Evening, All

England and America are different—we know that. We know about their royal family and their parliamentary system, their passion for what the world calls football and our relative indifference to it, their socialized medicine and our dread of it, their Marmite and our peanut butter, the different words they use for things we have in common, like pants or braces. But sometimes we have the same word for things which are very different—also like pants and braces. One of these, I discovered when I lived in England, is Bingo. To share an evening of English Bingo is to learn something about history and class and much more about linguistic inventiveness.

Twenty-five years ago my family lived in Chester, in the northwest of England. One wet November night I took my two oldest daughters to a working class suburb called Blacon for a Bingo evening in the Church Hall, where they each went once a week for Brownies and Girl Guides. The Brownies and Guides sponsored the Bingo night, which was a fundraiser in support of the church, perhaps to restore this unlovely modern, but already rundown, facility. The vicar wandered vaguely in and out from time to time but the real presiding genius of the night was Beryl Dobson, a stout, elderly woman with bad legs but an incredibly high spirit. She was one of the leaders of Mary’s Brownie troop, along with her daughter Leslie. Leslie was called the “Brown Owl”; Beryl was “Snowy Owl,” or “Snowy,” and her granddaughter who sometimes helped out was called “Tawny Owl.”

On this occasion Beryl not only sold the tickets and told the girls—in the no-nonsense, oddly militaristic style characteristic of that approach to British scouting—what to do (mostly serving tea in the interval) but also called the Bingo. Like many other British towns, Chester had a large Bingo palace, the customary converted cinema in the city center, where large groups of committed players compete for significant prizes. From what I have seen on television of these places, the calling is electronic and the atmosphere businesslike. But things are entirely different in more homely venues like the working men’s clubs or church halls, such as Holy Trinity in Blacon.

The players at Holy Trinity Bingo Nights were mostly old, mostly women, and mostly heavy smokers. By the time the calling began the air was blue. Most serious players seemed to play multiple cards at once and they seemed equally able to smoke multiple cigarettes. The younger ones, the Girl Guides and Brownies, tended to clutch stuffed animals for good luck—an interesting trait that I was to see later on when my university students of both sexes brought stuffed animals, gremlins, My Little Ponys, and other talismans to put on their desks while they took their exams. The prizes were modest. It was a fundraiser, after all, and the prizes had been donated. There were toys, boxes of chocolates, and bottles of wine and spirits. (It was hard to imagine an American fundraiser, run by Girl Scouts, where you could win a liter bottle of whisky.) Our Mary got lucky twice and won a box of twenty-five Christmas cards and a large ceramic bank shaped like a bear.

What interested me most, beyond the heterogeneity of ages represented, combined with the homogenous, working class demographic, was the way English Bingo differs from what I remembered back home. As in American Bingo, each player has at least one card and is trying to fill in spaces based on numbers randomly drawn and announced by the caller. But an English Bingo card is a rectangle with three horizontal lines of nine squares each, some of them blank while others have numbers already printed in them. The object is, first, to get a line filled in by having all five numbers called; then, to complete the whole card (fifteen numbers). That’s called a full house, or just house, which explains one of the other names for Bingo: Housey-Housey. The winner is as likely to shout “House!” as “Bingo.” (Another name for the game—used mostly in...