2 September 1966

     I have often read and heard that the English foster order and have a reverential regard for it primarily because they are fundamentally disorderly creatures. I suspect their awareness of this carefully restrained trait has something to do with their emphasis upon the sort of punctuality that, J. Brett Langstaff said—in Oxford—1914 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965)—his Greek tutor’s butler called “the essence of politeness.” Their almost incessant quest for regularity and ceaseless efforts to eliminate untidiness of manner or place are everywhere evident. Those efforts are most obvious, perhaps, in the succession of gardens which line the narrow roads leading from villages like Wroxton and Drayton to towns like Banbury.
     Although close up they reveal pleasant individual touches, they seem, as they flash by a bus or car widow, almost identical. In virtually every one, the rusty ironstone earth is rich, dark, and weed free about the canes of roses luxuriantly in bloom. Among the roses are clumps of geranium, fuschia, snapdragons, ageratum, and similarly bright plantings. All the plots seem also to be just about the same lovely little size, about fifteen or twenty feet square and walled in by privet, yew, or fencing of wood, metal, or native stone. A five or ten mile broken string of them, colorful as it may be, can become monotonous and somehow a bit depressing.
     And so can several other features of the solid, dependable life the Englishman seems ever anxious to sustain. Queues form everywhere as a sort of spontaneous mass reflex. Imperatives adorn the walls of shops, restaurants, and hotels, and frown down from street signs and bus ceilings. On the Midland Red Line this morning, for example, I noted these signs: "The passenger is reminded that he must present his ticket for inspection." "Place used tickets in this slot." "Do not stand near this platform whilst the bus is in motion." "Ring the bell once only to signal the operator of the vehicle." In the storage tunnel of the Abbey I have frequently seen on the sides of used cardboard cartons the warning that "This tray will be charged at 2s. unless returned."
     And the Abbey instruction booklet, prepared by the English staff here, consists of eight pages of statements reason¬ably well represented by these few: "Faculty and Students should not bathe in either of the Lakes...The College Authorities reserve the right to enter any room at any time for purposes of instruction...Hand in your key to the College Office...Keys not returned will be charged at 2L each...Students must use the Garden Room Entrance to the College until 6 p.m. and after that time the Main Hall Entrance until 11 p.m...Students are reminded that all accidents, sickness or injuries, however, minor, must be reported...Do not replace an electric bulb [most of them are 40 watt] with a more powerful one...Throwing water, snow or any other substance into, from within or towards the College buildings, is forbidden...Articles of food must be kept in glass, plastic or metal containers...Guests to meals and other resident guests must pay in advance...If you have a Radio Receiver you should obtain a license, price 25/ d., from the General Post Office..."
     Admittedly such regulations have a peculiar justification in this ancient house, but they seem pretty much of a piece with the rules, written and unwritten, which guide the natives outside these walls. It all seems part of the system which multiplies the gardens; dictates a potted plant in back of a thousand windows in succession; and makes an instant reflex of "Sorry," “`kyou," and "Please." The same impulse produces little name placards over the doorways of shabby row houses identified as "Ivydene" or "Close Cottage" in imitation of the namings of the grander hold¬ings and estates on the fringes of towns.
  :   One sees the system at work in the supermarkets, where each customer does his own bagging of his purchases. He sees it in first class railway cars in which passenger after passenger will back off from a "Reserved" card on a seat which has already been empty for half an hour and obviously will not be claimed by its purchaser.
     Like the gardens, these other evidences of some prevalent power supported by an almost universal solicitude for it can, I think, charm an American and make him feel envious, but they can also make him strangely melancholy and full of longing for the scrap and scuffle, the variegated confusion, even the reassuring—if shocking—wastefulness of his land's ways. He feels something like hunger, for instance, for big, strong Kraft paper bags instead of the flimsy ones he must bear so responsibly here, for books of match¬es scattered freely about (one pays 3d. for one of them to an English tobacconist) for free delivery service, for 3 hour dry¬cleaning facilities catering to his procrastination and slipshod wardrobe habits.
     He also finds himself longing for American slickness of decor, even if plasticized, in places of business as he views the 1930-ish appointments of a provincial English bank, the tawdry and tasteless jumble of clashing designs and colors in a Banbury fabric shop, the rummage sale disorder of an ironmonger's. And as he does so, he is reminded that the "the system" is not so all-pervading as it might seem, that he really has no right at all for thinking of the English as hive bound and wondering how in God's name they make love to each other or write wild and wonderful literature.
     He remembers the other half of the game that the system really is, the abandoned and crazy part of it. This part permits the fearfully sound, over disciplined, and frostily sensible Englishman to carry about coins which will buy nothing at all, to quote prices in a unit of currency that does not exist, to elect twice as many MPs as can be seated at any one time, and to cling stubbornly to currency arrangements and driving habits seen as quaintly perverse by most of the rest of the world.
     That, at least, is the way the whole matter seems to me right now, new as I am to Britain. But then, I have a special reason for being mindful of something close to violence which lies beneath the Englishman's veneer of conformity and steadiness. I have just visited a Banbury barber who wielded his scissors as if he were in the throes of an epileptic seizure. I can think of
few worse introductions to England. I commented on the event in these terms in a letter I sent to the States yesterday:
     "My most destructive experience...has been my visit to an English barber shop. The U.S. customs booklets should include clear warnings about the danger of such foreign adventuring. It is physically and psychologically traumatizing and produces marrings which, unquestionably, are irremediable. I looked in the rear view mirror when I wakened from the anesthesia with which the surgery had been attended and promptly blacked out again.
