How to be a Brit by George Mikes Read Free Book Online

of streets
of exactly the same name in different districts. If you have about twenty
Princes Squares and Warwick Avenues in the town, the muddle — you may claim
without immodesty — will be complete.
    6. Street names should be
painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards
carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down
and inside out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe in your bank, otherwise
they may give people some indication about the names of the streets.
    7. In order to break down
the foreigner’s last vestige of resistance and shatter his morale, one further
trick is advisable: Introduce the system of squares — real squares, I mean —
which run into four streets like this:
     

     
    With this simple device it
is possible to build a street of which the two sides have different names.
     
    P.S. — I have been told that my
above-described theory is all wrong and is only due to my Central European
conceit, because the English do not care for the opinion of foreigners. In
every other country, it has been explained, people just build streets and towns
following their own common sense. England is the only country of the world
where there is a Ministry of Town and Country Planning. That is the real reason
for the muddle.

CIVIL SERVANT
     
    There is a world of
difference between the English Civil Servant and the continental.
    On the Continent (not
speaking now of the Scandinavian countries), Civil Servants assume a certain
military air. They consider themselves little generals; they use delaying
tactics; they cannot withdraw armies, so they withdraw permissions; they
thunder like cannons and their speech is like machine-gun fire; they cannot
lose battles, they lose documents instead. They consider that the sole aim of
human society is to give jobs to Civil Servants. A few wicked individuals,
however (contemptible little groups of people who are not Civil Servants),
conspire against them, come to them with various requests, complaints,
problems, etc., with the sole purpose of making a nuisance of themselves. These
people get the reception they deserve. They are kept waiting in cold and dirty
ante-chambers (some of them clean these rooms occasionally, but they are hired
commissionaires whose duty it is to re-dirty these rooms every morning); they
have to stand, often at attention, whilst they are spoken to; they are always
shouted at in a rude manner and their requests are turned down with malicious
pleasure. Sometimes — this is a popular cat and mouse game — they are sent to
another office on the fifth floor, from there they are directed to a third
office in the basement, where they are told that they should not have come
there at all and sent back to the original office. In that office they are
thoroughly told off in acrimonious language and dispatched to the fifth floor
once again, from there to the basement and the procedure goes on endlessly
until the poor fellows either get tired of the whole business and give up in
despair or become raving lunatics and go to an asylum asking for admittance. If
the latter case occurs they are told in the reception office that they have
come to the wrong place, they should go to another office on the fifth floor,
from which they are sent down to the basement, etc., etc., until they give up
being lunatics.
    (If you want to catch me
out and ask me who are then the people who fill the continental lunatic
asylums, I can give you the explanation: they are all Civil Servants who know
the ways and means of dealing with officials and succeed in getting in
somehow.)

    If a former continental
Civil Servant thought that this martial behaviour would be accepted by the
British public he would be badly mistaken. The English Civil Servant considers
himself no soldier but a glorified businessman. He is smooth and courteous; he
smiles in a superior way; he is agreeable and obliging.
    If so — you may ask — how
can he achieve the