Early Retirement

My father used to tell the story of a tutor at his university, a Viennese professor of something or other. There was a general conversation about what people would have, if they could have anything in the world. There were some surprising answers—a youngish woman don said she wanted an enormous wine cellar. When it came to the old Viennese, he sucked his pipe for a moment, and then said, ‘Vell, if I could really have anything I wanted, anything at all, I think I would choose...permanent delusions of grandeur.’

Dad loved that story. He liked it because it was funny, but I also think he liked the idea of a permanent state of feeling that excluded difficulty or pain. For instance, he could never bring himself to discuss money. He could talk about it in the abstract, in relation to businesses in the news or tax policy. But he couldn't bear to talk about money in any personal context to do with his income or — and this was a particular issue — my pocket money. I wasn't allowed to ask for money or even to mention it. The subject caused Dad too much pain. It touched on things from his own childhood to do with the fact that his father had used money as a means of control and interference.

What was odd about this was that my father worked for a bank. Dealing with money was what he did all day, every day, for his entire working life. And yet he couldn’t bear to speak of it at home. As a teenager I would resort to simply stealing money from his wallet rather than having to put him and me through the impossible ordeal of asking for it. I would steal it resentfully, too, from the wallet he left lying on the hall table, as if giving me permission to steal from it. I felt that I didn't want to steal but had no choice, and that the whole episode was showing both our characters in their least good light. I now see that the banking and the not-being-able-to-discuss-money were tightly linked: he had gone to work in a bank because his father had bullied him into doing a job which would keep him grounded in the real world — which, in his father’s world-view, meant doing a job which was all about money. The memory of that, and all that it implied, was so painful for Dad that if I ever mentioned money to him, he was overpowered by flashbacks from his youth and sent into a gloom.