Early Retirement

We lived in Hong Kong, where my father was working, first as deputy and then as manager, at the North Point branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He must have felt that his best years in career terms were in front of him: he was serving a long apprenticeship as a relative junior, but that wasn't unusual for the bank in its colonial days. He would still have expected to start to rise and for big opportunities to open up. That might seem like a naive hope for someone who had already spent seventeen years working for the same company; but the pace of banking life, like that of other forms of work, was slower in those days. His chance might yet come.

When it did, in the late 1960s, it was in the form of a transfer to head office in Hong Kong: the bank’s HQ at 1 Queen’s Road Central. Today, that address is occupied by a famous building designed by Norman Foster — at the time it was built, the most expensive privately owned building in the world, and a highly ugly and impractical one too. In those days the bank was a chunky stone structure with a lovely central hall illustrated with a mural of striving workers; it was so low, relative to the Hong Kong of my childhood, that it was impossible to believe that when my grandparents were first in Hong Kong it was the tallest building in the city. This was where my father was to spend the rest of his working life. It’s where I best remember him as a working man, when I used to drop in on him, semi-unannounced. I would either ring up to his secretary from the banking floor, or simply sneak into the staff lift and go up to his section before asking to be taken in by the ‘boy’ — a Cantonese man in his forties who was this section’s administrative manager. Dad was always pleased to see me and I him, and there was something very reassuring about my father in his office in his shirtsleeves at the centre of all this bustle, a picture of me and my mother on his desk.

In his career, though, my father was a disappointed man. He climbed to the stair below the top one, in terms of the bank’s hierarchy. He was a senior member of the overseas staff, well paid and as secure as any worker in the world, the beneficiary of a pension scheme which, as it happened, he helped design. But the next level up was that of the head honchos, the people who decided things and set the course, as opposed to running things and keeping them on course. He never got to that level. He had a platform with a perfect view of the personalities and political issues at the high levels of the bank, and he worked with three men who were eventually to run the organization, and oversee the process which took it from being a minor colonial bank to one of the biggest financial institutions in the world. One thing he told me I often remember: two of the chairmen he had known were, he said, diametrically opposite in their behaviour to colleagues. One would scream and shout and berate them, but he never sacked anybody. The other was mild-mannered and calm and never raised his voice, but was utterly ruthless and would sack and demote people without hesitation. I've kept that in mind ever since, and it's been borne out: in every organization I've ever seen at close range, the bosses tend to be either screamers or sackers. People have either a bark or a bite, almost never both.

The next level of promotion, however, did not come. There were one or two attempts by other senior bank figures to poach him to go and work for them—once, by a friend of my father’s who was setting up a merchant bank to wheel and deal, in what was to be the far more buccaneering style of banking so prevalent in the 1980s and since. But my father’s superior fought off the move, mainly, it seems, because he needed Dad to do all the work and run the department. My father saw this as a disappointment, and so it was, since the main thing in life isn’t so much what happens to us as what we think happens to us. I do wonder, though. The cure for being a banker wasn’t to be a more interesting kind of banker; it was, probably, not to be a banker at all. But it’s hard to accept, once you have been doing a thing for so long, that you have been doing the wrong thing.

Duty was important for him. He was a good man, in his unostentatious and shy way one of the best men I have known. He grew up in a culture in which duty and reticence and honour and privacy and lack of ostentation were all regarded as forms of goodness and public-spiritedness. Plenty of people still believe in all these things, but they have vanished from our public culture, or at least from our publicized culture, and no one celebrates them any more, or even admits that they were once seen, and not so long ago, as virtues. One aspect of this was the good deeds he did, and another was that he never spoke about them. I knew that he was appointed to sit on the Hong Kong rent tribunal, overseeing arguments between landlords and tenants — a highly sensitive position in a place where there is no freehold land, and a tribute to his reputation for fair-mindedness. It was also a tribute to the fact that he had taken the time to go to night classes and learn functional Cantonese, something few expatriates bothered to do, not least because it is so difficult. But there were things I did not know. In our latter years in Hong Kong, from the early 1970s onwards, we came to know a group of Catholic nuns who were lively and funny and did a variety of demanding jobs, mostly linked to poverty relief — one was a surgeon, another the private secretary to Cardinal Wu; others we met later were involved in medical aid work in Guangzhou. They had the unusual virtue in Hong Kong of being equal-opportunity sceptics, as unillusioned about the Communist Chinese as about Britain and the self-serving billionaires and big shots of the Hong Kong business community. I had always assumed that we met them through my mother’s Irish contacts in what my father always called ‘the Murphia’. Much later I found out that we knew them because my father served unpaid as the treasurer of one of the local hospitals, where some of the nuns worked. I had had no idea: he never mentioned it in front of me. That is how you are supposed to do charity, with the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, and it is the best side of my father’s reticence.

