When trumpets sang; when the mere skies
Are stranger and nobler than your eyes
And flesh is flesh, was flame before;
And infinite hungers leap no more
In the chance swaying of your dress;
And love has changed to kindliness.
Quite right, too.
7
Recession
One virtue he had in perfection, which was prudence, too
often the only which is left us, at seventy-two.
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
Like everyone else, I’ve been worrying myself sick about the recession, wondering what’s going to become of me and the rest of the world. I thought that at a pinch I might sell the house, get a job stacking shelves at B and Q, I’d sleep on rich friends’ floors and, finally, jobless, homeless and pensionless, I’d steal crusts of bread from the mouths of babes to conceal about my person until the moment I could consume them underneath a Thames bridge, in the comfort of my own cardboard box.
But one day I woke at about 9 a.m. – that’s what happens when you take a quarter of a Temazepam (free! all free!) and a mug of Horlicks at 4.30 in the morning because you’re so anxious – and my mind had cleared. I realized that I really didn’t need to worry. I was in a very strong position. I had been born, like most oldies, in what Cyril Connolly called the Drab Decade. And I knew about recessions like the back of my increasingly liver-spotted hand.
In other words, another great thing about being old is Knowing How to Do Without.
Us oldies do actually have a teensy inkling of what hardship means. Well, hardshipish. We know how to eat baked beans out of a can with a comb. Having been born in 1944, I remember ration books. I remember my first banana. And my first avocado pear. (On arriving at Woman in the 1970s, when I first became an agony aunt, I found, stuffed at the back of an old filing cabinet, a leaflet to be sent out to readers enquiring what they should do with this mysterious fruit when it first appeared on our shores. It was entitled ‘How to Eat an Avocado Pear’ and started: ‘Do not eat an avocado like an ordinary pear…’)
I remember the streets lined with pen hospitals and doll hospitals, and I remember making do and mending, and sides-to-middling sheets… and it was rather comforting. We used to keep the Christmas paper every year and my mother would iron it to use again the following year. And we had something called a ‘string drawer’ in which bits of ribbon and string, retrieved from the presents, would be carefully coiled and stored.
What we know that young people don’t know
We wait for things to come down in price. We know about Waitrose Wednesdays when everything’s repriced around five o’clock. We don’t understand new gadgets so we don’t buy them. Some authors I know still write with a pencil on the back of envelopes. We know about Lidl and we’re not ashamed to shop there.
We know how to make stock out of chicken bones. Indeed, we actually know how to cook! Which is more than a lot of young people know. We know what ‘leftovers’ are, and how to make a meal from the leftovers of yesterday’s leftovers. I know that it’s best to go to the market on a Saturday evening to get cut-price vegetables, and I seem to remember once eking out a big chicken for nearly a week… first roasted, then cold with salad, followed, the next day, by the rest of the bits all devilled… and finally made into the most delicious stock that provided the base for a hearty soup that lasted for two days.
We know that if the cheese grows a strange green bit on the side, we just slice it off. We understand what is meant by the term ‘fly-walk’. We know not to worry our heads about use-by dates, best-before dates and sell-by dates. Smell-by dates, that’s more like it. Younger people who look in my cupboards are always shocked to find yoghurts or packs of lentils way past their sell-by date – and look very wary when I tell them that this is exactly what they’re going to have for their supper.
I had a bit of pork the other day that was looking a little green about the gills, gave it a good scrub under the tap, cooked it for hours and it was absolutely delicious. I know you may now be thinking, ‘We won’t be going to supper with her’ but when bread costs ten thousand pounds a loaf, you’ll be glad of a bit of green pork round at my house.
It is second nature for me to turn out the light and close the door every time I leave a room – to keep the heat in – and I know not to fill a kettle too full if all I need is a cup of tea.
As for heat, when it comes to getting dressed I understand the principle of layers and, indeed, if I scrabble about far enough in my chest of drawers, I could actually come up with a vest and a pair of very warm long-johns. I do not find it odd or humiliating to be caught cooking in a bobble hat, a pair of mittens, a woolly waistcoat and a pair of warm boots.
I can darn socks. I know what a darning mushroom looks like. I know not to eat it like an ordinary mushroom. I cut off old buttons from unwanted clothes and keep them in a button box. I can turn cuffs and I can then boil the buttons up to make soup. You get the idea.
Dressmaking
My mother was cutting costs in her day by making pencil skirts when new material was thin on the ground – and then, when the New Look came in, she made, out of cheap blackout material, glorious little black Dior dresses with huge full skirts. In the 60s I used to make very fashionable mini-dresses by buying old gentlemen’s vests and dying them purple. I still have the urge sometimes to go out dressed, simply, in an old Turkish carpet. With the right accessories I feel pretty sure I could get away with it.
Mad tips
During the recession of the 70s, I asked readers of a column I was writing to give me some examples of money-saving tips. I knew of course about storing old bits of soap, boiling them up, putting them in a tube to set and making new soap out of the result – though I found it rather revolting. I myself invented an infallible way to make my tights last twice as long – cutting off the laddered leg and wearing it with another single one to make two.
