How to be poor

My wife
went on nagging me about this house and, thank Heavens, I went on resisting.
Today the tax office has disappeared — indeed it disappeared several decades
ago — and the house must be worth a quarter of a million pounds. A terrifying
thought. Having all that money would have completely ruined my splendid
character.
    I am aware of the fact that I may
lose my poverty any moment. Yet, I am not in the least worried. I shall face that emergency when it arises.

     
    When I was visiting Jamaica (see Introduction) I arrived in my hotel at the same time as an American who was pointed out
to me by awe-struck locals as a multi-millionaire. I went straight to my room,
but before he occupied his, he went to the telephone in the lobby and rang up
his stockbroker in New York. (He always phoned from the lobby, howling in a
stentorian voice, for all and sundry to hear every detail of his conversation.)
Soon the pattern of the day emerged. I was doing my job while he was talking to
his stockbroker in New York; I was enjoying a rum punch on the terrace while he
was talking to his stockbroker in Chicago; I was swimming in the pool while he
was shouting himself hoarse talking to his stockbroker in Los Angeles. That was
how he spent his days. His nights he probably spent on the phone in his room,
quarrelling with stockbrokers in Australia and South Africa. And when, at last,
the blessed hours of dawn came, he was, I am sure, on the phone to his stockbroker
in the City of London.
    I asked him once why he had come to Jamaica at all. He needed a proper rest, he told me. In New York he was spending all his
time on the phone.
    The very opposite of this attitude
was reflected by a dear old friend of mine, a writer. He returned to England after a few years’ absence abroad. He had a little money and, on the advice of some
guru, invested it in War Loans. Occasionally I would ask him how his War Loans
were doing and he would murmur some irritated reply. A few months later he
informed me that he had sold his War Loans.
    “But why? They were not going down,”
said I.
    “No. I was going down. Sinking
fast in my own estimation. Every morning I picked up The Times and even
before glancing at the headlines, I looked up my War Loans. I was happy as a
lark when they went up a few pence, and got depressed when they fell a few
pence. Slowly I grew very angry with myself. I was damned, I decided, if I
would become a chap who rushes every morning to see how his War Loans stand. So
I sold the lot and put my money in a Building Society.”
    Then he frowned and asked me: “By the
way, how is it that you knew that War Loans were not going down?”
    I cast my eyes down.
    “I kept looking them up too. For your
sake. Before looking at the headlines. I am glad you sold the bloody things. To
hell with War Loans.”
    We agreed on that. We also decided
that there was something crooked about it all: the War had ended a long time
ago, War Loans ought to have been paid back by now.
     
     
    Having a lot of money changes and
demeans a man’s character. Quite a few rich men have a vague recognition of
this fact and invent feeble devices to get around the problem. The most common
is that rich men (and women) insist that people should love them “for
themselves”, not for their money. Thousands of novels, plays and films turn on
this impossible dream.
    The whole idea is ludicrous, of
course. First, they are not, as a rule, lovable, so they should be pleased if
someone loves them at all, for whatever reason. Secondly, no one can really
love someone else “for his money”. You may love money, and swallow the person
who goes with it, but that is quite a different thing from loving him for his money. It is the old story of the Platnik diamonds all over again. For
the sake of the few uninitiated, here it goes.
    Two New York ladies, old friends who
have not seen each other since they left school, meet by chance and go into a
café to have a chat. One of them is wearing a dazzlingly beautiful ring. When
her friend goes into raptures over this ring for the fifth time, its owner says
well, yes, she supposes the famous Platnik diamonds really are very fine. The
other is impressed, but admits that she has never heard of the Platnik
diamonds.
    “This ring is part of them,” says the
wearer of it. “They are very beautiful and worth a vast fortune. But,
unfortunately, there is a curse upon them.”
    “What’s the curse?”
    “Mr Platnik.”
    Yes, that’s how it