PERSPECTIVE UK
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Life and living - 2
Some people see the age of 40 as a watershed, and I once did so myself. But there are no true watersheds. There are turning-points, and for me, 65 is the principal one merely because the Government makes it so. It is the age when prime ministers, judges and some leaders of industry alone are assumed to be at their peak while everyone else has a happy face and a vacant mind. Overnight, people who, throughout their lives, have been accomplished, and upwardly mobile, are now assumed to be tranquil, unemployable, and in a permanent state of simple enjoyment. They are pensioners. Senior Citizens.
Try gardening, say their advisers. Or painting. Or walk the dog. Or join a group. Or take a cruise. Or spend a couple of months in winter accompanied by others of your kind in some cheap Spanish resort. Or look after the grandchildren. A deckchair is a fine thing in summer; and a straw hat. But keep active, they say. Watch your diet Try not to stumble because the bones are becoming more brittle. And the one thing they do not say is: Compete. For that would impinge on their own territory, providing threat.
This is, of course, a conspiracy to neuter, to immobilise. All those below the age of 65 want the action for themselves. By arbitrarily setting a limit on worthwhile activity for others, they reduce their own fears about their ability to survive. At 64 years of age, a man stands four-square to the world. He is a part of it. Maybe he has a desk and can inspire fear in his subordinates. The moment the clock strikes his 65th birthday, he has a bus pass, has no need to pay for his prescriptions, and is referred to patronisingly. Dynamism is withdrawn like a tooth. Status is withheld. Whereas once he bore arms on behalf of his country, he now bears alms. One building society referred to men at 65 or women at 60 as being part of the Golden Generation. Cheek! A Senior Citizen is, to my mind, someone of any age who, by his (or her) efforts, his imagination, his intellect, his ability, has shown himself superior to others. No-one else is a Senior Citizen whatever his age. Citizens who lurch about on pavements and clutter up pedestrian precincts with their cars, are, for the most part, just.. . citizens. They could be of any age or persuasion. There are youths of 18 who have not the slightest intention of ever working for a living. There are those, I suspect, who put their sons down for immobility passes at birth, as the upper classes register their sons for Eton. So let us be clear about our descriptions.
As doctors insist on preserving people rather than despatching them prematurely with good intent as they did through history , and as producers of food products, hampered by hygiene regulations, have less chance of killing them off, so the expectation of long life increases. Eighty today, a hundred tomorrow, on, on, to 120 as an average. Eventually, a man will spend the first 65 years preparing for the second 65 years. If the advice currently available is not taken, there will not be a patch of ground untilled, a picture unpainted, a walk not walked, a dog not exercised, a pair of free spectacles not dispensed, a tooth not attended to, and British Rail will be so inundated by people with cheap passes that there will be no room for Junior Citizens of any kind whatsoever. Maybe someone wIll have to do something about The Twilight Fields.
There are two sets of older people: Those mentally and physically active, who occupy country restaurants every lunchtime, and those too feeble to exist independently.
The Twilight Fields are those establishments for the latter described as rest homes. They are like a Mexican horse flea I heard about: there is an entry but no exit. The flea eats and explodes. The old eat and expire. They expire one by one and note that they are a part of a diminishing number. There is nothing to think about but ailments and death, and they line the walls day after day thinking on these things.
Meanwhile, television sets blast out their wares at high volume. Occasional bodily function is all that distinguishes living from dead. There is a joint responsibility here. Many old people give in easily. Many rest home proprietors are too busy to properly encourage them or occupy their diminishing talents. Visitors to these places often treat the old as if they were the very young. "How are we today, then?" (patronising smile); "you're looking a lot better" (to someone barely able to move and with a skin like parchment); "Where's your friend, Jack?" followed by a hurried, "Oh, did he? Well I am sorry." Alan Bennett territory.
