No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year

by Virginia Ironside

  “Well, if it’s not VD, then I’ve got cancer of the uterus,” she said, calming down. “I’ve looked it all up in the BMA book of Complete Family Health. There’s no getting away from it.”

  “Go and see Dr. Green,” I said. “Find out exactly what it is. I’ll come with you, if you like.”

  “No, it’s fine,” said Penny. “I’m probably going to die. And before Hughie, too! If they put my body in the freezer, we could have a joint funeral!”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Ring me when you get back.”

  Later

  Penny has just rung. “Well, I went to see Dr. Green and she prodded and poked inside me,” she said. “And then she said: ‘I suppose you couldn’t have…by any chance…still got a coil in, could you?’ I’d forgotten all about it, Marie! Then she said: ‘Well, I think it’s a bit redundant considering you’re sixty, don’t you?’ and she yanked it out.”

  I suppose everyone nowadays is on the pill. It seems weird to think that when I was young I used to go round with a Dutch cap in my handbag. Funny solid round bit of rubber that we bunged up ourselves before sex and then pulled out with a big pop six hours later. Surely Dutch people didn’t wear caps like that? Awfully hot and uncomfortable.

  Honestly, sex. Is it worth it? I used to know a wonderful old lady of sixty (well, she seemed like an old lady then, though now, of course, being the same age myself, I am rather staggered to imagine that I would describe her in those terms). A few months after her birthday she suddenly confided in me: “You know, darling, I have decided to give up sex. I think it rather undignified for any woman of my age to have sex, don’t you?”

  Anyway, I read the other day that a third of women over the age of sixty no longer sleep with their husbands—older women prefer separate rooms to what the paper euphemistically called “close encounters.” It was “snoring” and “fidgeting and uncontrollable libidos” that forced them out. Apparently Evelyn Waugh said that he’d rather visit his dentist than share the marital bed.

  May 8

  Just read about someone who boasts that her mother was still doing the Hokey Pokey with two false hips at the age of 101. Is that marvelous, admirable and splendid? Or is it, as I think, simply barking mad and crackers?

  Later

  Finally dyed the cat’s rescue jacket black. I haven’t dyed anything since I was about twenty, when Penny and I used to go to Pontings and buy old men’s vests and dye them purple and wear them as mini-dresses. This time the dyeing was fantastically successful. The cat’s rescue jacket came out an amazingly cool blue-gray and expensive-looking. Wish I’d done it ages ago. Unfortunately, however, my fingers have gone the same smart shade of gray and no amount of pumicing will get them clean.

  Then went to have my frightful toes chopped about by the chiropodist, a rather sad woman from Yugoslavia. She told me she was so depressed a couple of weekends ago that she’d had a bath, put on her best makeup, dressed herself up in her nicest clothes and gone down to Paddington station to throw herself under a train. “But then I felt so stupid, I came home again,” she said.

  I seem to be the recipient of so many weird confidences. What the hell. Someone has to be.

  May 17th

  Chickens came home to roost tonight. Had a dinner party of my own, which was a complete disaster.

  First of all, Hughie couldn’t come at the last minute because he felt so terrible. James said he was going downhill fast. So, obviously, James couldn’t come. Penny had some relative to stay who I’d generously said could come, thinking that one extra woman wouldn’t be too bad, but at the last count we had seven women and two men—a nightmare. In desperation I rang Archie, hoping that perhaps he might be in London, and, amazingly, he was, and seemed very keen.

  Penny’s relative, a sallow widow from Wiltshire, was, as my father would say, “perfectly nice.” How I hope that no one ever describes me as “perfectly nice.” There is something about that word “perfectly” that sums it all up. Anyway, much to her credit, and unusual in a perfectly nice person, she smoked. But when I insisted that she be allowed to have a fag, there was a ghastly silence all round, and she said that no, she’d have a cigarette outside.

