It is a long time since I have experienced a ‘touch’. When I was a young man, people were always borrowing from me. I was brought up very strictly. My father said, ‘Never have an overdraft. Never have a mortgage except on your first house, and pay that off as quickly as possible. Never borrow. Always pay bills by return of post.’ I have stuck to these rules, even at Oxford, when I had very little and the temptation to get into debt was great. One of Charles Lamb’s most striking essays is called ‘The Two Great Races of Men’. They are ‘those who borrow and those who lend’. I have always, like Lamb, been a lender. When you are known always to be solvent, people instinctively come to you to borrow. Or rather, they always did in the old days.
I don’t recall any borrowing in Chaucer, though his master, John of Gaunt, richest man in Europe, exercised power by jud-icious lending. Shakespeare’s age was a notorious time for the art of genteel mendicancy. Hence Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes:
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
I suspect Shakespeare knew what he was talking about and, being prudent by nature, and kind, was a ‘touch’, though never a soft one. His Falstaff, who had a nasty side to him (‘Hook on! Hook on!’), was the first celebrated borrower in literature, battening on his landlady to the point of almost ruining her business, and cadging a thousand pounds out of old Shallow, which he had no intention of repaying. A thousand pounds was a vast sum in those days, enough to buy a fully rigged ocean-going ship and fit it out, and crew it, for an Atlantic voyage.
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