How To Be An Alien

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, businessmen, 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 even worthy of his contempt); he looks down upon his mother, because she has a business mind, his wife, because she comes from a non-professional family, his brother, because although he is a professional officer he does not serve with the Guards, Hussars, or at least a county regiment. He adores and admires his seven-years old son, because the shape of his nose resembles his own.

If naturalised, 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 Dostoevsky should be replaced with 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, certain caution is advisable. I know a naturalised 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.”