Rags to riches: the oldest con on the shelf, and the most reliable. We love it because it tells us money is a moral reward – the self as a going concern: work hard, deserve it, collect at the desk - and it quietly bins the part where half of any fortune is luck, timing, and being in the right gutter on the morning it rained. It flatters the winner into thinking he’s virtuous and the loser into thinking he’s idle, which is precisely why the winners never stop telling it. I should know. I’m a winner, more or less, and I’m about to tell you one.

And it was rough in a way that doesn’t carry to people who grew up where it wasn’t. Violence in Hunslet wasn’t an event. It was currency. It was the background hum, the mother tongue. Everyone spoke it, fluently, from the cradle. You learned to fight because the alternative was learning to be hit. My two older brothers, Mac and Joe, were hard lads with reputations, the toughest going, not to be messed with, and you’d think that would buy the baby of the family some peace. It bought him the opposite. It bought him a queue.

Joe wasn’t a violent man, understand. Joe was the gentlest of us until you crossed a certain line: fairness, respect, the few things he’d planted his flag on, and then something that had been packed down in him for years came up all at once and went off in your face like a furnace door swinging open. He’s the one who taught me the whole of my philosophy on the subject, and it’s served me in boardrooms since as well as it ever did in the road: avoid it if you possibly can; but if you can’t, if you’re cornered and it’s you or them, then take the surprise, hit first, and hit hard enough that there isn’t a second exchange. And the other half, the half people forget, that the outcome is never certain. One slip, one fluke, one unlucky angle, and the hardest man in the street goes down to the softest. I’ve watched that happen at every weight class life offers. The favourite is just the one the odds like. The odds don’t throw the punch.

And these men did sixteen-hour doubles, six and seven days the week. And every Friday night they took the wage to the pub and drank it down into oblivion, drank until the week and the works and the whole grinding fact of themselves went dark for a few hours. I watched them do it, week on week, and it went into me cold and clear and permanent, the truest sentence the place ever taught me: to exist like this is to consume yourself. To drink yourself dry

Still, the late seventies were a giddy, happy blur, head spinning, business growing, and the first sweet fruit of it arriving in the form of my magnificent Jensen Interceptor SP III. Roman purple, buttery-smooth cream Connely leather, smelling of a tannery – just so you get the picture. Target one, met, in metal, with the V8 in it. I was so proud of that car. I was proud of it right up until the afternoon it burst into flames. I was sitting in traffic directly in front of the Garrick Theatre when the engine elected to combust externally, in full public view, to my towering humiliation, to the open delight of my passenger – the Swede – and to the entertainment of the entire theatre queue, who got a matinee they hadn’t paid for. There it is, reader, the whole of it in one scene: the boy from the Morris Minor, first target achieved, sitting in his trophy as it cremated itself merrily on the Charing Cross Road. Pride, I learned, publicly, in front of an audience, precedes a fall. It also, on that occasion, precedes a fire brigade. The gods, it seemed, were really paying attention, watched by a queue.

Most of that collection went the way of most things in a divorce — into the fire, divided and itemised and lost to the settlement, the lawyers, the whole scorched-earth arithmetic of two people undoing a shared life. But I carried some of it out of the ashes, a canvas here, a canvas there, and those survivors hang around me still, and they are the truest mirror I own. Not the suits, not the clubs, not one of the deals — the paintings. Because everything else from those gleaming years has scattered or died or been sold to strangers, but a beautiful thing, well chosen, simply carries on being beautiful, serenely indifferent to your divorces and your recessions and your slow rearrangement into an old man at a window. That, it turns out, is the part that endures.

The air went. My chest closed like a fist. My heart began to do something frantic and arrhythmic, a drummer falling down stairs. My mouth dried; my palms ran. And then the worst of it, the thing I still can’t say cleanly: a great peeling sense of coming loose from my own life, as though I were watching it on a television set across the room, and the set had just cracked from corner to corner, and the picture went on regardless behind the crack. The chandeliers swam. The chief executive’s face came at me down a lengthening tunnel, his mouth moving, no sound arriving. I excused myself. I walked to the bathroom with the careful dignity of a man crossing the deck of a ship he knows is going down, and I stood at the mirror and checked, with my hands on the cold porcelain, that I was still in there.