  As an ex-smoker I am fiercely pro-smokers’ right to smoke, and got extremely cross that my guests had exerted such social pressure that the poor woman was forced into the rain in the garden. Dangerously, I said that it was preposterous not to allow guests to smoke, and how would they like it if I started banning deadly topics of conversation from my house? For instance, I said, I would like to ban from my table all conversations about alternative medicine, films I have seen, how dangerous London is getting these days and moans about old age, because they are so fantastically boring, but I am too polite to do so.

  There was general laughter and then over the main course Tim started talking about mugging and danger—he’d been mugged recently—and then after general mugging talk, with everyone topping each other with tales of hoodies, the pale widow said that after she’d been mugged in Salisbury the only way she got over it was to go to a healer in Wells, and then everyone told their alternative medicine stories. After going out to get the pudding, gnashing my teeth with rage, I got back to find that one of them was trying to tell the plot of the movie she’d seen last Saturday.

  “The actress was…” she said. “Oh, dear…I can’t remember…not Nicole Kidman, not Meryl Streep, the other one…rabbits…obsessive love affair…”

  “Senior moment,” said someone. And then everyone started talking about how we’re all losing our memories.

  It’s true that I can never find where I have parked my car. But I could never find where I’d parked my car, even when I bought my first Fiat 500 at the age of eighteen. I can’t even distinguish one car from another and can only remember which is my car by reading the numberplate. And if a couple of years ago I lost my room in a hotel in Italy and was found wailing on the wrong floor, that’s about the sum total of my recent forgetfulness. If anything I find my memory has got considerably sharper as I get older, partly because it was so appalling in the first place, partly because I am so much less anxious than I used to be and partly, possibly, because I stuff myself with fish oils, remembering that Jeeves’s mighty brain was due to the huge amount of fish he ate.

  Thought: Have I written all this before somewhere?

  After that we got on to the last cliché dinner-party subject, how time speeds up as you get older. I explained the theory that when you’re three, the next year is a third of your life, but when you’re sixty, the next year is one-sixtieth of your life, which gives it the impression of shortness, but everyone looked at me blankly and then Marion said that Christmas came every five minutes, hardly worth taking down the tree, until Archie, who was all too aware of what was going on managed to wrench the conversation round to “the worst meal I’ve ever eaten” which was, if not totally original, at least entertaining. Changing the conversation round, though, took a huge amount of psychic power. Helping Archie maintain the topic, I felt like an HGV driver doing a U-turn, everyone dying, really, to talk about age and alternative medicine.

  I went out to make the coffee and, blow me, when I got back they’d all returned to the same old tramlines. (No doubt Jack would say: “Tram? What is a tram, Mum?”) Now they were talking about whether there was life after death. The perfectly nice woman from Wiltshire turned out to be a great believer in God, and stupidly, though I should have kept quiet, I said that I believed in absolutely nothing at all, and thought that science would eventually explain the entire meaning of life, if indeed there was one, which I doubted. After the chilly silence that followed I tried to ameliorate it by saying how Richard Dawkins is an enthusiast about everything, how he says science is so much more exciting, mysterious, awesome, blah, blah, than religion, but I felt I had said the wrong thing.

  Everyone looked at me pitifully (particularly the women and, worst of all, Archie, who I think has been known to set foot in a church now and again) as if I were a co
ld-blooded amphibian that had never experienced joy. I tried to explain that indeed I did feel joy, as I could feel all my DNA and micromolecules dancing in tune to their counterparts in trees and mountains and rain and Scottish lochs, but the damage had been done. Those spiritual clearly thought I was a horrible, insensitive killjoy. I felt distinctly unfeminine, as I heard myself reply, when Marion asked if I didn’t think I’d see my father again when I died: “Absolutely NOT! And he was certainly convinced he’d never see me again. Although it would be lovely to meet him again, it would be a very unpleasant surprise for both of us to find that our views about the existence of an afterlife had been wrong all along.”

  After that they all left, saying they’d had a perfectly wonderful time, and I knew they were lying their heads off, and I was left to do the washing-up feeling a complete idiot. Even Archie went early, saying he had a train to catch, which I’m sure was an excuse. Oh, dear. I bet the scales have fallen from his eyes and he thinks I’m just a loud, shouting, horrible person.

