The Virginia Monologues

by Virginia Ironside

Time goes extremely fast when you’re old. It’s about the only thing that does, because in all other respects you yourself get slower and slower.

  When are we, officially, old?

  ‘Oh, you’re only as old as you feel!’ trill some of my more ancient friends. But who do they think they’re kidding? They must think like Jack Straw does apparently, that they’re ‘somewhere between eighty and thirty-five, depending what’s happening that day. If you were born in the 60s you think you have a divine right to go on feeling young.’

  When we get old, all of us have that peculiar sensation of being at once quite childlike and at the same time utterly ancient. We’re like one of those 3D postcards you get in Greece which, when you look at them from the left, show an immaculate Parthenon, decorated in gold and adorned with statues and, when you look at it from the right, it’s a crumbling old ruin. Other people’s perceptions don’t make anything any clearer, either. In my experience, the young see you as old, but the old see you as a spring chicken. When I’ve told people of seventy the title of this book they’ve chuckled and then, putting a withered hand on mine, exclaimed: ‘But my dear, you don’t even yet know the meaning of the word old!’

  Every year that passes, time gets more confusing. Jean Rhys said that ‘Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.’ (As I well know. See Sex.) And, I’d add, backwards reverses as well. Anyway, isn’t ‘old’ not just how far you are from the beginning, but how close you are to the end?

  My definition of getting old is when you can’t do the seatbelt up in other people’s cars without fumbling and when you can’t get out of them without using your hands on the side of the door to lever yourself upright. It’s when you surreptitiously buy yourself a folding walking-stick to keep in your bag ‘just in case’ and when, if your papers haven’t been delivered, you dare to shuffle down the street to the corner shop in your slippers, with only a coat buttoned over your nightie.

  In Germany you know you’re officially old when you’re offered a special menu. Apparently over there if you’re young, you’re offered a normal menu. If you have kids, you’re offered a normal menu plus a kids’ menu, a Kinderteller– beans and chips probably – on the side. But if you’re old, you’re offered a Seniorenteller. You can imagine what that is. Very small portions. Mushy. And you’re probably given a straw to suck it all up with. If you ask for a chewy steak or crunchy celery you’re no doubt told that ‘Sorry, you’re too old.’

  Do you tell?

  When asked your age you can, of course, be enigmatic like Cary Grant. When someone sent his agent a telegram asking, ‘How old Cary Grant?’, he sent back the reply: ‘Old Cary Grant fine. How you?’

  Or you could just sigh and say: ‘Well, put it like this. I won’t see sixty again.’

  But I don’t like keeping my age secret. I always worry that someone knows how old I am and will then tell everyone behind my back. Much better that I should be the person to tell them first. My date of birth, just in case anyone wants to know, is 3 February 1944. No earlier and no later. It’s all down there in Somerset House or wherever they keep birth certificates now (probably online, in a vast data centre available to everyone in the world if they only knew the password).

  What do we call ourselves?

  I like calling myself, simply, ‘old’ but we can all facetiously describe ourselves as ‘oldies’ or ‘wrinklies’. When I ring up to book tickets for a film or theatre, I sometimes ask: ‘Are there concessions for this show?’ And when the person at the other end says: ‘And what kind of concession are you?’ I’m never sure whether to answer ‘Senior citizen’ (or, as I once said, getting a bit confused, ‘Senior Sitting Room’), or ‘Old-age pensioner’ or, as I usually do, in a quavering voice: ‘I’m just incredibly ancient, my dear.’

  I have considered calling myself a ‘New Age Pensioner’– but then maybe they’d think I was one of those ancient long-haired grey-haired people, wrinkly wrists covered with metal anti-rheumatism bands and grimy pieces of coloured string.

  We could call ourselves ‘elderly’ or ‘senior’, but I quite like ‘over the hill’. Why? Because once you’re over the hill you get a much better view of everything than when you are struggling up it. You can enjoy the grand panorama as you sail down. It’s also an easier ride.

  Seen it all before

  A friend once said that she got very depressed being alone day and night. Every day was the same, she moaned. But I pointed out that every day couldn’t be the same because each new day she had more similar days behind her. It was this build-up of those same days that might, one day, push her into doing something to make tomorrow different. Time also gives us a completely different take on everything. It’s difficult, quite honestly, to experience much as completely new because everything reminds us of something else.

  I went to Venice recently. Extremely lovely. Very beautiful. But because I’d been before when I was young, what I was doing was retracing my steps from the last time I was there, remembering restaurants I’d visited and art galleries I’d seen. One of the things you can’t do when you’re old is see many things for the first time.

  Time’s changes

  Time changes people, too. It’s in old age that leopards really can change their spots. I know several people who were lousy mothers who now make brilliant grandmothers. I know men who, once bright and clever and innovative, have turned into crabby old codgers who moan about ‘the youth today’. I know an elderly woman who, during her later years, has softened completely, and who is now a twinkly-eyed charmer whereas before she was terrifyingly critical and acerbic. And I know another woman who was stoned (no, not like in Pakistan, the other kind) most of her life, left each of her five husbands, had four kids by different men, but who now teaches yoga in a country village, is the pillar of her community and is never absent from the church fête or the local charity run.