It was not a short ring. Men with the law on their side do not use a short ring; a short ring implies you might reasonably say no. It was the bell, held down with a sense of purpose, outside the electric gates, at six exactly, with the particular insolence of people who have read the order and know that the gate and the door is, as of about an hour ago, more theirs than mine. I opened the gate and came down to the door in a dressing gown. Through the glass I could see coats, good coats, which was the first wrongness, because the menace I’d been raised on wore donkey jackets or leather jackets and at least had the decency to look the part. These looked like men on their way to a decent lunch, or a funeral. There were several of them, and one in particular, a supervising solicitor appointed by the court to lend the whole invasion a veneer of fairness, who wore the rodent expression of an undertaker who enjoys his work but knows it isn’t the done thing to show it.

They tried to bury me. Fair enough. It’s the going rate for getting above your station, and they did it properly, by the book, with lawyers for shovels, a dawn raid for a funeral and a freezing order where the headstone should go. Their one mistake was horticultural. You bury a corpse. You plant a seed. Nobody thought to check which they had.

There’s an old line — Confucius gets the credit, and may even deserve it — that before you set out to harm a man you should dig two graves. The first is for him. The second is for yourself, because you will most likely be destroyed by your own malice, or by the consequences it sets running, which come back to you over time with the cold reliability of physics: every force, an equal and opposite, no exceptions filed.

Here is the thing nobody tells you, and it took me thirty-five years and a near-death experience in a London hotel lavatory to learn it: the gap between who you are and who you’re pretending to be is not a quirk. It is a wound, and it leaks. Picture a fried egg, if you’ll let me be vulgar about the soul for a second. The white is who you actually are. The yolk is who you’re straining to be. Keep the yolk inside the white and you have breakfast. Let it run, let the two come apart, and you have a mess on the plate and a body that has quietly decided it is under attack. Stay under attack long enough — years, decades, a whole driven life — and the stress chemistry stops being weather and becomes climate. It goes to work on the vessels, the immunity, the brain. It ages you from the inside like damp in a wall.

I drove away rearranged. Here was a man who could move nothing but his head, running one of the most complex and savage businesses on earth, and he had reduced his entire existence to a single burning point and lived there, on purpose, every day.

We reversed out of that cave with a slowness I have never since equalled, Jack’s small hand in mine, my eyes on the dark, the growl following us to the mouth and no further, and we stood in the wet green dawn with our hearts going, and I learned that fear — real fear, the clean animal kind that has nothing to do with offers at the Ritz — is the most purifying substance on earth. I had not thought about Kuck, or Etoile, or who I was pretending to be, for the entire duration of that growl. The jaguar had reduced me, mercifully, to one thing: a father getting his son out of a jaguar’s cave. The simplest and best version of me I have ever been.

The room was beige in the way that only official rooms achieve, a beige that seems less a colour than a sedative. There was a table, unassuming, and water in a jug nobody drank, and my accountant beside me with a lever-arch file for every year of my adult life, and across from us the inspector — courteous, unhurried, with the soft remorseless manner of a man who has all the time in the world because he is, in the relevant sense, immortal. He represented an institution that cannot die, cannot tire, and cannot be sued for wasting your one finite life. I represented a man with a mortgage, a pulse, and a calendar that was, unlike his, running out. It is not a meeting between equals. It is a man being interviewed by a glacier.

What I left out was the shape of the bargain on offer from these rescue funds, because the bargain is the lesson. Rescue capital is not rescue. It is a transfer of ownership conducted under anaesthetic. The terms would keep the ships afloat and the investors technically alive, at the price of signing the entire upside of any recovery over to the rescuers — so that if the world ended, we lost everything, and if the world recovered, they kept it. Heads they win, tails we lose, the oldest asymmetry in finance, now wearing a life jacket and calling itself salvation. The dilemma was constant and exquisite: take the vulture’s terms and survive, gutted, a tenant in the company you’d built — or refuse them, keep your dignity and your upside intact, and sink with both. I have never found dignity to be worth a great deal at the bottom of the sea.

Tom Wolfe set down the terrible discovery a man makes about his own father sooner or later: that the towering Protector who once kept the roof on the sky was never a god at all, but a boy — a frightened boy much like himself — who had grown up, had a child, and out of duty and perhaps love taken on a role called Being a Father, improvising a lid over all the chaos and catastrophe of life so that the child would have something mythic to hold on to. I made that discovery about my own father late, watching a ninety-odd-year-old man who had laid telephone cable across the Japanese front lines and come home sealed shut, and understanding at last that the silence I’d taken for strength had been a boy holding a lid down with both hands.

