Early Retirement

Anthony Powell says somewhere that there’s nothing quite like having a father go bankrupt to force a man to think for himself. My father’s early death was a version of that. His life was not inherently tragic: he wasn’t inherently a sad man. If he had lived to be alive today, aged seventy, he would have had about twenty years of comfortable retirement to balance the years spent doing his boring job. He would, perhaps, have found things he wanted to do — the move into Norwich was a good start. He might have made a new life for himself, or even have just resigned himself to the fact that he was going to potter about enjoying his hobbies. But none of that happened. He didn’t have that long balanced life, with years of drudgery evened out by years of suiting himself; he had a truncated life, with years of drudgery followed by an untimely death. That made me determined not to do what he did. Whatever else I did with my working life I wasn't going to spend it doing something I hated.