I’d lie in bed imagining they were laughing at me, and, if they had a friend to stay, I would be completely unable to say: ‘In future, could you introduce me to anyone I don’t know who’s coming to stay in my house… and first ask my permission, anyway?’ I felt like someone in a surreal play, tortured by strange intruders. I hardly dared ask for the rent.
Now I leave crazy Post-it notes on the stairs. ‘Darling – rent’s due. Could I have it by Thursday? And PLEASE keep your radio down before 9 a.m. on Sunday.’
The other day, when there was a party going on beyond my garden that was keeping the whole street awake, I simply put on my slippers and dressing-gown, marched right around the block, banged on their door and told them in no uncertain terms that I was trying to get some sleep, as were millions of others, and could they at least shut the windows? Even the sight of a couple of teenagers sniggering at me on the stairs didn’t faze me.
I’ve always been very tolerant when it comes to people smoking in my house, allowing them to smoke anywhere, even the garden. But now if they suggest they smoke in the garden I simply refuse to let them. ‘You can perfectly well smoke in the house!’ I say, pointing to the various ashtrays laid around. ‘I’m not having you sneak off and having private chats with other smokers without my being in on the fun. And anyway, I like the smell.’
And, final nail in the coffin of shyness, faced with an empty dance-floor surrounded by people unable to be the first to start off the rock ’n’ rolling (yes, it was one of those middle-aged things) I went up to a complete stranger and asked him to dance.
Restaurants
In the past in restaurants I’d try to hide stuff that I couldn’t eat under a cabbage leaf rather than let on to a waiter that what he’d given me was inedible. Stuff that I was paying for! These days, however, I can send things back. I’m not horrible. I don’t humiliate waiters and demand to see the manager. I just give a great big smile and say ‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but I think this fish is a tiny bit off.’ Or sometimes I say: ‘You couldn’t warm this soup up for me, darling? It’s a bit on the nippy side.’ (Of course when they bring it back in a better condition, it’s worth confidently saying: ‘Oh, you’re a complete angel, darling, I’m sorry to be such a boring old fusspot’– or something like that. You may laugh and think I sound like a lunatic, but I can assure you, it gets me what I want.)
I think I may well be turning into an Old Bat. Certainly I now have the cunning to precede every call I make to a service industry or complaints bureau or, indeed, almost anyone except my closest friends and relations, with the words, ‘Hello. I am a pensioner…’ I’m thinking, when I’m a bit older, to add the words: ‘… and I have cancer’ just to make sure I get the attention I deserve.
Strangers
I actually smile at strangers in the street. And I don’t mean I’m one of those terrified little old ladies who go round with a permanent smile on their faces… my heart always bleeds for them because I imagine they were cruelly treated in their childhood. But sometimes I just dare to smile at someone particularly threatening – and I mean a proper, all the way up to the eyes smile, not a nervous twitch – and though I don’t often get a smile back, it’s certainly worth it when I do. I’ve even been known to smile at hoodies. ‘Hello, darling!’ I don’t actually say to them, but I’m thinking it. ‘Hello you angel! I’m an old lady and I can smile at you because I am no threat to you whatsoever!’
They don’t scare me any more
The confidence comes, you see, not with just not feeling others are a threat, but actually no longer being a threat. And if I’m not frightened of you and you’re not frightened of me, then that breeds confidence – and friendliness – on either side. When I was young, everyone older than me was frightening. Forty-year-olds were frightening. Now they’re just like big kids.
When I was young I used to dread going to hospital because I always felt so powerless. But the last time I was in, I got the hang of it. I refused to be called Virginia – and once the nurses start calling you by your surname (in my case ‘Ms. Ironside’) they automatically, if involuntarily, show a great deal more respect.
I scored two victories last time I was in. A nurse who looked as old as my mother (but who, I had to remind myself, was probably younger than me), tried to insist I wore slippers to walk down the corridor. I simply laughed and said: ‘I don’t wear slippers.’ She insisted and I repeated: ‘I don’t think you heard, my dear. I don’t wear slippers!’ Collapse of stout party.
Next they tried to force me into a pair of hot white stockings in the middle of summer to stop me getting an embolism (I think). ‘Darlings,’ I said, grandly, ‘if I wanted to look like an understudy from Pagliacci, I would have painted my face white and brought a red nose with me into hospital. I am too old for fun and games like that.’ As none of the poor mites had any idea of what I was talking about, the white stockings were quickly bundled out of the way.