The combination of patronising talk, use of first names on first contact, constant heat, regular meals, doctors' visits, and immobility preserves these senior citizens as if they were in some kind of warm vacuum. They are isolated from all risk. In the old days, they would have been dead at 40, 50, or 60 because of germs, or cold, or lack of food, or whatever. But I am not sure whether a senior citizen of the 19th century would envy one of the 20th century his longer years and gradual crumbling away. There is endless room for debate here. And endless room for action; ~action with some dignity, not the sort that reflects the belief that age is about simple games wearing a paper hat.
What price a life without quality? The Mozarts and Michaelangelos of this world had to get along with what they were doing pretty dam'd quick because the grim reaper was industrious in their particular meadows. A man had no sooner written the prelude than the final movement was at hand. No point in being at university at the age of 23 if life expectancy happened to be 30. And yet they had the courage to build vast cathedrals. A hardy lot.
In modern times, the East has much to offer the West in the way of example. Young and old mix to their mutual advantage. There is nothing so barren as a smart English suburb where all the occupants are uprising execs with trim moustaches and matching lawns, a bottle of Chablis in the fridge and a two-berth garage to accompany the two dustbins. Weighed down by self-importance they all have firms' cars and their wives hold coffee mornings. There is no-one over the age of 50 within a mile. And such estates are hell. If there is no blend of young, middle aged and old life ceases to have a balance.
The impetuosity of youth is, on a balanced estate, tempered by the caution of maturity. Buddhism would call it The Middle Way. People of Eastern persuasions believe we treat our old with barbarism. Those who do reach the age of 65, the young-old, are desperately searching through reference books for evidence of people who did remarkable things in their advanced years. Like Churchill, or Helen Bradley, the painter (who had her first exhibition at the age of 65) or de Gaulle, or Adenauer, or even, in a muted sort of way (because she just goes on doing what she has always done, but for ever), the Queen Mother, who waved to us politely for a century , constantly leaving but not going anywhere, before she, too, expired, to everyone's surprise. Some of these oldsters are so intent on what they are doing that they forget to die, like Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland, who began to look like a monument decked out in candyfloss. I am surprised, now, to think that I was once uneasy about being 40. Looking back on my comments of the time I find the following:
"Being a cautious sort of fellow, the kind who builds air-raid shelters at least ten years in advance of a war, I began to take pills that fortify the over-40's rather earlier than most. At the age of 32 to be precise. I did not want, as it were, to be caught short, reasoning that if I were eight years in advance of everyone else in the matter of rejuvenation, I would still be doing the Dashing White Sergeant. immaculate in white gloves, when all my friends were memories. Considering myself, then, free from flagging corpuscles, all my chromosomes leaping about vigorously, I had a shock when the makers of the pills suddenly changed tack and announced that growing old begins at 28 .They had robbed me indiscriminately of four years when I ought to have been fortifying myself instead of lolling about counting the hairs in my comb."
I can only regard this as facetious now that I am more, ahem, mature. Plainly I did not take the subject seriously, although I did make some generalised comments that ring true at this distance in time:
"The breath comes shorter. You can't take whisky like you used to. You tend to cry for help when you slip in the bathroom, and your car insurance has gone down because you no longer burn up the country lanes on Saturday nights. You avoid arguments at parties in case someone invites you outside. You no longer remember how many pints you drank last night, but you know precisely how many hairs there are in your comb. It is not so much that the policemen look younger; everyone looks younger, even the 6O-year-olds, and they talk to you man to man as if there were some affinity, asking you whether you've yet had trouble with your waterworks.
"Some 40-year-olds fracture under the strain. They buy little boats and smuggle things from Tangier, or fall in love with girls of 12. They exercise with great weights in their bedrooms at the coming of night and end up in hospital with hernias. They try to comb their hair over their eyes in some grotesque teenage imitation, then give the game away by talking about Jimmy Durante or Bing Crosby. They condemned their fathers for remembering The War; and now they are the ones who remember. All the questions they put to their fathers are now put to them."
I find it remarkable that a 40-year-old would not expect a 6O-year-old to talk on equal terms. I know some people of 40 who are a bit old for me at 78. What it amounts to is that no age can be properly assessed until one reaches it. I find, now that I am impatient of old people. I fume and fret behind other drivers of my own age. I drift into sleep at funny times of day: deep sleep, too. It lasts half an hour or so. It does not worry me because Churchill did much the same and led the nation to victory at the same time. While he was zizzing away in a boiler suit his friends were taking Tobruk. Was he pickled, I wonder? Like an egg or a frozen mop herring?
