P's and Q's

When Mr. Los Angeles and I were first married, we would waft into the kitchen of a morn, borne on the wings of love, while turtle doves twittered in the eaves and all was right with the world.

Photo by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I would tenderly inquire of my beloved.

Mr. Los Angeles would beam at me in delight.

“Sure!” he would reply.

“Then bloody well fix it yourself!” I would snarl furiously and storm out of the room, leaving the turtle doves silenced and Mr. Los Angeles scratching his head in manly confusion.

It was Mr. Los Angeles who, after a few rounds of such an exchange, at last summoned me from my sulking chair.

“I’ve figured out what’s been happening here,” he said. “In Britain, if you offer another adult a cup of coffee, they’ll say ‘Yes, please.’ Here in America, it’s only little kids who say that, adults say ‘Sure.’ I’m not going to start saying ‘Yes, please,’ because I’m not a little kid. But it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the offer, because I always do.”

The turtle doves resumed their song and all was once again right in the Los Angeles kitchen.

There is a perception in some quarters that British people are by nature more courteous than are Americans. This is, to put it politely, hogwash. Obviously, there are polite people and impolite people in both cultures; but the British cultural tic of uttering the words “please” and “thank you” at times when Americans don’t, has somehow translated itself into the notion that British people are more polite in the grand scheme of things, which is by no means necessarily the case.

This stereotype might be colored by the fact that Americans are, on the whole, more direct than the British. If the American sitting next to you at a dinner party wants to know what you do for a living, they will ask you. If the Brit is curious about the same thing, they will ask whether you’ve traveled far to be there; to which you will reply that it wasn’t a great distance, but that the traffic had slowed the journey somewhat; which the Brit will counter by remarking that if the traffic is bad at this time of the evening, it’s even worse during rush hour; to which you will respond that, luckily for you, you’re usually able to avoid the rush hour because you work from home; to which the Brit will return that since Covid, there have been many more employers who are willing to let their employees do this; with which you will agree that so you have heard but, as it happens, it doesn’t affect you personally because you’re self-employed; at which the Brit will muse that there are a number of interesting ways to be self-employed, in both the artistic and the commercial fields; by the time you’ve been shepherded into volunteering your exact job description, the evening is drawing to a close and you’ve infuriatingly missed the piece of gossip that drew such scandalized gasps at the other end of the table and that everyone now refuses to repeat.

Is it politeness to subject your companion to such time and effort when a direct question would have uncovered the same information in seconds flat? Judging by the typical British response to such an inquiry of an offended intake of breath, followed by the icily stilettoed preface of “Well! Since you ask …” the Brits seem to think so.

Of course, genuine politeness consists of neither more nor less than making the other person feel at ease, an art in the exact opposite of which few people are more skilled than the occasional Brit who has put their mind to it; unfortunately, this seems particularly prevalent where it concerns the continuing British obsession of their class system. I was once telephoned at my home by a British photographer with whom I had been commissioned to work on a magazine article. I was out when he called and so he left a message with my youngest brother, who was visiting me at the time, and who, for reasons best known to my youngest brother, was choosing to present himself to society as a loveable cockney sparrer of a diamond geezer. After Bert the Sweep had transmitted the message to me, I called the photographer and introduced myself as his new colleague, to whose brother he had spoken earlier that afternoon.

“Well, now,” was the man’s greeting to me. “You’ve come up in the world, haven’t you?”

I cannot imagine any American’s even being capable of forming such a conclusion based on a few words spoken by a stranger over the telephone; let alone thinking it acceptable to speak it aloud. To my shame, I failed to repress the retort that it was my brother, not I, who had gone to Eton, a description which I imagine might have somewhat surprised the teaching staff of Finchley Catholic High School, London N12; but the photographer treated me with noticeably increased respect from then on, for which he should have been even more ashamed of himself.

My late and sainted mother, the granddaughter of a dirt-poor Irish immigrant on one side and a Liverpool policeman on the other, had the nerve to be something of a snob herself – her father had made some money, now long scattered to the winds, and as a girl she had attended the sort of upper-class convent where, she used to joke ruefully, she had been taught little but how to address a bishop and how to eat ice cream with a fork. She had also been taught that the only socially acceptable way to add salt to one’s food was to pour a heap onto the side of the plate and dip each individual forkful into it, in contrast to the hopelessly déclassée habit of her state-educated husband and children of sprinkling it over the top of the whole dish.

My mother often disapproved of the social habits of her husband and children; in fact, she disapproved of the social habits of most people she knew, with the shining exception of her adored eldest brother, my Uncle Tony, who had been educated at Ampleforth (posh), gone on to become a Jesuit (impressively posh), and now divided his time between Farm Street church in Mayfair (dead posh) and the Collegio Internazionale del Gesù in Rome (all but lost in the lofty mists of high altitude Catholic Poshtopia.) Uncle Tony, in my mother’s eyes, was The Business.

One day Uncle Tony, pith helmet tucked under his arm and phrase book of North Londonese clasped helpfully to hand, made his way to the wilds of Palmers Green to dine with us. When my mother passed him his plate of food, he tasted it, nodded approvingly, then picked up the salt shaker with his large and aristocratic hand and sprinkled the salt on top.

We children were transfixed. Our gazes flew from our posh uncle, who hung out with Honourables in London and contesse in Rome, to our formerly posh mother, who now went shopping at Sainsbury’s every day but Sunday. The expression on my mother’s face was a veritable Jackson Pollock of shock.

Uncle Tony was not a man to mince his words.

“What?” he boomed dismissively. “You don’t hold with that Victorian nonsense of putting the salt on the side of the plate, do you? Nonsense!”

It was possibly the sole occasion during my childhood on which I saw my mother deprived of speech.

Sad to say, my mother had died some years before Mr. Los Angeles appeared in my life. Try as I might, I can’t picture the two as boon companions; but he and Uncle Tony became very good friends indeed.