"There'll always be an England..." as the song goes.   A popular War-inspired patriotic song, "There'll Always Be an England," released in 1939, about the same time as George Mikes's How to Be a Brit. Although with slightly different sentiment. 
  
Its famous lines include: 
  
"There'll always be an England 
While there's a country lane, 
Wherever there's a cottage small 
Beside a field of grain. 
There'll always be an England 
While there's a busy street, 
Wherever there's a turning wheel, 
A million marching feet..." This 'blessed plot' persists in part because it attracts and seduces into staying the most talented, broad-minded, and trenchantly observant people worldwide. People like the Hungarian-born Gyorge "George" Mikes (February 15, 1912 – August 30, 1987), who was sent to England as a journalist on assignment and liked it so much he stayed.

In 1946, between learning the Queen's English and mastering a queue of one, Mikes wrote an unexpected classic, How To Be an Alien, which was later adapted and reissued as How to Be a Brit.

I believe, without undue modesty, that I have certain qualifications to write on 'how to be an alien.' I am an alien myself. What is more, I have been an alien all my life. Only during the first twenty-six years of my life, I was not aware of this plain fact. I was living in my own country, a country full of aliens, and I noticed nothing particular or irregular about myself; then I came to England, and you can imagine my painful surprise.

Mikes wrote his guide to becoming British, knowing, "You can be British, but you'll never be English." The guide was intelligent, thoughtful, all-encompassing, but by Mikes's admission, not intended to be humorous.

But it was humorous. The kind of head-nodding humor rooted in squeamish truths. The type of humor the British embrace. Mikes's observations vary from class structure, the British view of foreigners, their love of gardening, wealth, snobbery, and generally inexplicable habits:

Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down or insight out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe in your bank, otherwise they may give people some indication about the names of the streets.   utable Massachusetts Senator, Ted Kennedy perhaps, once noted that if one cannot read Boston street signs (which are far, far worse than England's), then perhaps one doesn't belong in the Boston.

Get thee behind me. "Queueing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race," writes Mikes. "The English are rather shy about it, and deny that they adore it." Illustration by Nicholas Bentley.

Mikes's writing excels in observing the hypocritical British investment in "getting along with one another" in micro-interactions while ignoring this value entirely at the macro-geopolitical level.

In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state that in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion.

The need to be superficially calm and polite (and tend to understatement) leads to the preponderance of discussion about the weather, a rare connective tissue of British society.   As an expat American living in Britain, my main criticism of the general British society, especially when compared to my native America, is that while the British are extremely respectful and polite, they often lack warmth. Warmth being, perhaps, too emotive. The downside of American warmth, while lovely, is it can also turn into aggression, anger. 
  
I prefer emotional distance, having had my fill of American tempers, but everyone has their own preference. Many of my Eastern-European friends who live in London have made similar assessments.

This is the most important topic in the land. Do not be misled by memories of your youth when, on the Continent, wanting to describe someone as exceptionally dull, you remarked: 'He is a type who would discuss the weather with you.' In England this is an ever-interesting, even thrilling topic, and you must be good at discussing the weather.

Good afternoon! Illustration by Nicolas Bentley.

Of course, this must be—a modern convention, perhaps a relic of Victorian uptightness. I cannot fathom Henry VIII enduring long chats about the ailments of the sky as a pretext for social engagement.

The core of How to Be a Brit is this: what we must remember is Britain was, at some point, possibly recently, someone else's dreaded future. And to decay, you must have risen to great heights. (And "in decay" is a wonderful place to be.)

Ups and downs. Illustration by Nicolas Bentley.

"There will always be an England... Indeed, but what England is, to the likes of Mikes (and the nostalgic memoirs of Laurie Lee, Penelope Lively, and Stephen Fry is not what it will be. This tension, this divide between the imagined past and the imagined future, has become more apparent in recent years and even fractious.   People longing to hold on to a memory of what was hold fast against what might be. I don't blame anyone for this, and this isn't the place for politics. 
  
But there are more cars honking in London than there used to be. A habit to be found in America and Egypt, I've found from personal experience. That is not a British thing. 
  
What is interesting about Mikes is that despite all this difficulty, he still chose to stay in Britain. As many do (as I have). Is he telling us subtly that "religion, food, politics, race—it matters not. But please, for goodness' sake, learn how to queue? And go quietly on your way?"

Ultimately, How to Be a Brit seizes on the limitations of "being" a Brit. (Which is likely a limitation in any country in the world.)

Study these rules, and imitate the English. There can be only one result: if you don't succeed in imitating them you become ridiculous; if you do, you become even more ridiculous.

The paradoxical nature of any country is the heavy-set rules and customs that make a country what it is, also initiate a barrier between it and its most hopeful immigrants. Is that cruel? It can be. Like most things human, it is utterly complex and susceptible to the best and worst things we are.

Accompany Mikes's delightful, poignant portrait of one of our most critical modern nation-states with Peter Mayle's narrative of making a home in France: the Englishman abroad finds his most British habits buffed and worn under the French way. Or the nostalgic memoirs of Laurie Lee, a man the same age as Mikes who grew up in an idyllic Cotswold village and walked out one day, never returning. Or the less-rosy account of impoverished England from its most famous political dissenter, George Orwell.

Eden indeed. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

You might also enjoy my study of walls and what they are, how they are used, and misused. A bit conceptional but thematically relevant. Britain has many walls (and wall builders). What are walls if not ways we fortify ourselves and things we care about?).