It begins, always, with the frogs. You want one good company, so you kiss a great many. You sit in rooms full of men selling you the best years of their lives at a markup, and most of them are frogs and stay frogs no matter how you pucker up. You learn to read them fast — the ones polishing a turd to a high shine, the ones whose numbers have been combed over so carefully you can see the teeth marks, the ones who’ve quietly stopped investing in the thing two years ago and are now selling you the momentum of a coasting car with the engine off. You kiss and you kiss and your lips go numb and somewhere in the procession a frog looks, in a certain light, after a good lunch, like a prince. And that, friend, is the most dangerous moment of the entire enterprise, because the prince is the one you stop interrogating.

Hunslet was worse than I let on. I gave you the version with the maroon blazer and the three buses and the rough-but-formative grain of the place, the version that plays as character-building, and all of it was true and none of it was the whole truth. The whole truth is that the place was a machine for the manufacture of desperate men, and desperation, observed close up and from the inside, does not ennoble people. It deforms them. It traumatises them young and then hands them, fully traumatised, to their own children, generation after generation, a relay race of damage run with no finish line in sight.

The art of surviving it is the art of making yourself a smaller, harder target — and now and again, when quiet won’t do it, of taking the loudest threat and removing it from the board so comprehensively, so memorably, that the others recalculate and leave you alone. You do not win that war by being reasonable. You win it once, brutally, in public, and then you bank the silence.

I did not raise my voice. I have never found that voices need raising; it’s a confession of weakness, raising your voice, an admission that the words alone won’t carry the freight. I asked Hugo if he’d step outside with me for a moment. Just a word. And in the corridor, away from the buyers and the lawyers and the careful theatre of the thing, I explained the position to him in terms I had first worked out at the age of twelve with a glass jug in my hand, translated now into the dialect of men who lunch. We would go back in, I said. And he would sign the deal exactly as it stood, not a penny altered. Or I would walk back in, cancel the sale in front of everyone, and fire him from the board on the spot, there, in the room, so that the last public act of his distinguished tenure would be his removal. His choice entirely. I genuinely didn’t mind which. That was the part, I think, that persuaded him — that I genuinely didn’t mind which, that I had already made my peace with blowing up my own deal to deny him his squeeze. The desperate are frightening to the comfortable precisely because the comfortable have so much more to lose.

The lesson Hunslet teaches and the lesson the boardroom teaches are the identical lesson in different tailoring: decide what you are actually prepared to do, make the other man believe it without theatrics, and then — this is the part the MBAs leave out — actually be prepared to do it. The bluff only works if it isn’t one.

Never meet your heroes, the saying goes, and it is sound advice, but it misses the deeper and sadder thing, which is not that they’re disappointing but why. These were Icarus, all of them, every one — given wax wings and a glorious morning and the whole sky, and they flew at the sun because that is what the wings are for, and so many of them came down early, burned out, fell into the sea while the crowd was still cheering, dead or hollow or both before forty. I watched a number of them do it. The light that dazzles the stadium is the same light that consumes the man holding it; there is only the one source, and it does not distinguish between illuminating you and burning you down. I stopped envying the famous quite early. It is one of the few pieces of wisdom I came by cheaply, and I have tried to be grateful for it, since so little else was.

Their favourite phrase, the one that still lifts the hair on my neck, was skin in the game. They would say it to me — to me, and to men like me — across those desks. Did I have enough skin in the game. We required, they’d murmur, to see real skin in the game. And I would sit there, having mortgaged my house, my marriage, my sleep, my health and a painful share of my actual internal organs into the thing they were proposing to grace with a fraction of their fund’s spare change, and I would listen to a man who had risked nothing more dangerous in his life than a strong opinion in a Monday meeting lecture me on skin. They had no skin in any game. They had other people’s skin in every game, which is a different commodity entirely and trades, morally, at an enormous discount.

The tragedy of the human condition, examined the way I have been forced to examine it — close up, from the inside, with frequency and intimacy, in the boardrooms and the back streets and the lavish dying years of marriages and companies — is a nihilistic tragicomedy. It is, more or less, Macbeth’s verdict: a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying, on a cold reading, nothing. It is also, I’m aware, more or less a description of this book, dear reader, which has been precisely that — sound, fury, an idiot narrating, the whole picaresque clatter of a life lived at the top of its voice. I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise.

Every explorer who ever crossed an ocean took the soft option. The longest, hardest, worst-charted voyage on earth is the one straight down into your own heart. There’s no view, no applause, no frequent-flyer points, and a fair chance you won’t much like who’s waiting at the bottom. Most people never book the trip. I left mine until the last chapter.