Public speaking
The prospect of reciting Autumn by Shelley at a school concert when I was young reduced me to a gibbering wreck. My palms sweated, my legs trembled, my heart thundered and I felt sick. Now – I can hardly bear to admit this – but if anyone asks who would like to deliver a eulogy at a funeral, I feel my hand shooting up before they’ve even got the words out. I am doing a one-woman show at Edinburgh. How on earth has this come about? It’s not just because I love public speaking. It’s also because of experience. Forced into talking to ladies’ luncheon clubs by an editor when I worked on a women’s magazine in the 70s, I now realize that I can talk to a bunch of old ladies who are all snoring their heads off and the world doesn’t come to an end. Having done a book tour, I know that if one person – a very crazy and probably homeless person at that – is the only member of the audience, I can still stagger my way through a script. And if it’s bad, and I get just a sad handful of applause – for which I’m lucky because I’ve often had to face the sound of the scraping of chairs as people left all the way through the performance – it simply doesn’t matter all that much. I merely try to tell myself, as I experience the shame and disappointment, that ‘This, too, will pass.’ And because I’m older, I know that it will. (It’s odd – the confidence of age doesn’t seem to apply to driving or travelling, about which on the whole older people get more frightened rather than more confident. But perhaps that’s because they know too many of the possible pitfalls – see Anxiety (in Ailments).
It’s no good telling a young person that. How are they to know you’re right? But when you’re older you know that nothing lasts, neither happiness nor misery. And that knowledge makes you a whole lot braver.
Where does the bravado come from?
We’re braver, partly, because we don’t fear death so much. We know it’s got to come sooner or later, so there’s much more point in living for the moment. Which leads on to the feeling that there’s not much time left. At sixty-five you’d be lucky to have twenty years left of life, and it’s silly spending any of those twenty years sitting through crap films or talking to people you don’t like or doing things you don’t want to do. I don’t mean that one should forgo the duties that society imposes on us and be totally irresponsible, but perhaps we needn’t feel quite as beholden as we used to. We’ve spent our lives doing things for other people. It’s our turn to have a few people, just sometimes, do things for us.
The confidence to ask for help
When I was young I did everything for myself. I changed my own tyres, I painted my own ceilings, I repaired my own furniture and I made my own picture frames. I re-caned the seats of chairs and wired up new lamps. I grew my plants from seed and I even, once, re-hung my own front door, having shaved a bit off the bottom to make it fit. That’s what we did in the 60s and 70s, partly to show that we were as good as men at doing practical things but partly, in my case at least, because it was tremendous fun. I once made an entire ping-pong table for the family. Hung my own wallpaper. The only things I drew the line at were clea
ning my own chimneys, carpeting my own floors and felling my own trees.
Now? Well, let’s be honest. It would not be impossible for me to do any of those things. But the great thing about being old is that you don’t have to. And, when you don’t do these things, you don’t lose any face. I would have felt a bit of an idiot if, when I was thirty, I was found standing on a roadside begging for help from a man because I’d got a puncture. I’d have been horrified if a man asked, politely, if he could carry my suitcase up the steps at a railway station. I would have cringed if I’d used a free disabled toilet without being disabled. But now, as an older woman, I don’t feel I lose any dignity at all when I ask for help. If there’s anything that needs doing that requires a bit more effort than I can be bothered to make, my mantra now is ‘I’ll get a man in.’
Of course, in an emergency, I’d be out there with my Black and Decker, no worries. If battling grannies can ward off robbers by wielding mops (and every day one reads of these resourceful creatures who repel drug-crazed robbers simply by gurning at them and boxing their ears), I could, if I wanted to, build my own shelves. But I just don’t want to any more.
Us sixty-year-olds are part of a blessed generation. When we were young we were idolized, as young people – because young people had only just been discovered. We have had free education, and a pretty good health service. We’ve never directly experienced a war. Even now, however lame or crippled we may be, we feel ourselves to be in some way special – we’re not, of course, and we know it intellectually, but since we’ve always been treated as new, fresh and interesting, unsurprisingly, for lots of us, that feeling has stuck.
We are, in our sixties at least (and don’t let’s think about some of the horrors that may await us), caught in the wonderful interface between youth and ancientness. The old French saying runs ‘Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait’– which means ‘If the young only knew, if the old only could’. But in our sixties we actually have the chance to both know and be able.
Bliss.
4
Spare Time
If you want to get a favour done
by some obliging friend,
And want a promise, safe and sure,
on which you may depend,
Don’t go to him who always has
much leisure time to plan,
If you want your favour done,
just ask the busy man.
The man with leisure never has
a moment he can spare,
He’s always ‘putting off’ until
his friends are in despair.
But he whose every waking hour
is crowded full of work
Forgets the art of wasting time,
he cannot stop to shirk.
So when you want a favour done,
and want it right away,
Go to the man who constantly
works twenty hours a day
He’ll find a moment somewhere,
that has no other use
And help you, while the idle man
is framing an excuse.
Anonymous
‘The problem with retired people,’ said a young friend of mine the other day, ‘is that they’re so incredibly busy.’
When you retire, you often wonder what on earth you’re going to be doing with all the time you’ve got. But all I can advise you to do is to make the most of those few short days that you have, after retirement, when you feel just a teensy bit bored. Parkinson’s Law is: ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’ Well, his law applies just as well to leisure.
After you’ve given Saturday over to the grandchildren, Sunday over to having people to lunch and Monday for the reading for the bookclub (if you belong to one, of course. I have other interests – ballroom dancing being one); then Tuesday writing all those complaining letters on behalf of the Residents’ Association, and Wednesday doing a stint of Volunteer Reading at the local school, followed by Thursday – genealogy day – and Friday, catching up on cooking, cleaning, shopping, phoning, emailing and generally staring at the computer for hours on end – there’s not much time in between except for the odd snooze. And as for the gardening… and the charity work… God knows when there’ll be time for those.