     I have been trying, ever since I was brought home to convalesce, to decide just that style of do I received. The young sheep shearer who had at me assured me that he would give me an `American cut,' but the term would suit only if, as I now believe, he was speaking out of a violent prejudice against my native land. Olivier's Henry V or Behan's Borstal Boy appears to me a more pertinent possibility. I have seen only one haircut like it in my life. That one was on the head of Bruce Cabot when he portrayed a villainous Iroquois in The Last of the Mohicans years and years ago. His appearance, a cinema shocker in its day, led, I believe, to the founding of the Hays Office and quick passage of the Sullivan Act.
     The shop in which I was actionably assaulted was `Christo's,' pronounced just like the first part of Christopher. For me, though, the i will henceforth and ever after be long, and the t will be separated by a hyphen from the o, which will be followed by a bold exclamation mark, not an apostrophe and an s.
     I had Patty take a close up photograph of the back of my head while it was still smoking hot from the drawer's knife. You shall have a good view of it—the picture only, that is, I hope—when we get home and start settling some old scores with our showings of slides."

Note 1992: Rereading this entry in February, 1992, just after having read page 27 of Lionel Tiger's The Pursuit of Pleasure (Boston, 1992), I am moved to add another little bit of apparent incongruity to my earlier account of English rigidity and austerity: Tiger says, drawing upon The Economist for August 5, 1989 (p. 58) that "In Great Britain one-third more money is spent on chocolate each year than on bread!"
     At almost the same time that I read Tiger, I was reading Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (New York, 1986). It, too, included a passage I was reminded of as I looked back at this 1966 entry.
     The passage, like the book as a whole, focuses upon Harriet Vane, Sayers' protagonist here. Vane has, reluctantly, gone back to her undergraduate college, Shrewsbury, for a reunion. Her reunion quarters are the dormitory room of an undergraduate, temporarily not in residence. Having settled in, she decides to bathe, for "Shrewsbury's hot-water system had always been one of its most admirable minor efficiencies." She looks about her as she hunts for the bath: "She had forgotten exactly where the bathrooms were on this floor, but surely they were round here to the left. A pantry, two pantries, with notices on the doors: NO WASHING-UP TO BE DONE AFTER 11 P.M.; three lavatories, with noticies on the doors: KINDLY EXTINGUISH THE LIGHT WHEN LEAVING; yes, here she was--four bathrooms, with notices on the doors: NO BATHS TO BE TAKEN AFTER 11 P.M., and, underneath, an exasperated addendum to each: IF STUDENTS PERSIST IN TAKING BATHS AFTER 11 P.M. THE BATHROOMS WILL BE LOCKED AT 10:30 P.M. Some CONSIDERATION FOTR OTHERS IS NECESSARY IN COMMUNITY LIFE. Signed: L. MARTIN, DEAN.
     Harriet selected the largest bathroom. It contained a notice: REGULATIONS IN CASE OF FIRE, and a card printed in large capitals: THE SUPPLY OF HOT WATER IS LIMITED. PLEASE AVOID UNDUE WASTE. With a familiar sensation of being under authority, Harriet pushed down the waste-plug and turned on the tap. The water was boiling, though the bath badly [p. 6] needed a new coat of enamel and the cork mat had seen better days." [p. 7]
     All those fussy rules brought back vividly for me the frequent misgivings I felt in the presence of England's many minatory public messages and instructions. In Sayers' context, however, they also reminded me of one of the happier consequences of England's accepting, with Harriet Vane, the "familiar" and, I think Englishmen often think, comforting "sensation of being under authority": an attention to details and a willingness to live by high standards of correctness, of which Sayers' writing in Gaudy Night is a good example. It may be one of the best-written of all English mysteries--at least as far as the sound and shape of its words are concerned.
     Here, to cite the first of a very few examples, is Sayers' treatment of Harriet's reminiscing about her days at Shrewsbury: "She saw a stone quadrangle...in a style neither new nor old, but stretching out reconciling hands to past and present. Folded within its walls lay a trim grass plot, with flower-beds splashed at the angles, and surrounded by a wide stone plinth..." [p. 1] Here, Harriet rummages through "an ancient trunk" looking for her academic gown which she will take with her to the reunion: "She burrowed to the bottom of the pile and dragged a thick, black bundle out into the dusty sunlight. The gown, worn only once at the taking of her M.A. degree, had suffered nothing from its long seclusion: the stiff folds shook loose with hardly a crease. The crimson silk of the hood gleamed bravely. Only the flat cap showed a little touch of the moth's tooth. As she beat the loose fluff from it, a tortoise-shell butterfly, disturbed from its hibernation beneath the flap of the trunk-lid, fluttered out into the brightness of the window, where it was caught and held by a cobweb." [p. 4]
     And here are several terms and phrases chosen more or less at random from other early pages of the novel: "Dr. Margaret Baring [a warden of Shrewsbury]...could soothe with tact the wounded breasts of crusty and affronted male dons. ... [p. 10] The procession came into sight...moving with the slovenly dignity characteristic of university functions in England. [p. 11]