My awareness of my father’s unhappiness at work was not a vivid thing. He did not complain at length, only in muted asides. He felt that he was brighter and more able than the people he worked for. As for his work, he hardly every spoke about it, and only once showed me papers he had brought home when there was a choice between three candidates applying for a senior job. He spread out the papers, explained who the men were, and then said that although one of them was obviously the best and brightest he wouldn’t get the job because he was too spiky and cocky and wouldn't necessarily fit in. That, he explained, is how things often worked. People want to have a quiet time and don't like to be disrupted, even if it is by someone who in other ways is the best man for the job.

The defining event of all these years happened in 1974, when my father had a serious heart attack while in the office. Until this point he had, in twenty-five years of employment, not missed a single day’s work through illness, something of which he was very proud, especially because he had so often been sickly in his childhood. He was forty-seven years old and a smoker, getting through a pack of Benson & Hedges Gold a day, but apart from being overweight — not obese, but overweight — and sedentary there were no warnings. Years afterwards he told me two things about his heart attack. One was that the first symptoms were like those of indigestion. At the time I didn't understand what a glimpse this was into a world of constant, tormenting anxiety. He also told me that at the moment of having the heart attack he felt himself falling over, losing his footing as he collapsed, so that whenever now he began to lose his balance, on something like a carpet that was slipping over a smooth floor underneath, he had a flashback to the moment of losing consciousness during the heart attack. Again, I didn't understand how terrible the ensuing anxiety and sense of apprehension must have been. The main thing I saw was the physical caution which never left my father afterwards, and the regular angina attacks he used to suffer when out walking, which would cause him to pause and catch his breath with his fists resting on his hips — a syndrome called ‘window shopper’s angina’. He kept his nitroglycerine pills on him at all times, and latterly we had an oxygen cabinet in the coat cupboard. He gave up smoking, began to take regular exercise in the form of walking, and never ate so much as a mouthful of butter or bacon again.

My father had had difficulties with phobias and anxieties in the past. Wide open spaces triggered moments of irrational fear, and so did moving from dark places into sunlight suddenly; he once said to me he thought the feeling might be linked to traumatic hidden memories about being born. He dreaded social situations that he couldn’t get out of, and had a particular fear of restaurants; he would have to walk up and down outside them for a while, summoning the nerve to go in. These anxieties were taken to a different level by the heart attack, since he now had reason to worry that he might overtax his heart by panicking and suffer another infarct. In other words, the anxiety gave him a powerful legitimate reason to feel more anxious.

I don’t want to make my father’s life sound unrelievedly grim. He was a popular colleague and people were quick to like him: he was unpompous in a time and a place when that wasn’t a common trait in men. He was gentle, funny, intelligent, kind, and also had the rare quality of actually listening to what people said. Women liked him. He had very few close friends and, I sometimes think, no intimate ones. He almost never spoke of his deepest feelings; I think I might be the only person apart from my mother to whom he did. But that did not make him seem a closed or secretive man, merely a private one.

