Want To Know Someone’s Inner Soul?

Reach for a bottle of champagne

I remember the moment I fell in love with my husband. We were on our second date at a bar in London. He was American and incredibly exotic to a south London girl. He called me Honey, and he ordered champagne. But what had me smitten was the way he paid for the champagne.

He threw his credit card on the bar. Threw it. With abandonment. With largesse. With a well-oiled flick of the wrist. With a devil-may-care generosity. At that moment, I said to myself,

This is the man for me.

I had grown up in a home where there was little money. Not a crime, not unusual. But to compound our plight, my dad was frugal. Every item that was not needed to sustain life, that was extraneous, that was just for the hell of it — like a bar of chocolate — was weighed and considered and mulled over till the joy of the thing was quite extinguished.

When I was fifteen, my parents divorced. I often think that if my dad had been a little more forthcoming with small gifts, he might have made a go of their marriage, despite my mum being mad as well as Irish. But my dad hadn’t grown up with much and he was determined to own his own house, so everything bent to the mortgage, to the bricks and mortar that sheltered us.

There’s no shame, of course, in being poor, and no one likes a spendthrift. Prudence and good housekeeping are desirable, important qualities in a mate. But you can take things too far.

Parsimony is a particularly unattractive quality. There’s something calculating, something sly, something underhand; it is the very opposite of generosity.

What I had seen in my future husband was a generosity I had never encountered in my father. They say a woman marries her father or his opposite. I did the latter.

It wasn’t to be the last time a bottle of champagne illuminated another’s soul.

I’m a teacher and I have always worked in small specialist schools that are geared to pupil remediation. Small schools are vulnerable to failure; they depend very much on the calibre and passion of their heads.

One head I worked with used to sit in the school carpark with children who were too frightened, too shell-shocked from mainstream school to even walk through our door. She would sit on the tarmac and patiently and gently listen to their worries and then after the school day had ended, and the school was empty, she would draw the child into the building. By such care and trouble, would she try to help a child back to school and learning.

Heads for such schools need to have all the experience of running a school married with an understanding of special needs. But they also need to be compassionate and generous. The head described above had all those qualities, but alas, the day came when she retired.

The woman who replaced her was very different. At first, I couldn’t work her out. She wore suits, was very corporate and she had excellent knowledge of the mountains of legislation and policies needed to pass school inspections. She was competent but distant, and I couldn’t get a grip on her essential being. Till the champagne arrived.

We had a boy who had been at the school since the age of five. He was the type of five-year-old who was either on the desk or under the desk. He was very bright (he’s probably a nuclear physicist now) and several teachers and TAs had to put a lot of work into him, especially the TAs who had to supervise his antics during break times and in the changing rooms when he was at his friskiest.

This boy made such good progress at the school that by the age of thirteen, he was able to return to mainstream education. His father was so grateful that he brought two crates of Moet Champagne to the school to thank the teachers.

I was in the hall when the father arrived with the champagne. The new head was there as well. She thanked the father, and he left.

This new head had had no input in this boy’s education. I don’t think she even knew who he was. She opened one crate, and I thought she was going to count the bottles, calculate how many staff could share in the gift. Instead, she reached into the crate, grabbed a bottle, and rushed it to her office to ensure she did not miss out.

That action taught me everything I needed to know about her. Her essential character was revealed: selfish, self-absorbed, ungenerous, and grasping. Like a pig in a trough, she rushed to ensure her own possession before that of her staff.

What she ought to have done was ask who had worked with the boy and she should have summoned the TAs first and given them the champagne first, followed by the teachers who had worked with the boy.

But her first impulse was to grab what she could for herself. What leadership. What inspiration.

So next time you are wondering whether a person is generous or grasping, can I recommend you bring out a bottle of champagne? You may just see into their inner soul.