But I wasn’t prepared for the bizarre. One reader told me that rather than throw an old jersey away, I should sew up the neck, cut off the sleeves, thread elastic through the bottom, and bingo! Warm woolly knickers for winter! Another told me of a cunning way to fold paper to avoid the need for an envelope and another advised me to chop up old rubber gloves from the fingers up in thin strips and ‘Presto! – a year’s supply of rubber bands!’
As for the problems of next Christmas, I have already kept, in my ‘present drawer’, unwanted presents given to me from Christmases past ready for recycling next year.
In my bit of London, Shepherd’s Bush, where a lot of Polish refugees live, I am used to seeing old people collecting bits of wood from skips to take back to hoard in their gardens. It is the habit of a lifetime and I am considering not only joining them but elbowing them away when I see a good bit of timber going spare.
New things
Us oldies don’t need new things, do we? I remember when I got a new cooker the other day and a friend said to me: ‘Well, that’ll see you out!’ And it’s true. I’ve got enough stuff to well see me out. I doubt if I’ll ever need a new ironing board. Or a new stepladder. Or a new electric drill. And there will no doubt come a time when a new toothbrush will see me out, too. I’ve got a lot of what is currently known as ‘stuff’.
Free things
We get so much for free now we’re old. Reduced entrance to museums and galleries and cinemas. A pension! Then they bung £200 a year into my bank account for heating without even so much as a by-your-leave.
Not to mention free eye tests – I’m always round at the optician asking for another one –and free prescriptions. And then if you live in London you get a free travel pass. The day I got mine I was like a child. I hopped on a bus and went one stop – flicking a mental two fingers to everyone else on it – and then I took the bus back home and did the same again, back and forth all afternoon. It didn’t cost me a penny.
We’ve scrimped and saved
Now, I know that many of us fin
d that we’re not as well-off as we thought we would be. But most of us oldies have something stashed away, if we’re sensible. We possess the ‘silver pound’ (I don’t like calling it the ‘grey pound’– sounds so depressing). In fact some of us have quite a few silver pounds. The over-sixties actually own four-fifths of the nation’s wealth. And the great thing is that since we’re not going to live much past eighty-five (please God, in my case), we’ve only got a limited number of years in which to spend our cash. Many of us find we are actually miles richer than we ever were before in our lives.
One reason we’re lucky is that we’ve never been of the borrowing generation. We disapproved of the first credit cards, particularly the one that claimed to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’. We’re used to waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And often if we wait long enough, eventually we discover that we don’t want what we thought we wanted after all. Or, at least, by the time we start thinking of purchasing it, it has skeltered down in price. Or become obsolete.
And even if we’re not rich, all of us know how to make something out of whatever we’ve got left.
Lodgers
Many young people wouldn’t dream of taking in lodgers. I wonder if they’re even called ‘lodgers’ any more, actually – the word being reminiscent of dusty bank-clerks, wending their way up stairs covered with threadbare carpets, guttering candles in hand. But the moment I’ve had a room free in my house (and a house is something you often find you have, when you’re old, which is a bit of a treat), I’ve always stuffed a lodger into it and, in times of recession, I’m sure I could accommodate a couple of families in the cupboard under the stairs.
Eeyore mentality
We are hardened to hard times. We don’t expect a lot. We were children in the Cold War, and to some extent most of us have adopted some kind of deep-grained nihilism – i.e. what’s the point if we’re always four minutes from a nuclear holocaust? At the same time cynicism and scepticism inform our psyches, too. It’s not because we’re selfish that so many of us can’t be fagged to recycle, and hoard our incandescent light-bulbs despite the threat of Global Warming. It’s because we’ve lived with changing threats all our lives – from the idea of hell, foisted on us at Sunday School, to the Bay of Pigs and nuclear war, to the world being wiped out by Aids, then Bird Flu – and we’ve heard the cry of ‘Wolf!’ too often to believe it.
Growing our own
Some of us have allotments. And having been laughed out of court as we used to stagger home with our baskets of tomatoes, reduced to making tons of green tomato chutney in old Nescafé jars, we now have so much produce, the laugh’s on us. Soon we’ll be able, perhaps, even to barter our beans and peas for services, or sell them on the black market. And, of course, once the house is packed to the rafters with lodgers, we can always retreat to live in our shed on the allotment, just returning home occasionally to have a bath and collect the rent.
They do say that the only people who survived the Irish Famine were those with turnips and shotguns, so once I’ve got my hands on a shooter, I’ll turn my garden over to vegetable production, put a barbed-wire fence around the edge, retreat to the shed, making only occasional forays out to spend all the cash I’ve amassed under the fold-up bed.
Back to childhood
Isn’t there, for those who remember penny-pinching times in the 50s, something rather comforting about a return to frugality? I’m not talking about it being comforting for anyone on the breadline or who’s at risk of losing their home, but for the reasonably well-off middle class, the sort who might buy this book, there is something rather cosy and reassuring about the idea of toasting crumpets in front of a blazing (as opposed to electric) fire (which, of course, we know how to lay) and following it up – because we Know How to Make our Own Entertainment – with a game of charades, or a round of Ludo.