The material comfort he provided for his family was a source of pride to him. He once told me, ‘I like the feeling that if I wanted to go down to London and stay at the Ritz for a night or two, you know, I could.’ Not that he ever did, but I know what he meant: he liked the wiggle room, the psychic sense of space, that earning a good living brought. This sense of potential freedom came at the cost of mortgaging his life away — but at least in some sense he felt free. He was proud of the good education I was getting, and very proud when I got into Oxford, and then even more proud when I got a first in my moderations, the exams at the end of my first year. He saw this, with reason, as a set of opportunities he had created. When my mother told me about my father's pride in these things, she would always use the same phrase: ‘He opened the window and flung his chest out.’

In 1979, having spent thirty years with the same employer, my father had the option of taking early retirement. This might seem like a no-brainer: to have got to the age of fifty-three and now to be free of a job you are bored by, on a comfortable pension, free to do anything you wanted with the rest of your life. What’s not to like? It was difficult for my father, though, because it meant accepting that he wasn't going to get any further at the bank and therefore that his career ambition had failed. So taking retirement involved facing and accepting the fact that he was disappointed. He decided to do it anyway, and 1979 was our last year in Hong Kong. Rather than take a summer holiday in England he worked through and left the territory forever in September. I went back to boarding school in England to start my A-level year, and my parents took the long, slow trip home which they had been discussing ever since he decided to stop working: Thailand, Cyprus, and then Sweden to buy a new Saab and drive it home across northern Europe. At school I received a sequence of postcards. And then my parents arrived in Norfolk, some time in early November, and the open-ended years of retirement began.

This was at Alderfen, a house he and my mother bought in 1972. There was no connection of any sort with Norfolk other than the fact that my mother's sister lived in Norwich. In many ways it was an unfortunate choice. Village life proved to be unfriendly even by the standards of English village life—read: very unfriendly indeed. There was next to no culture and no ready-made social life. The site was windy and bleak; the house itself was an unlovely 'chalet bungalow' of recent construction. But my father loved the idea of owning his property, with no street address beyond that one word, ‘Alderfen’. It had nineteen acres of land, most of it unusable, indeed unwalkable, marsh; but beautiful nonetheless. It felt like he owned a piece of somewhere. For someone who felt like he didn't belong anywhere and who had lived all his life in property belonging to other people, that was a novel and consoling feeling.

I recently went back to the village and the thought that hit me with great force was: what were they thinking? My father went to a Norfolk village from a highly structured work environment with long hours and a built-in social life in a city where he had lived for most of his life. To go from living in the Tropics, mostly in one of the world’s great metropolises, to a sleepy, isolated, insular, cold piece of nowhere—how could it possibly work?

The fact is that my father was entirely unprepared for retirement. As a lively-minded man with many interests, he no doubt thought he would be free of the intellectual underemployment which can blight life after work; he had lived mostly in his head for many years, and probably thought retirement would be more of the same. He began to study electronics on a two-year course at Norwich Technical College, pursuing an interest he had had for years and, characteristically, wanting to find things out from the ground up. (The other mature student doing the course was twenty-four.) When he bought a BBC Microcomputer, one of the first affordable consumer models in the UK, he wanted to know how to program it, and how it worked, software and hardware, from the bare machine-code upwards. I said, ‘But what can it do? Who cares how it works?’ He shrugged. ‘Difference of approach,’ he said.

In the summer holiday of 1983, I took him out on the canoe that was my great source of happiness at Alderfen — a neighbour and I would spend hours and hours on the small dykes, the river and the local Broad, the most excitingly wild and natural place I, a city boy, had ever known. On some days we would see a kingfisher that lived near where I kept the canoe: the electric-blue flash of his wings, so startlingly vivid amid all the greens and greys, would, whenever I saw it, be the high spot of my day. I had not known before that a natural phenomenon could be the high spot of a day. At the end of our narrow, overhung mooring, you could turn right and head down to the Broad, or left and explore the narrow, shallow, shifting waterways which were impassable to even a rowing boat. There was never a soul there, except the one day we rescued a man who had got lost (we were in the garage playing darts when we heard him shouting for help—a trick of marsh acoustics, since, when we eventually got to him, he was well over a mile away).

