Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 20

The biggest stumbling block, therefore, was the name. Like a bell, my father’s surname had a resonance in Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. that David’s did not. Until Colin was removed, that is. Then the roles reversed. David became an honorary Rowland Smith, while Colin – sidelined from business and family alike – effectively forfeited his name. An acquired namelessness, like a reverse baptism, was one of the many facets of his plight.

But we shouldn’t let the peculiarities of the Colin/David scenario lead us into thinking that having different names is always a problem in friendships. Quite the reverse. Like marriage, friendship is exogamous. It involves making a bond with somebody outside the family. That requires you to choose a friend with a different surname. I mean by different surname ‘coming from a different lineage’, even if the actual word – Jones or Patel or Blanc or Diaz or Khan – is the same. If it were really the same family name – the same patronymic or matronymic, to give it its technical title – then you would be making friends with somebody from your family, which is unnecessary. Unnecessary because the bond already exists. If we think of friendship as the reducing of the otherness of other people, or as making the strange familiar, then in a family this labour of familiarisation has been done in advance. It’s implicit in the word ‘family’. Regardless of how much you like the person, befriending a family member is ever so slightly ingratiating. Ingratiating because superfluous.

It cuts the other way too. The superfluousness of befriending a family member gives us an excuse not to make an effort. With friends there’s always a subtle pressure for that effort to be made. I am not saying that one shouldn’t bother to be friendly with family. But ‘friendly’ is different from ‘friends’. Family is a blood system, friendship water. Although the two can be mixed, they are intrinsically different. Mixing them evokes a subtle sense of aberration.

So Colin and David did not remain friends after the former left the company. Whether Colin’s departure in 1979 really helped the business to recover is debatable. In 1983 Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. was sold to a Dutch enterprise. The following year Colin’s father, my grandfather, died.