Alive, Alive Oh!

by Diana Athill

  He then took sixteen of my pictures and contrived to hang every one of them (he runs a gallery, so is a master of closehanging), and on the day of the move, with the help of his son Orlando, went ahead of me, arranged the books on their shelves and my various ornaments in clever places, and made my bed, so the pretty little room had become mine before I set foot in it. I have yet to meet any fellow-resident who had such a good start.

  This it was, I believe, that made it possible for me to be so quickly sure that I would be contented here.

  Newspaper stories about nasty happenings in homes for old people, when untrained, probably underpaid and obviously ill-chosen staff have bullied and manhandled helpless residents, have been shocking, but no more so to us, who are residents in such a home, than to outsiders. Being old ourselves, we naturally feel for the victims, but apart from that, such stories have nothing to do with us. Our home – and no doubt the same could be said of many others – is one in which such happenings are unthinkable. Basically, this is because ours is not one of the many run for profit.

  Ours is run by a charity founded in 1876 by Lady Mary Feilding (not a spelling mistake), the eldest daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, with the help of God. Whatever one’s own feeling about God, it would be a mistake to belittle Lady Mary’s, because her unwavering belief in Him shaped her whole life, and did a great deal to shape ours. She never made any decision without a period of earnest prayer, and the many decisions she had to make in the course of organizing what came to be called the Mary Feilding Guild all turned out to be wise and practical. No doubt, when putting them into practice, being the daughter of an earl was also helpful. It is not likely that the daughter of a country parson, still less of a baker or a blacksmith, even if as genuinely pious as Lady Mary, could have persuaded so many rich and important people to contribute support to the cause she favoured.

  She had identified a crying need: working gentlewomen whose working days were over. At that time no gentlewoman would have been working for her living if she had any family to support her, nor would she have had the training for the kind of work which enabled her to earn enough money to accumulate savings. She would almost always have been a governess, and only very rarely would her employers have loved her enough to keep her on for free until she died. For such unfortunate women it was a case of job over, food and shelter gone.

  The Guild helped such women in many different ways. God saw to it that Lady Mary was supplied with shrewd financial advice (letters reveal that whenever someone helpful turned up she was certain that God had sent him or her). As time went by and the nature of society changed, the Guild’s nature changed too, until it ended up with a considerable chunk of valuable property on which stands the present home, now described as ‘A Retirement Home for the Active Elderly’, which takes men as well as women. The residents now pay for their keep, although a good deal less than they would in any other comfortable and well-run retirement home; and no one has ever been asked to leave on account of running out of money. A fund exists to deal with such an emergency. It is not a nursing home, but care is available as and when it becomes needed, up to any point at which hospital treatment has to be resorted to. The ideal is that we should go on living in our rooms until we die.

  There is one important respect in which Lady Mary’s touch, in spite of all the changes, can still be felt. She was always strict about respect: the people being helped by the Guild must never feel humiliated. And this rule of hers has been faithfully preserved by generation after generation of her successors. Residents must always be addressed by their surnames and titles; their rooms must be absolutely theirs, no one entering must forget to knock; they must be free to come and go as they wish, leading their lives in a way as normal as their health permits. And in addition to this civilized respect for the residents, there is obviously great care taken in the employment of the staff, who genuinely like old people. Soon after I arrived I said to one of them that I’d been surprised to discover how interesting one very old resident, who looked as though she was almost past communication, turned out to be. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘I think everyone here is interesting if you take the trouble to get to know them.’ And I have now been here five years without ever coming across any exception to this pleasing attitude; and on the few occasions when I have been less than well, the comfort of being kindly looked after was inexpressible.

  Being free to live as one wishes does sometimes have unexpected results. One of the four women with whom I shared a table at lunch when I first arrived – I shall call her Hildegard – struck me as a forceful character. She wore bright coloured dresses which dated from the 1960s, and on hearing that I was still driving, said briskly, ‘Good. You can take me to Kew.’ The drive from Highgate to Kew, across pretty well the full width of London, could scarcely be more tiresome, so I said equally briskly that no, I couldn’t, and was relieved when she accepted my rudeness calmly. Someone then told me that Hildegard, though spindly and with one paralysed arm, travelled to India every summer, managing the journey by ruthlessly telling people to help her and not wasting energy by minding if they failed to respond. My friend added rather oddly: ‘Have you seen Hildegard’s room?’ This was a question that I was asked by several other people, so eventually I went to see why . . . and it was worth the expedition. The room was so crammed with bags, boxes and small pieces of furniture that it was literally impossible to see where her bed was: each night she must have had to dig her way into it. I could distinguish the presence of a large and rather beautiful dolls’ house and several teddy bears, and there seemed to be a chest of drawers against one wall. ‘But Hildegard,’ I said, ‘how on earth do you get things in or out of that?’ ‘Oh, that,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t opened that for eight years.’ She then scrambled her way to the door into her shower room and shoved it ajar – it wouldn’t open any further – and that little room was stuffed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. (Hildegard was not dirty. Every corridor has extra lavatories and spare bathrooms for those who dislike showers.) The normal procedure here is that our rooms are cleaned for us once a week. Hildegard’s room could never have been cleaned, which must, in the past, have distressed the cleaning staff. They had, however, got used to it. This was how Hildegard liked it, so that was that: an attitude which I found wholly admirable. And which, alas, I am not sure that we could count on today. Our management does its best to fight free of the web of red tape woven by authorities in their attempts to guard against horrors in care homes (attempts that are necessary and laudable, but can verge on the over-careful); but it would be a miracle if they could always win.