Here are some suggestions – and pros and cons – for those who find, after retirement, that they are at a loose end.
Get a new life
It’s quite tempting, isn’t it? Re-invent yourself? It’s true, you could place yourself in an artificial environment, like a plant, and try to produce one last fruit even though it’s the middle of your winter. These late flowerers tend to veer away from their old careers and do what they say they really wanted to do all along, if only they’d had the time. Often this involves things like learning about life in the court of Louis XIV or the intricacies of the Suffrage Movement. They’re happy slaving away over hot essays with a mug of Horlicks by their side, and some even go away for the odd week to attend seminars and lectures.
Frankly, the very idea of starting up learning again makes my heart sink. First of all, being a writer, the idea of writing an essay for nothing seems to me to make no sense whatsoever. I’m so used to writing for a living that I can barely dash off a thank-you letter without attaching an invoice. Secondly, surely, I feel, I did all that essay-writing when I was young? Could I really bear to sit chewing my pencil, trying to eke out another 200 words about the development, say, of Public Health in Bedfordshire between 1858 and 1859 – and then hand it in to some twelve-year-old chit of a professor who has the power – not to mention temerity – actually to mark my stuff?
I thought I’d said goodbye to the university refectory, the grimness of a locker, and the sheer terror inspired by a library.
The other problem about getting a new life is that learning a new skill just isn’t that easy when you’re old. The best time to learn things is probably when you’re about seven… but when you’re just about to turn seventy the old brain cells aren’t working with such agility as they used to. The synapses are shrivelling, and our mental pathways have already got worn, like old cart-tracks. The soil of our brain is no longer soft and malleable, but needs a great deal of drilling and hacking to penetrate.
You can, of course, take up something you’ve never tried in your life, and use bits of your brain previously untouched by human thought, such as learning to become a blues pianist or trying to replicate the craft of Chinese pottery-making in the nineteenth century. But rather than become a mediocre water-colourist at sixty-five, wouldn’t it be better to build on something you already know something about, and are familiar with? Look at subjects in which you already have a grounding and work on them? Were you an expert dressmaker when you were young? Could you now go back to it or branch out into upholstering, a skill along the same lines – rather than try to learn how to draw from scratch, a near-impossible task when you’re ancient?
The problem with getting a new life, if that’s your aim, is that so often you die half-way through it. I’ve known countless friends move to Italy to convert an old farmhouse and then – bingo, just as they’re about to put the final tile on the new roof, one of them pops off, leaving the other with the ghastly burden of a vast Italian estate and no one to share it with.
Don’t get a new life
One reason I’m so against getting a new life is that I’ve been trying most of my life to get a new life, and I’ll tell you why I’m so pleased now to stick with the one I’ve got. When I was young, a woman’s aim was never much more than to get a secretarial job and then marry and have children. I knew I didn’t want a career, I had a Career Mum and I didn’t like it.
It’s true that when I was about ten, I harboured vague ambitions of becoming a world-famous opera singer (emphasis, of course, on the ‘world-famous’). Musically, I was reasonably good at the piano, though certainly didn’t excel at it. But then my father gave me a 78 rpm record (a big old heavy plastic disc) of Lily Pons singing Delibes’
s ‘Bell Song’ from Lakme– a staggering piece of coloratura. And I found that, after a bit of practice, I got the hang of coloratura singing. My pitch has always been pretty good. And I absolutely loved singing along with Lily.
Then there was the duet from La Traviata and soon I found that I could sing along with both parts, man and woman, pretty spot on. I realized that I had a rather good range. And although I never asked for singing lessons, I secretly longed for years to be an opera singer. (About ten years ago, when I was fifty-five, I did have a singing lesson and have to say I was rather crushed when the young girl teaching me, clearly clueless, didn’t seem to be remotely impressed by my voice.)
All through my life I’d had yearnings to be things other than a writer or journalist. There was a moment, when I was twenty-eight, when I longed to be an academic of some sort. I applied to go to university, but half-way through the second term I cracked up completely, was carried out of the library by men in white coats and put into a nursing home in Primrose Hill. Then I got it into my head that I’d like to be a teacher. I signed up for the course, and dreamed of giving up journalism and running a school – as my great-aunt had done in the 40s. But after ten days, I dropped out.
But about five years ago, when I was sixty, I found I was still wondering what I would do when I grew up. Obviously, when people asked me what I did I would answer that I was a journalist or agony aunt or writer, but I never really believed it. Suddenly I looked back on my life and realized that over the years I had written millions upon millions of words. I had had, in my time, produced over a dozen columns on magazines and newspapers, and written over fifteen books. Could it be that all this time, while I was dreaming of another career, I was actually a writer, all along? A real one? Not just someone pretending to be a writer?
The Virginia Monologues Page 5
