Sophia Money-Coutts Do you have a narrow stoat’s head, thin hands and a small mouth? You must be upper class
A new book on English society by German lawyer Detlev Piltz is a right old hoot
If you’re in the market for a new book, can I recommend a comedy published this week? It’s called England and it’s by a German lawyer called Detlev Piltz. I know, I know, if you’re looking for a laugh on your Easter holidays, a book by a German lawyer might not be the first thing that leaps to mind. But I’m telling you it’s very funny and I barked with mirth throughout.
I’m being a bit mean. The book isn’t technically a comedy; it’s a non-fiction book about class. Mr Piltz first visited Britain in 1961 when he was 16 and the trip seems to have left such an impression that he’s been studying our peculiar ways ever since. Just over 60 years on, he’s distilled his learnings into a 424-page book of near-obsessive detail. Did you know, for example, that it’s upper class to have a cracked wooden loo seat and working class to have a plastic one?
What you must do is buy this book and read it while imagining the voiceover of a German David Attenborough. “Today’s mating places are universities, the workplace, leisure and events venues,” Mr Piltz intones in the faintly Mengele-sounding section headed “cross-class marriages”.
The comedy continues. The physical characteristics of the upper class include “thin hands”, a “narrow stoat’s head”, “hanging eyelids” and a “relatively small mouth” which bring to mind a creature I saw once in The Mummy. The working class look like Mr Potato Head: short necks, short arms and fingers, strong hands, stout legs.
In the “Vocabulary and Language” chapter, we’re told that someone upper class would say “John is attracted to the au pair girl” while someone working class would say “John fancies the au pair” (proper howl at that). In the chapter about cars (well, he is German), Mr Piltz says that you can tell an upper class car because it will be filled with “apple cores, biscuit crumbs, bits of paper, horse and dog-related dirt” which made me suspect that my mother picked him up from the airport.
The upper classes only eat mustard from earthenware pots while the working classes like it from a squeezy bottle, although apparently there is something that everyone does: “virtually all the English watch television at least once a day.”
It’s heaven, unintentionally. Although the book’s subtitle is “An Outsider’s View” so Mr Piltz admits that he’s coming at it from a foreigner’s perspective, and to be fair plenty of the detail is bang on. Posh dogs include labradors and various terriers; not posh dogs include alsatians and boxers (no letters please, I haven’t made these rules). Less accurate observations include the assertion that East Sussex is a smarter county than West Sussex, and that the upper classes won’t have a second drink before dinner. Perhaps he meant breakfast?
Here’s a little secret, though. Worrying about the flowers in your garden (lupins are posh, he says, but pink roses are not), or whether you eat your peas on the concave or convex side of your fork are silly distractions. The secret is not to give a stuff about any of this. Proper toffs are imbued with a confidence that verges on eccentricity, and in fact does still tip over into eccentricity in many cases, and they simply don’t care whether the milk goes in first, or what your doorbell sounds like, or what John’s intentions are regarding the au pair.
It’s actually very middle-class to worry about these things – and deeply liberating when you realise that they don’t matter.