Never Owned

I came to this subject the long way round, and through other people’s front doors. For thirty-one years I was an auctioneer and estate-clearer in the west of Ireland, which means that when somebody died and the family wanted the house emptied, I came with a van and a notebook and went through a life room by room — the furniture, the delph, the holy pictures, and always, somewhere, the papers. The papers told me more than the family ever did. I learned to read a life by its drawers: who had a few pound put by and who had a drawer full of final demands; who owned the roof they died under and who had signed it away years before for a conservatory and a car. And I came to believe, against everything I had been told, that there were only two kinds of people in the end, and that the difference between them had almost nothing to do with what they earned.

That is why this book exists, and it is the reason I think it matters. The houses I cleared were the plainest evidence there is, taken at the one moment a life can no longer be performed — when the front is down and only the truth in the drawers remains. I watched a woman who cleaned offices her whole life die clear, with a paid house and nine thousand pound and a little put by for every grandchild; and I cleared, the same year, the houses of men who had earned in a month what she saw in a year, and found them owing on the beds they died in. After enough of that, a man stops believing the things the world tells him about money, because he has read, in ten thousand drawers, the plain refutation of nearly all of them.

There is no shortage of money books, and that is rather the trouble. Most of them are written by people who got rich selling money books, and they teach the one thing I never saw work in a single cleared house — how to earn more — while passing over in silence the one thing I saw work in every clear house there was, which is how to keep what you have, want little, and owe no one. They sell the river and never mention the dam. The old books were better, because the men who wrote them had nothing to sell you: I found my first thrift book, a foxed Victorian Samuel Smiles, in the parlour of a man who had died clear and content at ninety-one, and I read it in a night and have been quietly furious ever since at how right it was and how forgotten. This book is my attempt to carry what those old writers knew, and what the drawers confirmed, across into a language and a life that can use it now.