And because we’re not a generation that has realized itself only through shopping, or, like the young, with no reference to our existence except what we saw the previous night, we have many more resources than they do, to keep us going. It is possible to spend a very jolly evening simply reading a good book.
I’ve often felt like an alien in a world of bling and choice; I’m baffled by women who possess 500 pairs of shoes – or, even, more than about six (and that would include slippers), come to that. I’ve shopped in my time, but I’ve never shopped till I’ve dropped. Old people, on the whole, just don’t. Lucky us.
They say that ‘by the time people have money to burn, the fire has gone out’ but that’s fine. Let’s just put on another jersey. Or jumper.
Or, even better, some weird footwarmers we’ve knitted with the wool unpicked from a couple of old tea-cosies.
8
Work
At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.
Colette
If, all your life, you have felt utterly humiliated by having to reply, when asked what you do, with the words: ‘Shelf-stacking at Sainsbury’s’, you are now in the wonderful position of being able to answer instead: ‘Well, actually, I’m retired.’ It’s a very crass person who will then ask what you are retired from. And if they do, you can just airily brush them aside with a groan and a ‘Don’t ask… The travelling… the meetings… thank God it’s all behind me.’ They are not to know that the travelling involved taking a tube from Greenford to Wood Green and then a bus, every day. And the meetings? Nothing more than directing people to the butter.
It can be pretty much of a shock when you stop working. What are you going to do with all that time?
Generally, however, after the initial shock, we usually find we’re busy with things that we actually want to be doing, rather than with a job which, while fulfilling in some ways, may well have involved hours of pointlessness and boredom. One of the great things about being old is that you’re your own boss and you’ll never have to go on one of those frightful bonding team-building weekends ever again. Okay, you miss the camaraderie and the gossip round the water-cooler, but isn’t it a pleasure not to be playing ‘Secret Santa’ ever again? Isn’t it a treat never having to open a present of a willie-warmer and pretend to find it incredibly amusing? Isn’t it great never having to look again at a flip-chart or welcome focus groups from America or attend all those grisly leaving-dos that take place before your own? Isn’t it fantastic not to feel part of a team made up of members only half of whom you have any time for?
But if, as Noël Coward said, you find that ‘work is more fun than fun’, dealing with retirement may be a matter of trying to pretend that what you’re doing in your leisure time is actually work. (And let no one pretend it isn’t. Anyone who has tried to organize a village fête will sometimes long for the unchanging, straightforward hours of the office.)
You could, of course, pretend to continue working. No, I don’t mean like that Sherlock Holmes story where a man used to leave his home every morning dressed for work and then, a few streets away, change into ragged clothes, smear his face with coal and spend the day begging in the Strand. No, I mean you can take on unpaid work and treat it in exactly the same way as you used to do your job. If you have special skills, there are charities gagging for free advice, apparently. Or, I suppose, if you were desperate you could actually work for money, by stacking shelves in B and Q, one of the few firms who do actually create special job opportunities for oldies. Don’t forget – Winston Churchill was sixty-five when he first became PM and started his epic struggle against Hitler (who was in his forties).
Or you could do voluntary work. The problem with voluntary work is that it is, these days, no longer a matter of sauntering into a place and lending a helping hand. You nearly always have to have some kind of training for voluntary work, and commit yourself to various days or evenings. Then if you’re working with people you’re usually checked to see if you have a criminal record and frankly, it’s often too much of a hassle, since you can feel hampered at every stage of the way by people who resent unpaid amateurs coming in an
d doing their jobs – often better than they do.
However, you might get lucky. But when I offered to mentor young people in my area – a job at which I would, I know, excel – and they heard my fluting South Kensington tones, I was told sharply, that there was nothing available.
I would recommend – if you’re good at work and want to use your own skills, be admired, interact with other people, but never feel under too much pressure – you become a local do-gooding busybody. If there isn’t a residents’ association in your street, set one up. If there is one, join it and push your way up into becoming Chair. Sit on the local police committee. Involve yourself in Neighbourhood Watch. Keep your eyes peeled for unsuitable planning applications and, if everyone agrees, object to them, and set up petitions, marches, meetings and demonstrations. Be a pain.
Write to the papers. Challenge parking tickets. Buy a litter stick, and go down the street every Sunday, picking up rubbish and ostentatiously putting it into the bins. Watch from behind your curtain to take down the van numbers of builders who come and dump rubbish in your street. Pressure the council for a recycling bin. Pressure the council to remove a useless recycling bin.
By setting up our own anti-tram group in Shepherd’s Bush and combining with other groups along its proposed route, our residents’ association managed to help see off a plan for a tram to run down our main thoroughfare, a plan devised by Ken Livingstone no less, not a man who was usually thwarted in his ambitions.
You may become something of an irritation, even become known as a meddlesome old fart, but you will find that it’s a great way to get to know everyone in your street, to wield some influence, and, however much people resent you in some ways, your role can only be a force for good in that you will encourage everyone to get to know each other and feel ‘part of a community’ as they say.
The Virginia Monologues Page 9
