Living With The English

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30745, 8 May 1965, Page 4

Living With The English

How To Live Like a Lord Without Really Trying. By Shepherd Mead. Macdonald 208 pp.

The awful things we know about Americans, and the still more awful things they know about us are recorded here with wit and humour. Mr Mead is an American who has lived in Weybridge, Surrey, for the last six years. Buckley Brash, his problematical hero, comes to England on business, with a wife and two children; and his problems include housing, education, transport, and the perennial struggle to keep warm in British houses —besides, of course, the social customs and quaint phraseology which have to be understood and respected. The family’s first domicile was an hotel, there the children enormously enjoyed the novelty of ringing bells, getting stuck in the lift, and locking every door in sight, and then losing the key. After casting longing eyes at blocks of council houses, which seemed to them the only mod-

ern buildings suitable for occupation they found themselves directed to real upperclass accommodation. This consisted of the entire groundfloor of a large mansion—described as a “flat.” Here the kitchen (coal stove only) was “a quarter of a mile from the dining-room.” Later on they bought their own house, and took precautions to stop themselves shivering. The author says, quite rightly, that the English climate is not harsh. (This is a myth created by the English themselves) but that, for Americans, their houses are under-heated. Another of Mr Brash’s little trials was having to drive on the wrong side of the road, with the controls in the wrong place and the hazards of cyclists, cows and everlasting bends having to be surmounted on highways of only two carriage-way widths. At the end of the year when he had triumphantly overcome all these difficulties without disaster he found himself obliged to take a drivingtest in order to be given a British licence. The American determination not to be parted from their children for eight months every year led to some difficult problems in their attending day-schools, and the young Brashes, laden with school impedimenta, made three varying journeys to rather distant schools daily by complicated transport arrangements. One of the pithiest of the author’s observations about the curious garments considered suitable for an adolescent female at her seat of learning was that they resembled those of the inmate of “a good Victorian orphanage,” a fact which undoubtedly rendered her “safe” from the hazards of budding womanhood.

The author’s view of the British way of life is so brilliantly expressed and hits so many nails accurately upon their heads that the book, embellished by Anton’s superbly characteristic illustrations, should be a riotous bestseller in England, besides supplying a few hints to the New Zealand reader about to go overseas for the first time.