The Virginia Monologues

by Virginia Ironside

  It’s not work as you knew it – but it’s work.

  9

  Downsizing

  Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no wind! And

  when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does

  without them!

  Journal – Paul Claudel

  When you get older everything diminishes. Or should diminish. And it’s rather a nice feeling. Instead of having a desire to conquer empires, you long to reduce yourself and your surroundings. You don’t want to expand, you want to contract. I don’t see it as something depressing. I see reducing as being like something you do to a wine sauce. From being all sloppy and tasteless to start with, after you’ve simmered it for ages, it eventually turns into a delicious, pungent concentrate.

  Not for us oldies the idea of shopping till we’re dropping. Not only are we, if we’re lucky, reasonably replete, both materially and emotionally, but we also know, from long experience, that buying more Stuff, won’t make us any happier. It will just mean we will have less room to move and more things to dust.

  I couldn’t help but note, when I recently went on a cruise (see Travel) that when all the oldies poured off at the ports, they avoided the souvenir shops and sellers of trinkets round the harbour. ‘I have,’ said one of them to me, sighing, ‘enough Russian Matrioska dolls. I have enough castanets. I have enough pottery peasants with pottery straw hats sitting on pottery donkeys. My aim is to bring absolutely nothing home with me at all except the clothes I brought with me.’

  Ask any oldie what they’d like as a present, and nearly always their answer is either a consumable or something with a short life-span. Flowers. Bath oil. Tickets to the theatre. Marrons glacés. Plants. Room spray. Candles. A useful can of moth repellent. What you just don’t want is something to keep. Because this is an age when, curiously, you realize that it’s true that you ‘can’t take it with you’. As a result you have far less attachment to things. And having spent most of your life acquiring things, it’s tremendously exhilarating, now you’re old, to get rid of things. Quite honestly, when one of my grandsons breaks some precious ornament, I’m secretly rather relieved. It means that another bit of baggage (as one’s past is now known) has been thrown into the bin. And, as a result, some of the burden of owning possessions has been taken from one’s shoulders.

  I have an idea that Buddhists eventually want nothing but their prayer mats, and I find discarding things rather a freeing exercise, myself.

  I used to take photographs of everything. I have two whole drawers, bursting with albums all marked with dates and years. These days I can hardly be bothered even to pack my camera, far less actually get it out to take a picture. I honestly can’t see the point.

  Now, this is the moment when you may think of moving. Of course you may have to downsize because you’re releasing capital by moving into a smaller, more manageable, place. (But for pity’s sake, beware of moving to a bungalow. A bungalow can knock years off your life. Doctors say that the best place for a retired person to live is in a very thin eighteenth-century house positioned at the top of a steep hill – walking up and down keeps them fit.)

  But where to move? When they were younger, lots of my friends imagined that when they become older, they’d retire to the country. A few of them have indeed done just that, but not as many as those who’ve lived in the country all their lives and who decide to spend the last years of their lives in cities or large towns. In urban areas there’s more efficient transport, more friends who live nearer, and the medical services are usually much better and closer.

  Once you’ve found your smaller house or flat, you can start to get rid of things in a big way. Perhaps it is now time to throw out that funny old massage machine you bought at a Mind and Body Show twenty years ago. To get rid of the rusting extra bike you have in the shed that you’re keeping for a guest to ride. To realize that, now your fingers are starting to seize up, there’s really no reason to keep that ancient Spanish guitar you bought in the 60s hoping to impress your friends with flamenco songs. And now’s the time to start transferring, if you have the expertise, all your old singles, EPs and LPs on to disk at last.

  And while you’re at it, now’s the time to spend a bit of money on getting a valuer round to your house and finding out what everything really is worth – sparing your offspring the ghastly task of doing the same when you die. You can give your children things in advance, too, things which might prove a bit of a liability when probate comes. And you make sure that you’ve destroyed all those embarrassing letters and disks which have evidence of a life that you might not wish them to come across when you’re dead.

  Do they really want to know quite how much you missed them when they left home? Or how painful you found it when they forgot your birthday? Would they appreciate finding love-letters from a woman who wrote to their father after he was married rather than before? Would it be useful or kind to allow them to find the birth certificate of a baby you had adopted when you were young and foolish? Or the fact that you had, once, had cancer, got over it, and had never told them a thing about it? Now you can rake over the old traces and leave the past a pristine area, devoid of skeletons in cupboards.

  And isn’t it just wonderful not to have that awful possessive anxiety that you used to have about objects? The very phrase ‘Mine! It’s mine’– a phrase which, I’m ashamed to say, has been constantly on my lips from the age I first could speak – is one that I hear myself saying far less frequently, and certainly less stridently. ‘It’s mine – well, sort of mine – well really, it’s ours… what the hell, why don’t you have it? Who cares?’ I find myself saying more and more often to my younger relations.

  I never thought that to give more often than to receive would ever bring me such unconditional and easily achieved pleasure.

  10

  Looks

  Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,

  Takes off her artificial Hair:

  Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,

  She wipes it clean, and lays it by.

  Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,

  Stuck on with Art on either Side,

  Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,

  Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.

  Now dextrously her Plumpers draws,

  That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.

  Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums

  A Set of Teeth completely comes.

  Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop

  Her flabby Dugs – and down they drop.

  Proceeding on, the lovely Goddess

  Unlaces next her Steel-Rib’d Bodice;

  Which by the Operator’s Skill,

  Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill,

  Up goes her Hand, and off she slips

  The Bolsters that supply her Hips.

  With gentlest Touch, she next explores

  Her Shankers, Issues, running Sores,

  Effects of many a sad Disaster;

  And then to each applies a Plaister.

  But must, before she goes to Bed,

  Rub off the Dawbs of White and Red;

  And smooth the Furrows in her Front,

  With greasy Paper stuck upon’t.

  She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;

  And then between two Blankets creeps.

  ‘A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed’

  – Swift

  I’m a real lookist. I’m not saying I look great all the time, but I do think it is one’s moral duty not to look too ghastly. Looking good lifts not only your own spirits, but also other people’s as they see you walking down the street so, in my book, looking one’s best is actually a kind of good manners.

  There’s no excuse, when you’re old, to ‘let yourself go’. And yet so many people do.

  Visit any service station along the M1 and what do you see – hordes of old people who’ve simply not bothered to do anything about their appearance when they got up that morning. T
he women have opted for a frightful kind of cropped haircut, which needs no more maintenance than the odd clip, like a hedge, possibly by the local council; they haven’t bothered to put on any make-up and, often, they’re wearing the asexual uniform involving some kind of amorphous ‘top’, a windcheater and underneath a pair of trackie bottoms, socks and the ubiquitous trainers. Some women just seem to have given up being women completely – they look just like lumps on legs.

  I know what they’d say if I criticized them for looking so utterly dreary. They’d say: ‘But I just want to be comfortable.’ But it’s perfectly easy to be comfortable in a much more attractive get-up.

  And anyway, however comfortable you want your clothes to be, you don’t want to look as if your clothes are comfortable. I remember a member of the audience, a friend of an actress appearing on stage in a play, who had to visit her in her dressing room after what was an excruciating performance. After wondering whether to lie through his teeth or tell her the truth, he settled on a line that got him off the hook. ‘Darling!’ he said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘You looked as if you were having a marvellous time!’ In other words, ‘You were thoroughly enjoying yourself! But everyone else in the audience was bored stiff.’ So whenever anyone says of your shoes or your clothes, ‘They look as if they’re really comfortable’, it’s time to rush back home and change into something that looks as if you’ve taken a little bit of time and trouble.

  And the men – what’s happened to them? Presumably when they were young they took some kind of pride in their appearance. But now nearly all of them have tummies the size of space hoppers, and some of them haven’t even bothered to shave – and it’s not because they want to achieve some kind of fashionable look. Go to France and you’ll find a completely different picture. Whatever age anyone is, the vast majority take care with their appearance. And it shows.

  Friends of mine have asked me: ‘What’s the point? I’m completely invisible now I’m older. I’m all wrinkles. I’ve lost my looks.’ But I say that a good-looking oldie can have the time of his or her life, particularly in England. The standard of looks in England is, like the standard of food except in the metropolis, so low, that with only the minimum of effort you can stand out as some kind of ancient Marlene Dietrich figure. Or Tina Turner. It just takes a bit of flair and courage.

  You don’t want to aim for the BUPA look, of course. That’s the one cultivated by the couples who model for brochures for private patients’ plans. They look, usually, eerily young, and yet they both have full heads of slightly tousled greying hair, they often wear ‘his ’n’ hers’ windcheaters, and he always has his arm round her shoulders as they gaze unflinchingly into the hazy middle distance, as if on a mildly breezy headland. These pictures always give a sense of coastlines and imminence and a vague idea of Cape Cod and clapboard. He may have a windlass, suggesting access to yachts (and therefore to funds) while she may be grey-haired but wears just enough lipper to suggest she still kicks up her heels when the fancy takes her. Sometimes they are pictured on a golf course, or wandering through an autumnal wood (get the point?), eyes sparkling, their faces full of fresh hope and with rather stupid grins because, presumably, they know that when the need comes to have their hips done, BUPA will pay.

  Then there’s that picture of that immaculately permed lady on her stairlift. And that rather elderly model with the snow-white perm in the small ads at the back of the Telegraph magazine, who is always lying at the bottom of her staircase pretending she’s ‘had a fall’, clutching the emergency call button round her neck and hoping desperately that someone will come soon.

  I have never seen people like these ‘old’ models in real life, and I certainly wouldn’t want to look like them.

  To a degree, of course, there’s not a lot you can do (apart from having major construction work on your face) about your basic look. For instance, like many people, I realize that the older I get the more I look like my mother. Oscar Wilde once wrote that it was every girl’s great tragedy to ‘become like her mother’. But my own mother looked pretty good. Even when I was a child, people used to say: ‘You can tell you’re mother and daughter! You’re as alike as two peas in a pod!’

  When I was older, taxi drivers used to take us for sisters. My mother would simper and fumble in her bag for an extra-large tip.