I do not hear too well, but that is a family affliction and an advantage because much of what people say is not worth hearing. I adjusted my Nicam television the other day to a point where conversation was entirely clear to me and what I saw was a bouncy sort of girl-child from one of the television news-shows interviewing a salesman at Selfridge's or Harrod's, I forget which, and she asked what people did during the sales. Well, said the assistant, they come in, they look around, choose something, and buy. She looked amazed at this revelation. I was amazed for a different reason. Who are all these frantic youngsters awash in trivialities? What turns them on? Or, more pertinently, how does one turn them off? I lowered the sound to the point of incomprehensibility and all was well with my world once more. (I recommend similar action when watching Test matches: many cricket commentators are only ledger clerks on holiday.)
I have reached the conclusion that if a thought is not put down on paper, it is not worth having. And I can read for hours on end without bother. There seems little point in listening to anyone at all on television if you have Mark Twain and Thurber by your right hand. I once assumed that I would drink a great deal in retirement; that it would be a principal enjoyment; but for some reason one is less able to drink in quantity, so one improves the quality, and there's a mellowing compromise. A little of what you fancy. There was a point in my life when drink was the essential lubrication of my working hours. In small quanatities it inspired better thought. In larger quantities it quelled the restive mind. To drink was to sharpen experience.
In winter, one gets up late and finds that all the younger people have been in motorway crashes while one slept There are pictures of all their company cars looking as if they have been dropped from a great height. Two dozen knicker salesmen have gone to their doom together with three area managers. And for what? They would have been better off walking. Human progress is not necessarily advanced by the inventiveness of humans.
One has a few shares and reads the business sections of newspapers to impress others; and these sections record how the young employees are being screwed to produce better profit. It is called Efficiency. But I know what it really is. It is The System, grinding on and finding its victims at all and every age. Sometimes workers are able to grind the bosses and sometimes it is the other way around. Neither side ever learns that mutual tolerance might produce a better result.
A load of old shibboleths are proved wrong. The meek do not inherit the earth. The earth inherits them. Turn the other cheek and the nearest human will slap it. As one door closes another door closes. Early to bed and early to rise means no more than that you are either a milkman, a newsagent, or an infant. In the end you wonder what it was all about and the best of us have no idea. MarIon Brando was mumbling out of my TV set and he said something like that. My mother sometimes thought "it was all a dream." Shakespeare ("all the world's a stage") obviously had the identical thought so, for once, my mother was in good company. On the whole, the world rushes about looking for something to achieve. There is nothing to achieve. People of whatever ability can only discover what is already there. Albert Einstein, he of the theory of relativity, with his e equals mc squared, merely saw what was staring him in the face. His one distinction was that nobody else had seen it. Great art? Painters invariably say that something beyond them flows through the brush strokes; and the greatest art merely reflects, badly, the realities of life. Or it's modern, and it doesn't, which is worse. Great music? It echoes a rhythm the world moves to.
I still agree, on the whole, with some conclusions made at the age of 40: "There is a psychology of age. The young and old want to be older. The middle ones want to be younger. All the 16-year-olds say they are nearly 17, and all the 69-year-olds say they are going on 70. Meanwhile, all those who are 30 tomorrow are running around, up to the stroke of midnight, shouting to anyone who listens that they are only 29. Growing old does not begin at 20 or 30. It begins the day one is born."
To be serious about life is, I suspect, to mistake its purpose. We are no more than the leaves moved by unpredictable wmds. But one learns a httle along the way. Meanwhile, I would like to examine the matter further, and to suggest, first, that people in retirement have more power than they think.
