and will, for example, inch forward in a pointed manner, with suspicious sideways glances, closing gaps to thwart another driver who appears to be considering an opportunistic manoeuvre, while carefully avoiding eye contact.
When the turn-off lane on a motorway or other main road is moving very slowly, some unscrupulous drivers will 'cheat' by zipping down the outside, faster-moving lanes and then trying to edge back into the turn-off lane at a later point. This is tantamount to queue-jumping, but the only punishment such sinners receive is much the same barrage of scowls, filthy looks and muttered insults that faces pedestrian queue-jumpers - perhaps with the addition of a few irate or obscene gestures, almost always performed from behind the safety of closed windows. The horn is rarely used in such cases, there being an unwritten rule to the effect that honking and beeping 'in anger' should be reserved for admonishing driving behaviour that is potentially dangerous, rather than just deeply immoral.
These tactics seem to be somewhat less effective at maintaining fair play among drivers than among pedestrians, because there is less potential for embarrassment. In the security of their mobile castles, with the ability to escape quickly from disapproving looks or angry gestures, the English are less vulnerable to these rather subtle deterrents and sanctions, and thus more inclined to break the fair-play rules. It is worth noting, however, that although queue-jumping and other opportunistic behaviours are more common among drivers than among pedestrians, only a small minority of drivers break the rules: the majority of English drivers, most of the time, 'play fair'.
ROAD RULES AND ENGLISHNESS
What do these rules tell us about Englishness? The denial rule provides yet another striking example of English social inhibition and embarrassment, and further evidence of our insularity and obsession with privacy. In the last chapter, I suggested that these two tendencies were related: that our excessive need for privacy is at least partly due to our social awkwardness, that 'home is what the English have instead of social skills'. A rather bold claim, perhaps, but none of the data in this road-rules chapter, which has been concerned with what happens when we venture outside the privacy and security of our homes, has caused me to revise this opinion. Both the denial rule and the mobile-castle rule confirm our inability to deal with the realities of social interaction: we can only cope by practising various forms of self-delusion, pretending either that other people do not exist, or that we are still at home.
The courtesy rules, both in the public-transport and driving contexts, also remind us of the importance of politeness in English culture, but I think we are now getting closer to a more precise understanding of the subtleties and nuances of English politeness. The identification of England as a predominantly 'negative-politeness' culture - concerned mainly with the avoidance of imposition and intrusion - seems to me quite helpful. The important point here is that politeness and courtesy, as practised by the English, have very little to do with friendliness or good nature.
A pattern seems to be emerging as we examine different aspects of English life and culture, a recurring theme that I think may be crucial to our understanding of the English character. What I am noticing is that there is rarely anything straightforward or direct or transparent about English social interaction. We seem to be congenitally incapable of being frank, clear or assertive. We are always oblique, always playing some complex, convoluted game. When we are not doing things backwards (saying the opposite of what we mean, not introducing ourselves till the end of an encounter, saying sorry when someone bumps into us and other Looking-Glass practices), we are doing them sideways (addressing our indignant mutterings about queue-jumpers to other queuers, and our complaints about delayed trains to other passengers, rather than actually tackling the offenders). Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion. We seem perversely determined to make everything as difficult as possible for ourselves. Why, as one American visitor plaintively asked me, can't the English just be 'a bit more direct, you know, a bit more upfront?' We would, as she pointed out, save ourselves and everybody else a great deal of trouble.
The problem is, I think, that when we are 'direct and upfront', we tend to overdo it, becoming noisy, aggressive, rude and generally insufferable. Whenever I talk to English people about my research on Englishness, and mention that we tend to be inhibited and have lots of rules about politeness, they say: 'But we're not inhibited and polite - look at our football hooligans and drunken louts all over the place - we're loud and obnoxious and a disgrace'. Leaving aside what this response reveals about our penchant for national self-denigration, I would argue that our inhibited politeness and our loud obnoxiousness are two sides of the same coin. Both tendencies reflect a fundamental and distinctively English form of social dis-ease, a chronic and seemingly incurable inability to engage normally and directly with other human beings. We have developed many ingenious ways of disguising and overcoming this unfortunate disability ('facilitators' such as The Weather, the pub and taxi-drivers' rear-view mirrors), but it can never be entirely eradicated.
Despite our idiopathic social handicaps, we do have some redeeming qualities. Many of the rules examined in this chapter, for example, highlight the immense importance of the concept of 'fairness' in English culture. This is not to say that other nations lack such a concept - what is distinctively English is our overwhelming national obsession with 'fair play'.
Most of the remaining rules in this chapter seem to be concerned with that other great English obsession: class. The car-care rules relating to dirt, tidiness and dogginess indicate a curious but apparently consistent pattern in which we find that the top and bottom ends of the social scale have more in common with each other than either has with the middle ranks. The common factor usually turns out to be some form of disregard for social niceties or a lack of concern about 'what the neighbours will think'. It occurs to me that this may be why the majority of the more notable and flamboyant English eccentrics have always come from either the highest or the lowest social classes. There seem to be very few examples of brazen, colourful eccentricity among the middle-middle or lower-middle classes.
Finally, the 'road-rage' issue sheds some new light on the question of English patriotism or, rather, our distinct lack of it. Can there be any other nation so resolutely unpatriotic, so prone to self-flagellation, so squeamishly reluctant to accept praise? This dearth of national amour-propre, this unshakeable conviction that our country has nothing much to recommend it and is in any case rapidly going to the dogs, must surely be one of the defining characteristics of the English. Although, having said that, I suspect that this trait is in fact a subcategory, a symptom or side effect of our modesty, moaning and humour rules (particularly the self-deprecation rule and the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule) rather than a defining characteristic in itself. Either way, I can confidently predict that despite all my critical comments on the English in this book, I will be taken to task when it comes out for being too positive, for painting too flattering a portrait, for ignoring or glossing over our darker side - and so on and so gloomily forth. If I sound a bit cynical and grumpy and pessimistic here, it's probably because I'm English.