  Later

  Glenn Close.

  May 27

  Latest mad piece of spam:

  No More Traffic Camera Tickets!!

  SAFE and EASY to use. Unlike license plate covers—photo blocker is legal in all countries around the world.

  If only.

  Midnight

  Huge commotion in the street, so loud that I went out in my dressing gown. A dark shape was slumped against my neighbor’s wall two doors down. A police car whined down the street. Then an ambulance. Some kind of knifing, apparently.

  May 30

  Turned out that the man I’d complained about, whose radio had been playing so loudly, had been stabbed to death by a friend over a £10 loan. Curse of Sharp, I’m afraid. It always works.

  June 2

  I’ve been looking in on Hughie most days recently. Some days he can get out and says he feels reasonably OK for a couple of hours; others he gets too tired and has to go to bed or sit in a chair at home. He has got rather hooked on daytime television, and raves about programs like Richard and Judy and Countdown. When I last saw him he was so deep into an old black-and-white movie, something with Richard Todd in it, that I had to sit through it with him as he wouldn’t switch it off.

  “If I’d known how good television was in the afternoons,” he said, “I’d have never gone to work.”

  Later

  When I was in the kitchen today, I noticed Michelle dropping an unused teabag of green tea on the floor, and then picking it up and throwing it away.

  “Why on earth are you doing that?” I asked. “It’s perfectly usable. The tea hasn’t touched the floor, and it’s going to be sterilized by boiling water anyway.”

  Michelle looked at me with disgust. “No, eet ees dirty!” she said.

  I once cooked a whole stew for six people, which fell on the floor. I simply scraped it up and served it. But I suppose it’s the old wartime frugality that shows through with me. Waste not, want not.

  I find it extraordinary to think how much change I have lived through during the past sixty years. When I was young we had no car, no telly, no supermarkets, no frozen food, no mobile phones, no central heating (the doors were always closed in winter to keep the heat in) and the lights were always turned off whenever we left a room, to save on electricity.

  It seems incredible to me, as I sit here, stifled by central heating, listening to the whirring of a dishwasher in the background, that when I was small, a man used to come round every evening on a bicycle with a long, lighted stick to ignite the gas lamps in our London street. There was still a working granary in the London street, which I passed on my daily walk down to the river to feed the seagulls. Rag-and-bone men drove by on weekends with their carts and nose-bagged horses, shouting their strange stylized cry: “Ragnboooone!,” and the roads were covered with steaming piles of horse manure. And in the summer I would collect huge blocks of ice from the fishmonger to keep in our “icebox,” a lead-lined substitute for a fridge. Nearly everyone in the streets was thin and white. Their teeth were often bad, their hair was, like mine at the time, washed only once a week, and everyone smelled, it being long before the days of deodorant. We were living in postwar London, where, as George Orwell wrote, austerity ruled and everything smelled of “boiled cabbage and sweat, of grimy walls and dirty clothes.”

  June 4

  I can tell that already Jack believes I’m losing my mind, but I think he has thought me fairly barking for the last few years because he always assumes I’ve lost my keys, and helps me across the road. Today he said as we were sorting out the pushchair for me to take Gene to the Park: “Why did you just say ‘bugger’?”

  “I didn’t say ‘bugger,’” I said.

  “Well, you did.”

  “I didn’t, darling. It’s not the sort of thing I say.”

  “Well, you did say it. I don’t mind if you said ‘bugger’ or not, but you definitely said it.”

  Did I say it? Did he mishear? Am I going mad, old?

  June 7

  I have Gene while Jack and Chrissie go away for a night on their own. I am so lucky! I keep looking at his little cup and plate; I’ve got all the toys out and his cot’s all ready. I feel quite skippy inside, as if I had a new boyfriend coming over. How Jack and Chrissie will be able to cope without him for two days I don’t know.

  When they dropped him round he was wearing a little blue tank top I had knitted him, and looking like such a tiny little man, even though he can’t walk yet.