The need
for a forum
Over the next 40 years, the elderly will form an increasing proportion of the population. For those involved, this is both strength and challenge. The challenge arises from resentment in the young that their burdens are increased by the unproductive old. This view is reflected in comments such as these, by (the late) Mr Auberon Waugh, the middle-aged son (born, 1939; recreation, gossip) of a famous father (Evelyn) :
"It is people's reluctance to die which is the real threat to prosperity in the western world - not only to be measured in terms of bankrupt undertakers, thrown into unemployment; but also in the drain on health and welfare resources to support this huge, unproductive population of oldies."
Wisely, he took his own advice, and exited, though I doubt whether he had such noble sacrifice in mind when he wrote his words.
The strength of the great army of the mature lies in the increasing numbers, which bring about a better potential for use of collective will. If those who have reached retirement age turn to books on the subject they are unlikely to find much that does not reflect a commonly-held philosophy: that here is an era of pastimes, not purpose.
A man gets "under the feet" at home; his wife feels her authority in the kitchen challenged. They become intertwined in a perpetual boredom and there is a sense of waiting for something unnamed and, for some, unnamable. That something is the end of existence and imaginative nightmares about the means by which it might be brought about.
In a different age, an age more dangerous and more spiritual, Sir Thomas More ( 1478- 1535) wrote in his own obituary notice,
"... that he may not shudder with fear at the thought of approaching death, but may meet it gladly with longing for Christ, and that he may find death not completely death for himself, but rather the gateway to a happier life. I beg you, kind reader, attend him with your prayers while he stiIl lives, and also when he has done with life."
To each his own, of course. In this age, morbidity is ill-placed. A person taking early retirement might have more years ahead of him than an Elizabethan's entire lifetime; enough years, in fact to be a second Mozart, who died at 35, or an Alexander the Great, who died at 33: so how is he to spend it? The problem has been endlessly considered but never properly addressed. There is no shortage of suggestions:
Spend more time with the family: get together all the aunts and uncles and cousins, those you normally meet only at funerals, and talk about past times in a convivial atmosphere; look up old friends; take up handicrafts; do voluntary work; acquire a pet; travel; cycle (but consider the danger of accident); play tennis, go rambling, play squash (but consider first whether it is too physically demanding), swim; join a society; take up amateur dramatics; find a suitable class at night school; "and here, by the way, a list of suitable addresses..."
If you do opt for Abroad, consider the ravages of tetanus, polio, typhoid, cholera, hepatitis, and the need (if you have had a colostomy) to take an extra bag. If you stay at home beware anaemia, arthritis, osteo and rheumatoid, bronchitis, cataracts and the dreaded dementia. Then there are diabetes, diverticulitis (bowels to you), gallstones, gout, heart attack, hiatus hernia (which brings about heartburn and regurgitation of acid fluid into the mouth), osteoporosis (lack of calcium), Parkinson's Disease, shingles, strokes, thyroid disease, varicose veins and so on. With more useful addresses...
Books of advice are not necessarily bundles of fun. They have a faint whiff of hockey sticks and starched aprons. They are redolent of bingo on Wednesday afternoons and old-time dancing, or a sing-song round the piano with its echoes of yesteryear. How about a more positive approach? How about saying that all the diseases on God's earth are not necessarily homing in on you because you are entitled to a bus pass? That they are milling about ready to strike anyone, anywhere, of any age, yea, even those who write the books of advice? That until they arrive we can put them out of mind? How about saying that the bunk about cycling and tennis and swimming is another way of describing someone as persona non grata? If you are not cycling, playing tennis and swimming the day before your retirement, then the hell with it the day after. I have seen people of 90 whose only exercise was lighting a large cigar and they had no ambitions to change it for a bicycle.
It is commonly supposed that a person has two careers: the one he follows to provide a living and the other which has eluded him and for which he has wistfully yearned. The theory is that the builder is really a composer and the composer is a builder; the tycoon shapes silverware in his garage at week-ends and wishes he lived in the Shetlands; the crofter worked on the Stock Exchange and the underwriter retires to the Lake District.
