A Matter of Courtesy

There are probably – in these days, now that slavery is mainly a thing of the past – only one group of people to whom a man or woman can be as rude as they like. These are one’s intimate relatives.

A boss who calls his secretary a slut will have to find another secretary; but a man who calls his wife by that name is unlikely to have an immediate separation on his hands. A woman who calls her grocer a cheat will not be served again in that store; but if she does it to her husband, the odds are that the worst she will have to put up with will be a three-days’ silence.

Courtesy is a delicate Christian virtue closely allied to charity. If it does not begin in the home, it is unlikely to be practised wholeheartedly in public life. I have heard it said that our young people are growing up with loutishly and unwomanly habits of discourtesy. Not all of them; but some of them at least. I suggest that the responsibility does not lie primarily with them. If parents, despite temptations to a contrary habit, were in fact heroically courteous to their children, it is my opinion that the thing might catch on.

I am sitting in a room with my good friend Mrs Grouch, balancing a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of sponge cake in the other. Mrs Grouch makes an excellent sponge cake. We are holding a rather one-sided discussion about the faults of modern youth.

‘You can say what you like,’ exclaims Mrs Grouch – I have in fact said nothing in the past twenty minutes – ‘but they’re becoming quite impossible. Take my daughter Anne. She’s seventeen. She’s just started at university. And she dresses like a hobo. And rudeness! You wouldn’t believe how rude she is – oh, is that you, Anne? I was just saying – ’.

‘I heard you, Mother.’

The girl has an oval face and long hair that hangs down to her shoulders. She is wearing the garb of poverty favoured by Mao Tse-tung and many of our teenagers, both male and female – a suit of blue overalls, somewhat faded but reasonably clean. In my opinion this uniform is quite becoming, though it has something of a clinical or Spartan appearance.

‘Well, Mr Baxter, what do you think of it? I tell Anne it makes her look like a mechanic in a garage.’

Lacking heroism, I say feebly that I am no judge of women’s fashions.

‘Fashion? It’s no fashion at all. It could have been picked up at the rubbish dump.’

‘Barney likes it, Mother.’

‘I’ve told you not to see Barney.’

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‘I was only – ’.

‘Don’t interrupt me, Anne. I wish you’d learn a few manners. Barney Cohen has got three things wrong with him – he’s a drop-out, he’s Jewish, and he probably – ’.

‘Our Lord was a Jew.’

‘Don’t be absurd. That’s quite a different matter. Our Lord didn’t go round looking like a tramp. And you know quite well he’s been in trouble with the police.’

‘That was politics. Barney – ’.

‘If he had any sense he’d get a job and not spend his time sitting on the steps of embassies. You only have to look at him, Anne – ’.

‘You don’t know him! You don’t know him! You’re always blaming people for being what they aren’t or for doing what they haven’t done!’

‘Don’t speak to me like that, I won’t stand for it.’

The girl goes out of the room and slams the door. Mrs Grouch explains to me that her daughter has been a continual source of anxiety to her since the day she left the convent school. Her varsity friends are all highly unsuitable. She dresses shabbily. She has begun to show an aversion to going with the family to Mass. Mrs Grouch feels that the young people are going off their heads. ‘Anne was such a lovely girl,’ she says wistfully. ‘Sister Xavier always said how neat and well-mannered she was. But you see her, Mr Baxter. You heard the way she spoke to me!’

I could, of course, suggest that Mrs Grouch should first apologise to her daughter and then impose a penance of twelve hours’ silence on herself. But I like her sponge cake and have no wish to be regarded as an enemy.

If she chooses to alienate her daughter with a torrent of carping criticism – well, she is queen of her own house, and it’s her business what she does there. I know that the same kind of circus is going on in every second home in the country.

The parents, particularly the mothers, have never learned to discipline their tongues; they are incapable of accepting the fact that their children have become young adults who require a measure of independence in their style of dress, their social activities and their choice of friends; and underneath the tirade there is no doubt a genuine anxious love which the daughter obscurely recognises.

I am concerned, however, that the children should remain in the Church. Parents are in a sense God-bearers to their offspring. A prudish parent can easily convey the unconscious impression that God is a prude; an indifferent parent, that God is indifferent; a stupid parent; that God is stupid; a violently anxious parent, that God is an executioner waiting with an axe. The responsibility is extreme.

I am myself a parent and well aware of certain shortcomings. Perhaps my children unconsciously regard God as an opinionated individual with an page 159 excessive liking for White Horse whisky. A loving and mainly silent parent might represent Him most justly.

A defective theology absorbed in the nursery years can to some extent be straightened out in the teens. But this requires great tolerance and some good rock-bottom communication from the young adult to the parent as well as from the parent to the young adult.

Courtesy is necessary for this kind of communication; one has to regard the younger person as a person, with legitimate needs and wishes and idiosyncrasies of his or her own. Unfortunately at least half of us older people are constitutionally incapable of such an attitude of respect. If our children remain with the Church, it will be the Lord’s doing and theirs, not our own.

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