The Regal Rules for Girls (6 page)
When I moved into my UK student dorm room and later into my first grown-up London flat, I had no idea how and where to go about making either of them vaguely livable spaces.
The only way I can describe my London dorm is Orwellian mental institution meets abandoned crack house. (If you don’t believe me, I have photo proof.) With its eerie green lighting, long dirty hallways, and exposed wiring, the place could easily have passed as a film set for a 1950s horror movie. The crazy part is that at the time I thought I was just incredibly unlucky and had simply been allotted the worst dorm in the country. But the longer I’ve lived in England, the more I’ve come to realize that this standard of student living is considered
normal
. A rite of passage, even. (One of my English friends told me how her dorm room was heated with a radiator that only worked if you deposited 10 pence every fifteen minutes.)
And although my dorm room had been furnished with an electric kettle and a heated towel rack (both of which I had lived more than two decades without needing or missing), I had not been provided with a desk of any kind. I was, after all, just a student living in a student residence hall—why would I need one?
So I had to purchase, among many other things, a desk. I also needed to go shopping for things like clothes hangers, sheets, towels, and halogen lamps. And I needed a new radio and a curling iron because both of mine had short-circuited seconds after being exposed to the high-voltage UK electricity. If I had been in America, I would have just driven to Target. However, now that I was in London, I clearly didn’t have a car, and more critically, England has nothing even vaguely similar to Target (much less Bed Bath & Beyond).
So here are the British alternatives:
IKEA
You’re probably already overly familiar with IKEA. They offer great quality, a great selection, and everything is very cheap and very stylish—but you pay for it in the end. You walk into IKEA and are tempted to buy everything in sight—until you get to the warehouse and realize you have to load the heavy items onto your cart by yourself, get them home (on the tube or via a very expensive taxi), and worst of all, put them all together piece by piece with things that you’ve never touched in your life, like hammers and screwdrivers. Instead of using a screwdriver, I tried to use a butter knife, and by the time I had (a) figured out where to buy a hammer and (b) finished hammering that stupid student desk together, I vowed that next time I would pay to have a desk custom made rather than go through the experience ever again. So when shopping at IKEA, take heed: buy only small items (like plants and
posters) that you can carry home, or factor in the cost of a taxi, because IKEA charges a fortune to deliver. Also make sure you have a strong British boy at hand to help you construct any furniture that inevitably will emerge from the box in thirty-two pieces. (That said, it’s probably good to have a strong British boy on hand for a variety reasons—not all IKEA-related…)
Argos
Argos is like a really bad version of Sears. They have a catalogue and they have a weird “store” that you can go to where you point to things (like clock radios and curling irons) in their catalogue and the employees fetch them for you from some mysterious backroom. No browsing at Argos. But it’s cheap, they have most basic items in stock, you can order online, and best of all—they deliver.
John Lewis
John Lewis is a British institution. Everyone
loves
to love John Lewis. They are kind of like a JCPenney with an upscale Target in the basement. And weirdly, they are the only store in the UK that offers a wedding registry service. Most Americans find John Lewis (and their sister store, Peter Jones) to be a bit odd to begin with, but eventually they realize it really is the only affordable UK department store that can be counted on for quality. John Lewis recently launched a great new website
and
they deliver—so no expensive taxis required.
www.johnlewis.com
1
Except when it comes to taking your money; you’ll notice that these transactions usually happen at lightning speed.
2
Prince Harry attended Sandhurst instead of a traditional university. Prince William attended Sandhurst after graduating from St. Andrews—so he essentially has two undergraduate degrees.
3
This is slang for Oxford or Cambridge.
4
Do not get overly excited and tell the immigration officials that you hope to look for a permanent job or they might decide to send you right back to America on the next plane.
5
This is actually disturbingly common. The simple pipe that allows one to mix both hot and cold water so you don’t have to scald yourself every time you wash your hands or face is still very much considered a modern luxury. Double-paned windows are considered equally decadent.
L
ANGUAGE
, M
ANNERS, AND
B
EHAVIOR
(Because you don’t have to marry a lord to act like a lady)
One of my best English friends (let’s call her Hattie) is a girl from a meager yet loving English background. She studied art history at university, landed a job in one of London’s oldest, most respectable auction houses, and now heads up all global marketing for one of the most famous companies in the world. She is good-looking, endearingly kind, incredibly well mannered, and clearly one smart cookie. Over the years, her working-class accent had vanished into something softer and convincingly appropriate for the upper-class clientele she worked with at the auction house, and when I first met her I was convinced she had been educated at one of England’s prestigious girls boarding schools.