Supposition is partly right. It is possible to track down these people with their dualistic aspirations. Newspapers do it regularly. They would not do it if their subjects were commonplace rather than anachronisms. The baking ovens of the Lake District bear proud testimony to their advancing skills. The organic acres of Wales supplant the busy interactions of The Gay Hussar. But I would suggest that this duality theory has severe limitations. A man sufficiently motivated will not put off his calling until tomorow.
Evelyn Waugh, since we have seen fit to mention him in passing, was not so much a man as a book. He could have been no other. The accountant, the journalist, the policeman, the architect, the planner and the social worker, having left the carousal which they could at no point stop during the progression of their careers, are not unwilling to take up some degree of its movements in a less demanding, but similar, capacity. A couple of months' rest is sufficient to rekindle the flame.
The Establishment realises this and long ago prepared its own solutions. An edifice to perfect retirement stands in London as the oldest second chamber in the world. Here is the House of Lords, a forum where those distinguished in all fields of national life (sic) can discuss (as Pears Cyclopaedia defines it) "issues of importance free from the reins of party discipline." Watched over by their most senior bishops they are comforted in this life and well prepared for the next. In the meantime, their contribution to the nation's affairs is exactly measured by their own inclinations, and if they feel the need for rest, they can nod off in a comfortable and secure establishment where rape, assault, robbery with violence, hunger and cold are unknown and where bars are at hand to stimulate the active, or calm the troubled. This should be the blueprint of all retired people. There is no reason why the growing legions of the retired should not, by their united will, demand two things:
I. That there should be a Chamber of Elders made up of their numbers to watch over, influence, and guide the deliberations of all local or regional councils throughout the United Kingdom, these elders to be selected and appointed by others of their kind in yearly elections. (This is in no way a call for the return of aldermen, who were senior councillors of either sex elevated by their fellows.)
2. That each town and city in the land should have a register of skills formerly practiced by the retired which can be consulted by business leaders and others requiring occasional expertise on any given subject. The effect of this would be to establish, in Britain, a principle widely accepted elsewhere, and strongly in the East, that elders have a degree of wisdom which comes directly out of experience, and that it is an asset denied the younger and more active sections of the population. The benefits to the elders are obvious: the sharp divisions between retired and unretired would be blurred; unease presently felt by the unoccupied would be replaced by a sense of purpose.
Society today isolates the retired with benign intent. It excludes them from meaningful action or dialogue. The retired are effectively shelved and become none-persons, the uninvolved minority. Any solutions offered by the well-meaning are anodyne.
American society is worse. Their elderly form enclaves in sun-spots such as Florida, adopt garish dress, and pretend that they are getting younger by the day. They reveal limbs that are too ample and fissured for pleasurable viewing. Their massive self-deception leads them to believe that they have the drive and capacities of youth, so they grow old disgracefully and without dignity. Theirs is not an example any self-respecting person should follow.
The changes I am urging will not come about because governments feel like providing them. They could come about because they are demanded. and demonstrated to be of real value. The retired have the capacity to demand since they are, as we have noted, an army whose numbers are increasing. They have not recognised a cause so they have not rallied sufficiently to make their voice heard. (Some have marched about pensions, but this, essentially, is an appeal to reason without threat.) To achieve the purposes I have described requires militancy. The action taken can be economic and it can be political. Politicians will do a great deal for millions of votes if those wielding them are sufficiently cohesive to make them count. Those who rely on the elderly for their trade - travel agencies, restaurants, shops, stores - might well prove sensitive.
A change would benefit all; and it must begin with the re-education of those who will, in their turn, be elderly: whose interests could they better serve? Meanwhile, where are the enemies?
Ageism is as old as sexism and as virulent. In both cases, the rule should be: The best for the job, whatever the age. Or, for that matter, the sex. If all the 20-year-olds happen to be better than the 50-year-olds so be it; but it is hardly likely. If wisdom and judgment are required, it is noticeable that there are no 20-year-old judges, but there are a great many over the age of 60.
Examples of ageism are to be discovered any day of the week, so there is a great battle to be fought. The skirmishing has hardly begun.
So go to it. For myself, I shall take a nap and think of Tobruk. Your victory might well be assured by the time I awaken.
To part 3
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
14 June, 2009