  And isn’t it great when time changes old boyfriends? From being golden gods at whose shrines you once worshipped, you meet them now and you can hardly hear what they say for the sound of the scales clattering to the floor as they fall from your eyes. I actually met an old boyfriend recently whose hair was two shades darker than when I’d known him in the 70s.

  Then a couple of years ago I went to a party and saw a small, elderly figure with white hair, and I was stunned by a pang of recognition. For this was a man who, when I was in my twenties, I had simply doted on for about five years. When I say ‘doted’, it’s an understatement. ‘Idolized’ would describe it better. I’d dreamt about him, I’d got pregnant by him, had an abortion… I’d even become a drugs courier for him when he ran out of some unspeakable substance in his country cottage, and I thought he was absolutely the only man in the world for me. After a disastrous split, I’d never seen him again. Until now.

  It took only a few minutes of listening to him burbling on about his belief in the power of Nordic gods, his new theory about Glastonbury, and the fact that he appeared to have done absolutely nothing except stay exactly in the same place since I last saw him, to realize that this was not just a man I no longer loved but a man whose company I should actually actively seek ways to avoid.

  ‘I must go to the loo,’ I said, interrupting his flow, and I turned on my heels and left, breathing a sigh of relief. I was delighted to find that time had changed me and my feelings completely.

  Time’s new view

  Time is a great educator. It teaches us to take the long view – one we could never have had when we were young and the past was only about six inches deep. These days we can cast our eyes over great mountain ranges of past, full of rivers and deserts, and get a much better idea of the whole. We slowly see life as a long continuum rather than a series of individual events strung together by periods of sleep.

  The sweep of my past actually includes meeting my great-grandmother (I know I am at risk here of Boring for Britain, see relevant chapter, but I’m old and I like it). She lived with a companion in a Glouces
ter Road hotel. She wore, I remember, a long skirt of black bombazine, a buttoned black top over a white high-necked blouse. On her head she wore a black hat with a veil, and in her hand she carried a silver-topped stick. She was like an illustration by Boz.

  I’ve known times when no one had a car, no one had a television set and the shops were closed on Sunday. Email, texting and mobile phones were unknown (see Boring for Britain again). The amount of change people of my generation have experienced in their lifetime is, I suspect, much more than anyone of thirty today will experience in their lifetime. It’s astonishing that, in view of all this, we have managed to stay reasonably sane.

  And as you age, you slowly start to realize that the world didn’t begin with you and isn’t going to end with you. You understand that you are part of an ongoing cycle – and this realization has a profound effect on how you live your life. When I got my first cat I never thought of it as my ‘first’ cat. It was simply my cat. Now that I have had so many cats, I can understand that we come and go in just the same way as cats do – the only difference is that we live longer.

  A friend of mine told me that when she became a grandmother and was photographed by her own children, she remembered that it seemed like only the other day that she, too, was photographed as a baby on her own grandmother’s lap.

  This relentless ongoingness came home to me sharply when recently I went to an Al-Anon meeting, the twelve-step group for friends, relatives and children of alcoholics. I’d last been to this particular group about ten years ago, and, for about four years, had been heavily involved. In my time I’d been treasurer, secretary, publications officer, chair, and expected in some peculiar way to be welcomed back as some old, venerated Al-Anon sage. I climbed the same stairs. I smelt the same smell of cabbage. I entered the same room, with the same chairs. But there the similarity ended. The room was full of strangers! They greeted me warmly, as a complete newcomer, and it was hard to explain that I had been engaged as an integral part of that group in the past. And yet now I was completely forgotten. And all these people who were now carrying out the same posts, the same rituals – they, too, would one day be forgotten, just as I had been. Made me think.

  As we realize we’re part of this chain of humanity, we see that ‘the future’ isn’t just a matter of how many years we’ve got left but, rather, that it is our children’s future, and our children’s children’s future. (Does this contradict my previous views on global warming and so on? Yes it does. I contradict myself. Whatever. It’s a perk of old age.) There was a moment when I thought that I’d just spend the rest of my money until I died (see SKIs in Spare Time) but now I keep working no longer for myself, oddly, because I could live quite frugally, but for the prosperity of my son and his family when I die, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren. When I’m asked how much I charge for a talk or a piece of writing, whereas a little while ago I’d simply be grateful to be asked to do anything at all at my great age, and hang the fee, I now think: ‘No – that might help towards a down-payment for a grandson’s flat’ or ‘Maybe that would help a great-granddaughter through university.’

  There is a curious way in which us oldies can find pleasure in trying to beat time, already trying to contribute, and matter to someone, and make a difference, even after we’re dead.

