How to be an Alien Read online

  IN THE HOUSE

  You may become an M.P. (Nothing is impossible – this would not be even unprecedented.) You may hear then the following statement by a member of Her Majesty's Government:

  ‘Concerning the two wrecked oil-dumps I can give this information to the House. In the first half of this year the amount of native oil destroyed by the Army, Navy and the R.A.F. – excluding however, the Fleet Air Arm – is one-half as much as three times the amount destroyed during the corresponding months of the previous year, seven and a half times as much as the two-fifths destroyed two years ago and three-quarters as much again as twelve times one-sixth destroyed three years ago.’ (Loud cheers from the Government benches.)

  You jump to your feet and ask this question:

  You: Is the Right Hon. Gentleman aware that people in this country are puzzled and worried by the fact that Charamak was raided and not Ragamak?

  THE RIGHT HON. Member: I have nothing to add to my statement given on 2nd August, 1892.

  EVENING STANDARD

  (Londoner's Diary)

  The most interesting feature of the Charamak raid is the fact that Reggie Tilbury is the fifth son of the Earl of Bayswater. He was an Oxford Blue, a first-class cricketer and quite good at polo. When I talked to his wife (Lady Clarisse, the daughter of Lord Elasson) at Claridges today, she wore a black suit and a tiny black hat with a yellow feather in it. She said: ‘Reggie was always very much interested in warfare.’ Later she remarked: ‘It was clever of him, wasn't it?’

  You may write a letter to the Editor of The Times:

  Sir, – In connection with the Charamak raid I should like to mention as a matter of considerable interest that it was in that little Pacific Island that the distinguished English poet, John Flat, wrote his famous poem ‘The Cod' in 1693. Yours, etc….

  An early interest in warfare

  You may read this answer on the following day.

  Sir, – I am very grateful to Mr… for calling attention to John Flat's poem ‘The Cod.’ May I be allowed to use this opportunity, however, to correct a widespread and in my view very unfortunate error which the great masses of the British people seem to share with your correspondent. ‘The Cod,’ although John Flat started writing it in 1693, was only finished in the early days of January 1694.

  Yours, etc….

  If you are the London correspondent of the American paper

  THE OKLAHOMA SUN

  simply cable this:

  ‘Yanks Conquer Pacific Ocean.’

  IF NATURALIZED

  THE VERB to naturalize clearly proves what the British think of you. Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being. I looked up the word natural (na'tural) in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (p. 251); it says: Of or according to or provided by nature, physically existing, innate, instinctive, normal, not miraculous or spiritual or artificial or conventional…. Note that before you obtain British citizenship, they simply doubt that you are provided by nature.

  According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary the word ‘natural' has a second meaning, too: Half-witted person. This second meaning, however, is irrelevant from the point of view of our present argument.

  If you are tired of not being provided by nature, not being physically existing and being miraculous and

  conventional at the same time, apply for British citizenship. Roughly speaking, there are two possibilities: it will be granted to you, or not.

  In the first case you must recognize and revise your attitude to life. You must pretend that you are everything you are not and you must look down upon everything you are.

  Copy the attitude of an English acquaintance of mine – let us call him Gregory Baker. He, an English solicitor, feels particularly deep contempt for the following classes of people: foreigners, Americans, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen, Jews, workers, clerks, poor people, non-professional men, business men, actors, journalists and literary men, women, solicitors who do not practise in his immediate neighbourhood, solicitors who are hard up and solicitors who are too rich, Socialists, Liberals, Tory-reformers (Communists are not worthy even of his contempt); he looks down upon his mother, because she has a business mind, his wife, because she comes from a non-professional county family, his brother, because although he is a professional officer he does not serve with the Guards, Hussars, or at least with a county regiment. He adores and admires his seven-years old son, because the shape of his nose resembles his own.

  If naturalized, remember these rules:

  1. You must start eating porridge for breakfast and allege that you like it.

  2. Speak English with your former compatriots. Deny that you know any foreign language (including your mother tongue). The knowledge of foreign languages is very un-English. A little French is permissible, but only with an atrocious accent.

  3. Revise your library. Get rid of all foreign writers whether in the original or translated into English. The works of Dostoyevsky should be replaced by a volume on English Birds; the collected works of Proust by a book called ‘Interior Decoration in the Regency Period’; and Pascal's Pensées by the ‘Life and Thoughts of a Scottish Salmon’.

  4. Speaking of your new compatriots, always use the first person plural.

  In this aspect, though, a certain caution is advisable. I know a na'turalized Britisher who, talking to a young man, repeatedly used the phrase ‘We Englishmen.’ The young man looked at him, took his pipe out of his mouth and remarked softly: ‘Sorry, Sir, I'm a Welshman,’ turned his back on him and walked away.

  The same gentleman was listening to a conversation. It was mentioned that the Japanese had claimed to have shot down 22 planes.

  ‘What – ours?’ he asked indignantly.

  His English hostess answered icily:

  ‘No – ours.’

  * When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles – but never England.

  * Please note my extensive knowledge of the American language.

  * While this book was at the printers a correspondence in The Times showed that the English have almost sixty synonyms for ‘street.’ If you add to these the street names which stand alone (Piccadilly, Strand, etc.) and the accepted and frequently used double names (‘Garden Terrace’, ‘Church Street’, ‘Park Road’, etc.) the number of street names reaches or exceeds a hundred. It has been suggested by one correspondent that this clearly proves what wonderful imagination the English have. I believe it proves the contrary. A West End street in London is not called ‘Haymarket' because the playful fancy of Londoners populates the district with romantically clad medieval food dealers, but simply because they have not noticed as yet that the hay trade has considerably declined between Piccadilly and Pall Mall in the last three hundred years.