  We got to Holland Park OK. Jack and Chrissie had fixed his car seat in the backseat of my car. But getting Gene and the pushchair in is as difficult as doing Rubik’s Cube with a blindfold on. Eventually I managed to click all the straps into place without him screaming too much and about an hour later, we arrived at the park and fed the birds, an activity he’d like to do all the time, as far as I can see.

  It’s odd how happy I can be just standing about feeding birds, while Gene watches from his pushchair. When Jack was young and we mooched about in Holland Park, I’d scream internally with boredom. I had the washing to do, I had friends to ring. Oh, I’d be thinking all the time, I want to get a life!

  These days I don’t want to get a life. Or, rather, I’ve got a life. Looking after Gene.

  We walked round a mysterious wooded bit at the back of the park. I got very nervous when we saw three extremely sinister hoodies on a bench in the distance, clearly involved in some kind of drug deal. One of them had an iPod (I think) plugged into his ears; one held a pit bull terrier on a chain. Unfortunately Gene spotted the dog and, yelling: “Do! Do!” insisted we walk past. When we came up to them, he grinned and shouted, pointing to the dog, while I maintained my usual petrified Don’t-you-darelay-a-finger-on-me!-I-am-a-feisty-old-bat-with-a-killer-handbag! expression. As we paused for Gene to look, the hoodies instantly burst into wreaths of affectionate, friendly smiles, each of them gave Gene a high-five, and the one with the iPod let him listen to the music on his earphones. I felt horrible being so suspicious. I suppose it is possible to be a creepy drug dealer and charming with small children at the same time.

  Finally got back to the car after Gene had examined what seemed to me every single blade of grass in the entire park, and it was a case of so far, so good. But then I had to fold down the pushchair, and after about twenty minutes trying to pull and push at all the catches, I finally gave up and just rammed it, open, into the back. Then, once I’d put Gene into the car seat, I couldn’t get his straps to snap shut. Maneuvering everything is like trying to put up a deck chair while wearing boxing gloves.

  As I couldn’t possibly drive him home with no safety belt on at all, I improvised by tying a plastic bag to one side of the seat, and then tying that to the finger of a glove, and knotting the whole thing up with a rubbery thing with hooks on the end that you use for keeping luggage on the top of your car. In the end, poor Gene looked like one of those strange and sinister parcels you sometimes see on the luggage carousel at Stan
sted, a parcel that has, apparently, been there for years and looks as if it will be there for another few years to come. I drove back very slowly indeed, worrying in case he should suddenly propel himself through the windscreen.

  When we got back, he tucked into some pasta, peas and ham, all mushed up. I gave him some fizzy water, and as he felt the sparkles, he let it all run down his front, roaring with laughter, as if it was a huge joke played on him by the water.

  He went to bed peacefully, and I felt so happy sitting downstairs, watching telly, knowing he was upstairs in his cot. I could hear his sweet soft breathing on the monitor, and I thought: Well, Marie, if your cup doesn’t runneth over now, I don’t know what.

  Having said that: What would it be like if someone else were in the same room as me, also contentedly listening to the monitor? Someone friendly. Like Archie. Have to admit that it would be rather nice. Then realized that he probably was, at this very moment, entertaining the Swedish bimbo team at the Ivy, and stuffing their faces with gravlax.

  Later

  I was right. I couldn’t have said “bugger.” I must have said “buggy.”

  June 8th

  I took Gene back to Brixton in the evening and put him to bed, because Jack and Chrissie were coming back after supper. I stayed over, so they could be late. I went to bed at eleven, but there was no sign of them at twelve, and by one o’clock I was panicking. By two o’clock I was desperate.

  What would I do if anything had happened to them? Had they been killed in a car crash? It so, should I move to Brixton to live with Gene and care for him, or should he move in with me? What school should I send him to? Jack and Chrissie are committed to state education. What should I do if they were both in a coma? If I’d sent him to a private school and then they both suddenly woke up, would they be furious and never speak to me again?

  Suddenly heard the sound of a flushing loo and, convinced burglars had invaded, I nervously pottered out of my room and said: “Hello?”

  It was Jack. Turned out they’d been back since 11:30 but I’d been asleep and hadn’t heard them come in.