  We each twiddled our hair, we have such similar voices that when I hear old tape recordings of the odd radio interview that she gave, I could swear it was me speaking. We share large breasts and a right-footed bunion. And we both have dark hair and drooping eyelids that give us a slightly oriental look; the same retroussé nose, the same big mouth. When my mother was fifty-four she had cosmetic surgery on her eyes – she was starting to look rather too oriental – and when I was fifty-four, after a friend at a party said that I looked like a Burmese princess, I had an eye-job as well. When my mother was fifty-six she had a proper face-lift, and got the incipient wattle –‘the lizard look’ as she called it – removed from her neck. When I was fifty-six I had exactly the same operation.

  And now, after trying to get away from the boyish haircut that my mother insisted I wore when I was young –‘It looks so French, darling’, ‘But I don’t want to look French! I want to look English!’– I have finally given up growing my hair, putting it up, curling it, wearing it in a bob, and, realizing she was right after all, I have resorted to the short gamine style that she knew suited me best all along. A cut just like hers.

  How can you improve your looks so that you can look even better in old age than you did when you were young? Some of my friends, it’s true, have certainly been dealt what in France is called a ‘coup de vieux’. One day you see them and they look halfway reasonable, the next you can barely recognize them. It’s as if builders had come in the night and suddenly removed an RSJ in their face. Everything turned to a pile of rubble. Total collapse.

  But their collapse is everyone else’s gain, because it means that those of us (yes, I’m that vain I include myself) who bolted themselves against the wreckers, stand out even more. And, to be honest, even those with wobbly window frames and in need of a bit of repointing, do look more ‘themselves’ than they ever did. Their crows’ feet and laughter lines and wobbling necks can conspire to make a face that looks a great deal more individual and original and approachable than it ever did in the days of peach-like skin and silkspun hair. It’s all a matter of how you deal with the situation.

  Now, there is a line between looking an utter wreck that’s completely gone to seed, and looking like a latter-day Fanny Cradock, hair so well done and make-up so perfect that you suspect that it’s been imposed by a fairy godmother and come midnight the whole edifice collapses. But, if you try, you can become as striking, outrageous or subtly elegant as you like without too much cheating. As Eleanor Roosevelt said: ‘Beautiful young people are accidents of nature but beautiful old people are works of art.’

  And you can, really, look much better when you’re old than when you were young. Many’s the old person whose striking looks have prompted me to think: ‘Gosh, they must have looked wonderful when they were young’ only to discover, when I see the photographs, that they were then just boring blobs, indistinguishable from other young people of the same period.

  None of us wants to look old in a horrible way, but we can look old in a good way. No one wants to look like a vandalized 1950s community hall in Hull, but I wouldn’t mind looking like Tintern Abbey. Or the Temple of Karnak, come to that. Indeed a very fashion-conscious friend of mine even looks in shop windows for clothes that she might buy in advance of the moment when the going gets tough. She has a couple of what she calls ‘cancer hats’ that she thinks she’ll look good in if she is ever forced to have chemotherapy. And the other day she came round in a newly bought coat that she wasn’t sure whether she liked enough to keep and, as she twirled in front of me, she said: ‘But maybe I will keep it after all. It would be a very good funeral coat.’

  In order to look g
ood when you’re old you must, however, obey some basic rules. I’m passing on the following tips, given to me by my mother, who knew what she was talking about because she was Professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art in the 60s and helped put people like Ossie Clark on the map.

  Never wear white, particularly near the face. It makes yellow teeth look yellower and the whites of your eyes will show up as slimy grey with streaks of red.

  Always keep your upper arms well covered. Those bits of flesh that hang down at the sides (known, apparently, as ‘bingo wings’) are hideous – and so are those strange rolls of flesh that appear between your underarms and your body.

  To be honest I’m not really too keen on glasses with strings. I know everyone has them, but they do look… well, a friend said they make people look deaf (see Hearing in Ailments). They always remind me of those little kids you used to see with string threaded through their coats to keep their gloves on.

  Get a new bra every six months at least and keep it well hitched-up. You don’t want to be one of those people whose boobs touch their tummies when they sit down. Or, worse, when they stand up.

  Don’t disguise a lizardy neck with a scarf or polo neck. They look as if you have something to hide – and the imagination always conjures up something worse than the reality. I’m always reminded of neck-scarves whenever I’m driving past a line of Leylandii trees. Rather than thinking ‘What a nice bit of greenery!’, I think: ‘What monstrous building are they trying to hide behind that wall of pine? A nuclear power plant? A prison? The British branch of Guantánamo Bay?’

  Always be spotless. It’s funny, but young people can wear filthy old binbags and shoes with holes in them and still look great but an old man wearing an immaculately cut Savile Row suit, shoes sparklingly polished, a crisp white, starched shirt, but with a tiny speck of egg on his tie looks utterly repulsive. And if you have to wear trousers, always check the bottoms of them. It’s amazing how the bottoms of trousers can catch a puddle when out in the rain, and by the gravity-defying power of photosynthesis (I think) the stain then creeps up the trouser till it’s nearly at the knee. (Of course I’m always droning on with my ‘spotless’ line to people and then find later I’ve got some ghastly butter-stain on my skirt.)