One Friday night, Hattie and I were barhopping on the King’s
Road and we met, as we often did on that road, a lovely group of floppy-haired, rosy-cheeked, upper-class English boys. They all wore pink shirts (with sleeves rolled up just below the elbow,
never
above) and gold signet rings bearing their family’s crest. They bought us round after round of gin and tonics, and before the night commenced, one of the boys (let’s call him Edward) had asked Hattie to accompany him to dinner the next evening and to a hunt ball
1
in the countryside the following weekend. She was ecstatic (as I would have been!) and went shopping for a ball gown immediately.
When we met for cocktails the following week, I begged her to tell me every last detail. But as soon as I mentioned the ball, her face fell.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was found out,” she said sadly.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It was all going so well until the ball itself,” she said. “I mean, our dinner the other night was amazing. Then Eddie and I drove out to Berkshire together… I met his sister and some more of his friends. They all seemed to like me.”
“But then what?”
“I slipped.”
“Slipped on what? Did you fall down?”
“No! Nothing like that… It happened at the ball. During the formal dinner. We were talking about Florence and… you know how much I
love
Italy because of the art… and I guess I just wasn’t thinking because I accidentally… I accidentally… said
pasta
the wrong way.”
I stared at her incredulously. “You mean you pronounced it like an Italian instead of an English person?” (Believe it or not, in certain UK circles, there is nothing more uncouth than pronouncing foreign words correctly.
2
)
Hattie nodded. “They all stopped talking and just stared at me. And suddenly they
knew
I wasn’t the person they thought I was. They
knew
that I wasn’t like them. They
knew
I hadn’t grown up like them. The rest of the night was really weird between us and I haven’t heard from Eddie since.”
It was a heartbreaking story. Through the misuse of a single word, Hattie’s working-class roots had been revealed and Edward never called her back. It didn’t matter that she made lots of money and dressed beautifully. It didn’t matter that her manners were impeccable and that she had a career most girls would kill for. Hattie’s linguistic faux pas gave the game away.
People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have been known to marry chorus girls! Some have even married Americans.
—HRH P
RINCE
P
HILIP
, D
UKE OF
E
DINBURGH
The English are delightfully self-effacing, refined, and complex, but due to the class system that is engrained in the psyche of their
culture, if you don’t play by the rules of the game, you can feel ostracized very quickly.
I had been in England less than a month when, through a mutual friend and an immense stroke of luck, I fell in with a dazzling English crowd. Their characters seemed to be taken straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel;
3
they were the
epitom
e of the Bright Young Things; their parties even appeared in the back pages of
Tatler
!
4
And by some cosmic miracle, I (a farm girl from the backwaters of Colorado) was along for the ride.
My new English chums all looked and sounded and acted exactly the same. Same accents (upper-class), same fashion sense (the more faded and worn your clothes appeared, the more money you had), same skin (glowingly and annoyingly clear).
In their young minds, the past reigned superior: They liked
old
houses,
old
furniture,
old
wine,
old
money,
old
families. In fact, I noticed what seemed to be an almost fanatical preoccupation with genealogy. Unlike the American mind-set, which is primarily about what you can one day
become
, for these kids the focus seemed to be much more about what you had
been
.
I realize the very concept of a class system is hard for most Americans to grasp—after all, it’s been drummed into our heads since birth that all people are created equal. But class pervades every single aspect of English life, so if you’re going to immerse yourself in the country, you must be aware of the antediluvian mind-set that you’re dealing with.
While American social divides are primarily about income, the English define themselves by a nonnegotiable set of qualities that have nothing to do with raw cash and everything to do with one’s language, style, and manners. (Apparently there was a time when you could tell a man’s rank, school, and era simply by how he folded his handkerchief.) If you pay close attention, you’ll soon find that vocabulary, pronunciation, accents, etiquette, and clothes mean more than you ever dared to imagine…
I’ll never forget the day I found myself having real conversations with real English people that didn’t involve buying a train ticket or saying thank you for my change. I was overjoyed, but at the same time, I quickly realized how innocent Americans are when it comes to language—how tiny, linguistic nuances in our conversations mean relatively nothing to us—but mean
everything
to the Brits. In a country where status is not determined by pure economics, I cannot overemphasize the importance the English place not only on what you say, but how you say it and with what accent—it is the most vital social signifier in the country.
An English aristocrat who speaks with upper-class pronunciation (clipped and plummy with lengthened vowels) and uses upper-class vocabulary, will
always
be considered and treated as an aristocrat, even if he is bankrupt, in prison, working in a factory, living in a mental institution, or living on welfare.
Conversely, a working-class Brit who has become a self-made billionaire, with private jets, expensive cars, and houses all around the world—will
always
be considered and treated like a member of the lower working class because he speaks with a working-class
accent—no matter how much money he has and continues to make. Even if he changes his accent to something more neutral, one word of working-class terminology will automatically give him away—making it virtually impossible to ever truly shift his standing in the social order.