  18

  Never Again

  One of the delights of being older is being able to control

  ideas. I have suffered all my life from a disease called Brains

  in the Head… in youth you keep bubbling with ideas. They

  may be foolish but you can’t stop them. I’ve learnt not to suffer

  too much from the Brains… As you get older your judgement

  develops. One of my joys is having my mind stirred by a good

  book, and not feeling I have to go to the typewriter afterwards.

  There is nothing nicer than nodding off while reading.

  Going fast asleep then being woken up by the crash of the

  book on the floor, then saying to yourself, well it doesn’t

  matter much. An admirable feeling.

  A. J. P. Taylor

  If there ever comes a time when you’re bemoaning your lack of youthful prowess, console yourself with the knowledge that listed below are the many things you will never have to do again in your whole life:

  Lose your virginity

  Go hitchhiking

  Have another period

  Sit on a committee

  Berate yourself for not having ever read Freud or Sartre

  Have a boss

  Go on your first date

  Fall in love for the first time

  Get pregnant

  Turn everything yellow by putting a duster into the wash

  Have to ask for a rise

  Have to please anyone else to keep your job

  Feel obliged to get drunk to keep up with the others

  Worry about being too hairy (or not being hairy enough)

  Wait to be picked for a football or netball team

  Wait for exam results

  Go for an interview

  Go to school

  Cook your first Christmas dinner

  Hear yourself saying that John Lennon really had something when he sang ‘All You Need Is Love’

  Dance the Twist

  Get your ears pierced

  Have a coil put in

  Have a coil taken out

  Be flashed at by men in raincoats

  Learn how to ride a bicycle

  Do homework

  Learn how to swim

  Climb a tree

  Watch your parents competing in the egg-and-spoon race

  Have an argument with your teenage children

  Get enraged by a daughter borrowing your clothes

  Be shocked or surprised by anything – you’ve seen it all

  Believe that a witch might be hiding under your bed

  Consider becoming a lap-dancer

  Feel compelled, when faced with some kind of Italian campanile or clock tower, to walk up the 500 steps of the stone spiral staircase to the top

  Try to make the Olympic swimming team

  Attempt to become prime minister

  Recite a poem in front of your parents’ friends

  Submit a CV

  Think Bob Dylan is a kind of god

  Discover that you can’t clean brushes covered in gloss paint with water

  Make a fool of yourself by declaring that Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield were two entirely different people

  Mind if you make a fool of yourself by declaring that Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield were two entirely different people

  Sacrifice comfort for style

  Paint a ceiling

  Give two hoots for troubled pop stars in rehab

  Run up or down escalators

  Think about giving your seat up

  Rummage around in Top Shop

  Go to an open-air rock festival or, come to that, an open-air anything

  Think twice before walking out of a film or play which fails to come up to scratch

  Defer to your elders

  Worry about what the world will be like in fifty years’ time

  Do last-minute revision

  Attend a workshop

  Think about getting a tattoo

  Worry about the White Slave Trade getting you

  Go out on the pull

  Be surprised by the evidence of corruption in politics

  Impress your friends at university by climbing up a tower in your town and hanging your underpants from the top

  Pay for drugs (free! all free!)

  19

  Wisdom

  And now, every fresh day finds me more filled with wonder and

  better qualified to draw the last drop of delight from it. For up

  until now, I had never known time’s inexpressible wealth; and

  my youth had never entirely yielded itself to happiness. Is it

  indeed this that they call
growing old, this continual surge of

  memories that come breaking in on my inner silence, this

  contained and sober joy, this light-hearted music that bears me

  up, this spreading kind feeling and this gentleness?

  The Delights of Growing Old – Maurice Goudeket

  The afternoon of human life must also have a significance

  of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to

  life’s morning.

  Carl Jung

  ‘Wisdom’ is rather a big word to apply to the kind of disorganized, random knowledge you acquire as a result of having lived a long time. I think I’d prefer to describe this condition as ‘not being quite such a total wally as one used to be’– rather a different kettle of fish to ‘wisdom’. But although we’re always prone to making new mistakes, there’s no question we don’t make quite as many of the old ones. In other words, experience pays off. If there’s not a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, then at least there isn’t exactly a pile of old rubble.

  Here are a few scraps I’ve gleaned over the years.

  There are two sides to every question. No, that doesn’t mean that one can never be right. I’m always right, no doubt about that. But as I age I do concede that other people may have other views. Wrong views, maybe. Barking mad views. Misguided views. But views.

  We know we can’t believe everything we read in the papers. Indeed, we know that we can hardly believe anything we read in the papers at all.

  We know that while it’s quite acceptable to write a letter to someone we feel furious with in the heat of the moment, it’s a great mistake to post it. We have learned this from hideous experience and still wake in the night when we think about that horrible note we sent to a friend way back in 1955 who later married that dreadful man who died in a skiing accident and we’re still sure somehow it was all our fault.

  But there again, was it really our fault? Nah. We don’t feel quite so guilty about things as we used to because we know that actually our contribution to the world’s good or ill is so minuscule as to be barely noticed, we are but ants… and so on.