My father didn’t often come out in the canoe. Looking back, I think he was worried that the exertion of paddling would overtax his heart. That day, though, it was clear and warm and I managed to get him to come out with me. Instead of heading for the Broad we went down the narrow dyke that ran by the edge of our property—the only way of getting there, since the marsh was too boggy and treacherous to walk. It could have been about 400 yards from our house, no more. The low, overshadowed dyke had been transformed into a broad water avenue, and it only took a moment to see why: about a dozen of the trees on our side of the bank had been cut down. I was surprised and curious, but my father was aghast. We cancelled the day out and went quickly home. A few days later I was back at university. Very soon after that I heard that my parents had put our house on the market and were planning to move.

What had happened was that a few locals had cut the trees down to provide access to the Broad for a mooring down past our property. They knew the trees belonged to us but had done it without asking for the straightforward reason that if they had asked my father might have said no. Quite a few people knew what was happening, but no one thought to tell him. After all he had had the house for only eleven years and had only been living there full-time for three.

The resulting feeling of betrayal was, for my father, very sharp. People he was on nodding and chatting terms with had, he felt, done something behind his back. He had a deep sense of insecurity about the untrustworthiness of the locals; he felt a lack of goodwill. So he sold the house and moved to Norwich.

At the time of my next holiday from university, at Christmas, my mother had gone to Ireland for a week so my father and I had a few days alone together. I had gone home in some triumph, having just won a university prize exam, and Dad was very proud and happy—his own finals result had been, by his own account, the worst day of his life. He was very glad to be in the city. ‘It was only when we got here that I realized that I had been so fucking bored,’ he said. ‘Here you can go out for a drink, you can go for a coffee, you can go to see a film. In the countryside there's just nothing to do.’ We went to see Peter Weir’s film The Year of Living Dangerously, and he said it was uncanny how it caught what Indonesia had been like in the 1950s and 60s. We had dinner together on Wednesday night. On Thursday, my mother came back from Ireland and my girlfriend came to stay for a few days. On Friday my parents went out for a drink after dinner and came back at about nine o'clock. My girlfriend and I were watching Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion when my father went out of the room. He was gone for about half an hour. My mother went to see what he was doing. She screamed my name. I ran upstairs and saw her standing over my father. ‘I think he’s died,’ she said. My first feeling was a great surge of tenderness for her: I felt so sad for her. Not him, not me—her. I knelt down beside her. She was right. My father was already, not cold, but not live-warm. He had had a massive heart attack.

We buried my father a few days later. The turnout was sparse, since he had so few connections with Norwich. In Hong Kong we could have filled a big church, perhaps even a cathedral. I can remember those days with a terrible clarity. As far as I could tell, I felt nothing, nothing at all. This wasn't denial so much as the fact that I simply couldn't locate my feelings. I just didn’t know where they were. And there was so much to do. There were phone calls to make, letters to write, probate to arrange, my mother to look after. I wasn’t prepared for anything about death, and one of the things I wasn't prepared for was the sheer workload.

This was the first time I was ever impressed by my mother’s religious faith. Her reaction the night my father died was one of pure shock: ‘What am I going to do? What will become of me?’ she kept saying. But by the next day she was deeply, passionately grieving. She told me that she had always thought it would be her who died first. She was able to feel the loss in a way I simply couldn't, and at the same time I felt it was somehow connected to her ability to see something beyond the loss, a context or meaning, provided by her faith. Somehow, because she could see beyond it, she could also see it — that was how it seemed. As for me, partly because the loss of my father seemed so random, so meaningless other than as pure loss, I couldn’t even acknowledge it, much less cope with any of the feelings it brought up. Because I had no way of describing to myself what had happened, it was on some level as if nothing had happened. It was as if I couldn’t find my keys; or rather, that I knew I had a pair of keys somewhere, and knew that they would be in some way useful, but couldn't find them. No: it was as if somebody had told me that there was something called a ‘key’, and that these things called ‘keys’ were essential, and that I would surely be able to find them if I looked, but I had no idea where they were or what they looked like or even, really, what they were for — just that somewhere, somehow, there were these things I probably needed.