Need a seat? Try asking for it

IT WASN'T the rush hour, but that didn't mean that the bus the other morning wasn't crowded. One mother was sharing a seat with her two daughters, who were aged around 10 and 12. Other young people held on to their seats, while a white-haired woman of about 70 clung grimly on to a rail, thrown about as one expects on buses.

When my friend and I, who had been standing for our journey, got off the bus, we both started bitching about the same thing. Why did nobody offer their seat to the old dear? Why did none of the parents suggest to their children that they should give up their seats, as our parents would have done when we were children?

We talked briefly about the nightmare of travelling when pregnant, when Eileen remembers the time when a man using crutches got into her crowded train carriage. He was trying to hold on to a hanging strap and at the same time attempting to keep his crutches under control, all while standing on one leg. She sat watching him, feeling terribly sorry for him. After a few more stops, the man hopped off the train. Suddenly, she realised with a shock that she'd had it in her power to help him out all along. While her sympathy for his predicament was genuine, it simply hadn't occurred to her that she should give up her seat to him.

Later in the day, back home, I switch on the news. A harried-looking suit from Thameslink is being cross-questioned by an aggressive interviewer. "Are these signs prominent enough?" she questions. "Shouldn't they be larger?" The man from the train company assures her that the signs are large and prominent. Then, in a moment of inspiration, the interviewer delivers her killer question. "But on a crowded train, won't these signs be obscured by standing passengers? Surely they can't be seen at just the time when they are most needed?"

This particular story, I discover later, centred on a new mother, Katharine Kent, who had complained to Thameslink twice while she was pregnant about the lack of seats on the service she needed to use while travelling to work. She had passed out twice while suffering from pregnancy-related diabetes and no one had offered her a seat. Thameslink had written back advising her to stagger her journey to avoid the rush hour. But since she had to be at work at 8.30am, and needed to keep working until she was 36 weeks pregnant in order to retain her contract, this was not an option.

Backed by maternity campaigners, Kent believes that Thameslink should "make an effort to make people more willing to give up their seats". Thameslink has turned down proposals for an awareness campaign to help pregnant commuters, saying that "it would be inappropriate to support one particular group who require seating". On this occasion, in their insensitive, officious way, the ghastly Thameslink's management is right. Or at least, not wrong.

This situation says two things about our society generally. One is the obvious observation that ideas of courtesy are no longer a set of rules that we share in common. The other is that more and more we want bodies or corporations to take over responsibility for pleasantries in life that we should be able to sort out through common compact amongst ourselves.

For, of course, once upon a time it was all so much more simple. Women married, became pregnant, had children, gave up their work, freedom, their independence, their sense of self and in return they had doors held open for them, hats raised to them, seats given up to them, and got to have first shout if they happened to be in a ship that was sinking. Not much of a trade-off, we eventually realised, and quite right too.

But as has happened so often in the fight for equality, instead of a redistribution of common courtesy which meant women took on the mantle as well, what happened instead was that it largely dropped off the agenda altogether. While the reason for some of this lies in male resentment - if pregnant women can go to work while pregnant, goes the logic, why is it that they can't stand up on their way there - the reason for much of it lies in male and female confusion.

For many years now men have been told that "elaborate" courtesy towards women is patronising. So often they feel timid about a service as old- fashioned as seat-offering for fear of scorn and rebuff. As for women giving up their seats to other women, well, it just isn't an equation we've taken on board as part of our emancipation. Likewise, parents are unsure about the political correctness of bringing up children with old- fashioned ideas about courtesy in the age of gender equality.

Other problems of misunderstanding come up around this subject too. When I was around 18 I offered my seat to a woman in her fifties who seemed uncomfortable standing up on a bus in high heels. She refused my offer in a hurt-and-insulted manner, mistaking respect for elders for respect for the elderly, and obviously regarding the gesture as confirmation that she was no spring chicken. In a society where independence is worshipped, the kindness of strangers can be misread as the interference of do-gooding busybodies.

We are simply no longer sure of the rules, so through confusion and neglect we have tacitly scrapped them. While this hasn't necessarily happened because we are just becoming nastier and less concerned about others, there is an extent to which the absence of set rules adhered to by all results in a trickledown effect of galloping aggressive rudeness.

At its extreme this lack of courtesy has resulted in appallingly ignorant behaviour - such as in the case of the man who wouldn't switch off his mobile phone on a flight - which ends up in court. Air rage, road rage, workplace bullying, and all sorts of other manifestations of our stressed out modern society stem from a lack of common courtesy - which is nothing more than a broad framework which ensures that we can all rub along together more efficiently - and end up as widespread trends. This again shores up our wish for rudeness to become a fiscal matter, or something that it is the duty not of citizens but, say, railway operators to sort out.

The general trend in such matters is to lay the blame not on parents, but teachers. Whenever a common problem among the population is identified, someone comes up with a plan for the teaching of such things to fall into the remit of the national curriculum. There is something of this in the idea of "citizenship" teaching, and something more of it in America's deep south where children who fail to address their teachers as "sir' or "ma'am" have recently been told that under the new School Respect Law, they will be committing a crime.

Meanwhile in Britain, the Campaign For Courtesy, formerly known as the Polite Society, has identified schools as one of the most likely places to get their message across. The organisation, has this year organised an essay competition offering prizes worth pounds 1,000 for the pupils aged 11-16 who write the best 250-word essays on the subject "Why good manners matter".

The results of the competition will be announced on the first Friday in October, which for some years now has been designated by the campaign to be "National Courtesy Day". This year's theme, I'm told by the group's founder, The Reverend Ian Gregory, is "Courtesy's cool". While this sounds terribly trendy vicar, it does hit the nail on the head.

It has become simply uncool to either expect or offer courtesy. People don't even think about it any more. My advice to Katharine Kent, the Maternity Alliance, the injured, the elderly and to anyone who feels they need it, is not to stand in quiet resentment, then write to some authority and demand that something is done, but simply to ask (politely) for help. Given the nudge that nowadays they need, most people are only too happy to oblige. And once they've played the Good Samaritan once, they'll feel good about themselves and perhaps not wait to be prompted the next time. Courtesy is just a habit we've got out of. But it's a habit we can easily get back into.