  Those teddy bears of Hildegard’s: they pushed me into a faux pas. I discovered that they were not the only ones – indeed, that from time to time a teddy-bears’ picnic was held in the library, and was well attended. ‘How very odd,’ I said to Mary, next to whom I sat at lunch, ‘how really very odd it is that so many old women still treasure their teddy bears,’ and I fear that I must have smirked. Her smile was slightly vague. And a few days later, passing the open door of her room, what did I see but a procession of five little teddy bears on a window sill, and on her bed . . . a pink plush elephant. What made this even odder was that Mary, without telling any of us, had for many years been working away at a very thoroughly researched biography of Robespierre’s younger brother – an alarmingly boring man – which we learnt about only when its publication was announced a few weeks before her death. After reading a biography of Jung I had concluded that psychiatrists were people who could make a little nuttiness go a very long way. This opinion was confirmed when I learnt that both Hildegard and Mary were retired psychiatrists.

  On hearing where I now live, people often say, ‘Isn’t that the home which won’t take you unless you can read Proust in French?’ – a joke we find tedious. A lot of us are North Londoners and all of us had to be able to raise enough money to keep ourselves here for at least most of our old age, so we tend to be reasonably well-educated middle-class people with
a wide variety of backgrounds. Five years ago, when I arrived, there were no men among us. At present there are two, one a retired doctor, the other an entomologist (ants were, I believe, his speciality, but he knows a great deal about a lot of other things as well). The dearth of men is at least partly explained by widows living longer than widowers, and widowed men being more likely to be scooped up by single women than the other way round, owing to the weakness so many women have for looking after the helpless and/or being married come what may. (Having tasted the delights of being utterly free of any domestic responsibilities, I find that weakness very hard to understand.)

  The independence allowed us by this place has much to be said for it, in addition to our being treated as adult human beings. It makes it easy for us to keep ourselves to ourselves if that is what we want to do, so that living here is less like being back at school than it seemed at first. That and a twinge of dismay at being surrounded by so many old people were the two worries that hovered over my first week here, only to be quickly dispersed. The likeness to being at a boarding school can’t be wholly denied, but is very superficial, and alarm at so much oldness is simply resentment of one’s own old age – something one gets used to because of having no alternative. Anyone here who persists in it soon begins to seem absurd. Not having to be sociable as a condition for being here results in slow gravitation towards congenial people, leading to real friendships. During the year when I was waiting to hear from the Guild that they had a room for me – the time when my decision had been made but I didn’t yet know what it involved – I thought quite often that I would not necessarily lose touch with my old friends, but I can’t remember expecting to make new ones. That, however, has happened.

  Old-age friendships are slightly different from those made in the past, which consisted largely of sharing whatever happened to be going on. What happens to be going on for us now is waiting to die, which is of course a bond of a sort, but lacks the element of enjoyability necessary to friendship. In my current friendships I find that element not in our present circumstances but in excursions into each other’s pasts. A shared sense of humour is necessary, together with some degree of curiosity. Given those, we become for each other wonderfully interesting stories, which arouse genuine concern, admiration and affection. To begin with I thought, ‘My word, this house is bursting with stories! Someone – me? – ought to go round with a tape recorder, collecting them.’ But then I realized that what I was calling ‘stories’ were – of course! – lives still being lived, not material for entertainment. They must be revealed only by those living them, brought forth only by warmth, sympathy and mutual esteem, as the material of friendship.

  As examples, two of the women I have come to know best. It is a pity that the word ‘dainty’ has become suspect, because restored to its dictionary meaning – ‘delicate, elegant, graceful, pretty, refined, scrupulous’ – it is precisely the right word for Minna, who arrived here on the same day as I did, 15 December 2009. She was born in the East End of London to an overworked, short-tempered mother and at a very early age had the care of six younger siblings dumped on her shoulders. At the age of eleven she tried to run away from this uneasy home, knocking on doors to ask for work (she got no further than two streets away). The one thing she always knew was that she wanted to learn, and being apprenticed to a firm of milliners did not assuage this need. Luckily, however, she discovered Toynbee Hall, the East End organization that saved so many young people like her, and it became what she describes as ‘one of my universities’. She had to go further afield to find the other one.

