by JOHN LANCHESTER
In 1982, partway through my first year at Oxford university, my father asked me a question that took me by surprise. He said, “Do you have enough money?”
It took me by surprise partly because it is somehow, in and of itself, a surprising question – not one that people often ask. What’s enough? We don’t ask ourselves that very often. I thought about what he’d asked for a moment and then said, truthfully, “I never think about money.” He laughed and said, “Then you’re rich.”
I remember this conversation so vividly partly because that seemed to me to be a profound truth: the definition of being rich is never thinking about money. But I also remember it because my father never talked about money. This was just about the only time we ever discussed it in a personal way. He could discuss it in the abstract, in terms of general issues or politics, but to talk about the effects of money made him unhappy. The issues it raised went too deep.
What was odd about that was that my father worked for a bank, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, for 30 years until he retired in 1979. That time was spent in Asia, except for a two-year spell in Hamburg where I was born. So Dad was a banker but he couldn’t bear talking about money. That was why the idea of never having to think about money struck him as the very definition of being rich.
A preoccupation with money, and especially with what money meant, was in our family an inherited thing. My father’s father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom. His own father had drunk himself to poverty and death in his thirties, and this left Jack with the belief that making money was the only way of being secure. This conviction propelled him from an early life as a schoolteacher in Yorkshire to study dentistry. He travelled to Hong Kong to find more lucrative work and then, when the colony fell to the Japanese, spent four years in Stanley prison, a Japanese internment camp. When he came out, he worked as a dentist for a bit, then made a living playing the stock market, but his health never fully recovered from the camp and he died in his mid-sixties.
Looking over Jack’s life, I’m left wondering whether he realised that his belief that money equals freedom ended up with him in Stanley prison. It looks obvious from the outside but it never seems to have occurred to him, and he was determined to encourage his son to do something practical – something to do with money.
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(Submitted by reader)