We are not all ostriches. Many English passengers - the majority, even - are smart enough to realise that other people can in fact hear what you are saying on your mobile, and we do our best to keep our voices down. The oblivious loudmouths are still a minority, but they are a highly noticeable and annoying minority. Part of the problem is that the English will not complain - not directly, to the person making the noise, only quietly to each other, or to colleagues when they get to work, or to their spouse when they get home, or in letters to the newspapers. Our television and radio comedy programmes are full of amusing sketches about the infuriating stupidity of noisy mobile-phone ostriches, and the banality or utter pointlessness of their 'I'm on a train!' conversations. Newspaper columnists are equally witty on the subject.
In typically English fashion, we channel our anger into endless clever jokes and ritual moans, reams of print and hours of airtime, but fail to address the real source of the problem. Not one of us is brave or blunt enough to go up to a mobile-phone ostrich and simply ask him or her to keep it down. The train companies are aware of the issue, and some have designated certain sections of their trains as 'quiet' carriages, where the use of mobile phones is prohibited. Most people observe this rule, but when an occasional rogue ostrich ignores the signs, nobody dares to confront the offender. Even in a designated 'quiet' carriage, the worst an ostrich can expect is a lot of glares and pointed looks.
COURTESY RULES
Although many of the foreign visitors I interviewed complained about English reserve, they all tended to be impressed by our courtesy. This apparent contradiction is accurately expressed by Bill Bryson, who is amazed and somewhat spooked by the 'orderly quiet' of the London Underground: 'All these thousands of people passing on stairs and escalators, stepping on and off crowded trains, sliding off into the darkness with wobbling heads, and never speaking, like characters from Night of the Living Dead.' A few pages later, at another train station, he is full of praise for the courteous behaviour of a large crowd of rugby fans: 'They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped or inadvertently impinged on someone's space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in Britain and how little it is noticed.'
'Negative-politeness' Rules
But our much-maligned reserve and our much-admired courtesy are, it seems to me, two sides of the same coin. In fact, at one level, our reserve is a form of courtesy - the kind of courtesy that the sociolinguists Brown and Levinson call 'negative politeness', meaning that it is concerned with other people's need not to be intruded or imposed upon (as opposed to 'positive politeness', which is concerned with their need for inclusion and social approval). The restraint, cautiousness and contact-avoidance of English public-transport passengers - the stand-offishness that foreigners complain about - are all characteristic features of 'negative politeness'. What looks like unfriendliness is really a kind of consideration: we judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy - so we mind our own business and politely ignore them.
All cultures practise both forms of politeness, but most incline somewhat more towards one than the other. The English are a predominantly 'negative-politeness' culture, while the Americans, for example, tend to favour the more warm, inclusive 'positive-politeness' mode. Although these are crude distinctions, and there are class and other sub-cultural variations in both types of culture, it seems probable that visitors from 'positive-politeness' cultures are more likely to misunderstand and be offended by the 'polite' aloofness of the English than those from cultures that are similar to our own in this respect (according to Brown and Levinson, these 'negative-politeness' cultures include Japan, Madagascar and certain sections of Indian society).
Bumping Experiments and the Reflex-apology Rule
Which brings me to the bumping experiments. I spent several amusing afternoons in busy, crowded public places (train stations, tube stations, bus stations, shopping centres, street corners, etc.) accidentally-on-purpose bumping into people to see if they would say 'sorry'. A number of my informants, both natives and visitors, had cited this 'reflex apology' as a particularly striking example of English courtesy, and I was fairly sure I had experienced it myself - but I felt obliged to do the proper scientific thing and actually test the theory in a field-experiment or two.
My bumping got off to a rather poor start. The first few bumps were technically successful, in that I managed to make them seem convincingly accidental34, but I kept messing up the experiment by blurting out an apology before the other person had a chance to speak. As usual, this turned out to be a test of my own Englishness: I found that I could not bump into someone, however gently, without automatically saying 'sorry'. After several of these false starts, I finally managed to control my knee-jerk apologies by biting my lip - firmly and rather painfully - as I did the bumps. Having perfected the technique, I tried to make my experiments as scientific as possible by bumping into a representative cross-section of the English population, in a representative sample of locations. Somewhat to my surprise, the English lived up to their reputation: about 80 per cent of my victims said 'sorry' when I lurched into them, even though the collisions were quite clearly my fault.
There were some minor variations in the response: I found that older people were slightly more likely to apologize than younger people (late-teenage males were the least apologetic, particularly when in groups), and British Asians seemed to have a somewhat stronger sorry-reflex than British Afro-Caribbeans (possibly a reflection of the negative-politeness tendency in Indian culture - such apologies being a clear example of politeness that is primarily concerned with the avoidance of imposition or intrusion). But these differences were marginaclass="underline" the vast majority of the bumped, of all ages, classes and ethnic origin, apologized when I 'accidentally' jostled them.
These experiments would tell us little or nothing about Englishness if exactly the same results were obtained in other countries, so by way of 'controls' I diligently bumped into as many people as I could in France, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Poland and Lebanon. Recognising that this would not constitute a representative international sample, I also bumped into tourists of different nationalities (American, German, Japanese, Spanish, Australian, Scandinavian) at tourist-trap locations in London and Oxford. Only the Japanese (surprise, surprise) seemed to have anything even approaching the English sorry-reflex, and they were frustratingly difficult to experiment on, as they appeared to be remarkably adept at sidestepping my attempted collisions35. This is not to say that my bumpees of other nationalities were discourteous or unpleasant - most just said 'Careful!' or 'Watch out!' (or the equivalent in their own language), and many reacted in a positively friendly manner, putting out a helpful arm to steady me, sometimes even solicitously checking that I was unhurt before moving on - but the automatic 'sorry' did seem to be a peculiarly English response.
George Orwell said that the English are 'inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes and use probably the foulest language in the world', but he nevertheless concluded, without contradiction, that 'The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic'. As evidence of this, along with the good-temperedness of bus-conductors and unarmed policemen, he cited the fact that 'In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement'. Quite so, and if your shove appears to be genuinely accidental, they might even apologize as they stumble into the gutter.