  Like many Jewish families, hers was scattered widely. It included an aunt who lived in Cape Town, ran a millinery business, and offered to take Minna on. I think she was seventeen when she arrived in Cape Town, to be greeted rather fiercely by the aunt, who turned out to be disconcertingly like her mother, and put to work selling hats to Boer ladies whose accents she couldn’t understand and whose names she couldn’t spell. Quite soon, however, she heard of a group of people who met regularly to listen to records of classical music, and there she caught the eye of a rather older man, a pharmacist. Almost at once he proposed to her (she must have been irresistible – tiny, with a halo of golden hair and the most transparent delicacy of mind and heart) – and she, shocked, refused him because she was sure that everyone would believe that, being penniless, she was marrying him for his money. It took him all of three weeks to overcome this principled resistance. She then discovered that as well as knowing a great deal about music, he could never go out without dropping into a bookshop, and never leave a bookshop without at least two new books in his pocket, and thus began her second ‘university’. Their children grew up to be clever and successful, and Minna is certainly among the best-read women in this place, as well as being a gifted water-colourist and a most discriminating listener to music. But what is most remarkable about her is her absolutely unshakeable, though very quiet, honesty and integrity.

  By an odd coincidence, my second ‘example’, Rita, also came to England from South Africa, with an exceptionally intelligent and able husband. Her father had the foresight to move his family from Vienna to Cape Town before they absolutely had to take such a step, so Rita’s girlhood was spent happily in that beautiful place, and it was there that her husband became a successful barrister. They came to England with two small children because his opposition to apartheid was threatening him with serious trouble, in spite of the fact that he would not be able to practise here without starting again from scratch. They had no friends here, so he had to turn his hand at once to uncongenial jobs, and she too had to find work where she could, while raising the children. Their struggle resulted in their becoming an extraordinarily close-knit family. While it was going on it must have felt not only hard, but very long. In retrospect, however, their successful establishment in this country looks surprisingly quick and complete, and clearly this was largely because of Rita’s energy, optimism, and openness to new experiences and new people. If Rita finds a new restaurant it is not just good, it is beautiful, and new friends are lovely people, and they stay lovely too, because she is tireless in keeping her many and varied friendships in good repair. Her generosity is unfailing. One of the younger residents in this place, Rita still drives her car, and whisks people off on shopping excursions and so on at the drop of a hat. She also follows a wide range of interests and goes regularly to a jazz club, a creative-writing class, a poetry-reading group and a discussion group run by the University of the Third Age, and she has organized a debating society within our home. She makes me feel lazy, in spite of kindly making more allowances than I do myself for the difference between our ages, and she has allowed me very rewarding access to her family.

  And these are only two of the people whose company I enjoy in this place, and who have added considerably to the interest of my own life. As has the company of other people who, like me, miss their gardens a great deal.

  My balcony overlooks the lawn, with beyond it the gardens and trees of the other houses in the street – Highgate is a bosky place. There is a magnolia tree as high as the house just outside my window, with a large and floriferous Japanese crab apple just beyond it. To start with I could potter about in the garden, and even plant things, provided I didn’t offend the gardeners. I gathered that the place had been a jungle until the Guild had found them, man and wife, an incredibly hard-working pair who come only once a week and somehow manage to keep the place spick and span. Given the chance, I fear I would have offended them, because their passion for tidiness makes them too severe with shrubs, which they chop ruthlessly into square or doughnut shapes regardless of their nature, which deeply offends me, and also the other ex-gardeners among the residents.

  We began to mutter, but only mildly and between ourselves, until the arrival of a new resident, who moved into the room next to mine: Elva, quite young (only in her mid-eighties), energetic, in no way institutionalized, who saw no reason why we shouldn’t ask for what we wanted. Lo
ok, she said, there’s all that long narrow bit behind the house which is a horrid mess (it had been neglected because it is rather shady): why shouldn’t we be given that to develop and be allowed to garden it ourselves? Why not, indeed; Elva had identified four people who, like her, were still capable of hands-on gardening. They didn’t, alas, include me because by now I have become too physically wobbly to be of any use, so all that I could contribute was enthusiasm and a few ideas. She also had an ally in Vera, who some years ago had successfully won the right to garden a square flower bed near a door into the house, and a long narrow one beside the path leading to it, and who still does garden that bit successfully in spite of deteriorating eyesight. After a short campaign, we were granted the shady garden to be our very own, and were free to discover that the soil was a mixture of clay and builder’s rubble. Undeterred, Elva contributed a tremendously sturdy and kind grandson, appropriately named Hector, who set to and dug out three large barrowfuls of brick, and gardening began.

  It then occurred to me that although I couldn’t do anything, I could buy some plants. There is a little narrow bed near the start of our area, which I thought would look good with six roses in it. Those I offered to buy, and the others liked the idea well enough to help me to pay for the roses, which arrived bare-rooted from David Austen’s last November. There were six large holes waiting for them, dug by kind able-bodied people – which had revealed that although that bed contained no bricks it was composed of the vilest clay, made more forbidding by the fact that the plants’ arrival had been preceded by a week of heavy rain. There was, however, nowhere else to put them, so we had to hope that if we added a lot of compost when we planted them, they would survive. The team was asked to stand by for planting after lunch.