A New Friend

I visited Mrs B. the other day. She had celebrated her birthday earlier in the week. She is now one hundred years old. Neat and tidy, welcoming me into her room in an Elderly People’s Home, she said her birthday had been marvellous. She had sat in a corner and members of the family had come one by one to talk with her. She had been tired at the end of it. They had made a big thing of it in the Home as well, for she is the oldest of the thirty two residents. I asked if they were all women. No, she said, we have one man, and – a slight suggestion of disapproval here – he is made a great fuss of.

Mrs B. is one of nine children. Her father was a Methodist minister at a time when it was normal for people of that calling to move home and church every three years. So she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of English geography. The children never had new clothes, she said, but had to be content with’ hand-downs’ and her mother could perform miracles with adapting them as well as making a house full of furniture they were also landed with, into a family home.

Born soon after the beginning of the last century, Mrs B. has lived through the two major world wars and the many others that have followed them, and seen the whole character and culture of a society she was born into, change beyond recognition. She finds television intrusive, listens to the radio but finds it hard to cope with after a while, and whilst she enjoys company is always glad to retreat to her little room. I had the feeling that she was as much an observer of what was going on about her, as she is a participant.

Someone burst into the room at one stage in our conversation, brandishing a meals list. Mrs B. gently but firmly asked her to come at some other time, for the present was not convenient. And slightly chastened, the hearty helper retreated. I felt a sense of awe in meeting this little lady for the first time – I shall see her again next month – for in her quiet and dignified way she is a depository of our history as well as her own.

B.R.

Living and Studying

My eldest grandson was talking about his school work in a critical year of his education. He said, ‘have you studied the Second World War?’ ‘I was there!’ I said; ‘I don’t need to study it’. I was wrong, of course, and he was right to ask the question. Living is not the same as studying.

History must always try to take a distant view of events. As a boy moving from childhood to adolescence, I was embroiled in the consequences of war and the prejudices that accompany it. I confessed to my grandson that I was still affected by those prejudices. Absorbing an atmosphere of hatred towards Germans- ‘The Hun’ as Winston Churchill’ demonised then - it was not easy to distinguish the people from the Nazi regime that had capitalised on a national sense of inferiority following the harsh peace settlement at the end of the 1914-18 War. I still have to pause and think rationally about Germany. One of my best friends is German. He is a pastor caring for 500 elderly people living in various Lutheran homes in Frankfurt. He grew up in the devastating post-war years, when more and more was learned about the monstrous regime with which Adolf Hitler tried to exterminate a race and overwhelm the western world.

Hosted by him in the Spring of 1996, I was one of a group of eight of his friends meeting for a meal in his home. One of them had been an associate of Oskar Schindler. He told us that in the last few days he had given over 40 interviews on radio and TV, the film ‘Schindler’s List’ having just been released in Germany. Unwelcome facts were meeting memories- buried for some, still raw for others – and history was beginning to form, not as convenient myths but as uncomfortable truths.

My grandson is studying what was once part of my life and that of millions of others, and can do so in a more dispassionate way than perhaps I can. Contemporary historians however argue amongst themselves about their discipline. Once presumed to be a scientific search for historical facts, history is often now recognised as an approximate study from which the writer’s own personal judgement and experience can never be absent. So perhaps the personal judgement of my grandson and the experience of his grandpa need each other!

B.R.

New Perspective

The pianist Alfred Brendel , who is also a poet and an essayist and reputed to have a wonderful sense of humour, has for a long time been one of my heroes. I have heard him play in Concert several times, and have one of his recordings of Mozart concertos together with an album of the Schubert sonatas. He was the first person to record all of Beethoven’s piano works and is currently making a world tour. It will be his last. He is 77, as I am, and he will give his final performance in Vienna next December. On Saturday he was responding to the Questions and Answers column in The Guardian magazine.

Asked what his greatest fear was he said that it was the collapse of the planet. His guiltiest pleasure he admitted was keeping smokers out of his house, and three things that he owed his parents were their loving care, a set of excellent teeth and a need to branch out. To the question ‘how do you relax?’ he answered ‘Looking. Reading. (Not listening: it’s too intense)’. ‘Tell us a secret’ said his questioner, and Brendel’s answer was ‘The piano sings’, which is exactly how it feels when one listens to him performing . Asked what he found deplorable in others, he said ‘Fanaticism, unreliability, pretence, and defined ‘the antics of an ageing brain’ as the trait he deplores in himself.

The phrase has stayed with me. It's just how it can feel as you get older, at least for me. Antics. The frustration of wayward thoughts, the difficulty of finding a word that’s got hidden in the fog of memory, forgetfulness (I left a building today and had to go back twice to collect things I had left behind and each time nearly fell over the same unexpected step as I left); misspelling every other word I type on this computer: they are all very well described by this ironic word, ‘antics’. I shall use it – if only to myself - in future. It transforms the inconvenience of ageing into a new sort of game. I shall try to be less angry with my ageing brain and deplore it as Brendel does, but laugh at it as well.

Thank you Alfred Brendel for being one of the most perfect and humane of musicians; and for this new insight, that may turn the occasional agonies of age into a series of amusing antics.

B.R.

A Signifcant Day

It was my seventy seventh birthday on Tuesday. Children are often asked if they feel ‘different’ on their birthday and the answer tends to be in the negative, but rapidly advancing years are a sobering experience, and on Tuesday I did feel a bit different; there were kind family and friends around helping it to be so. It was a mixture of three emotions : nostalgic reflection, limited expectation and quiet celebration.

I have been reading about the veteran journalist Katherine Whitehorn . I knew her late sister once but that is as near as I ever got to a remarkable woman who at 80 still loves and practices her profession. At the time of her ‘Guardian’ interview on Friday, she was off to Oregon on an assignment. After many years of very happy marriage she is now a widow. She says that she came to terms with her loss by continuing to be engaged with the world.

NOSTALGIA is not something I am very good at, and I suppose I distrust it a bit – what has been can never be again. I don’t want to live in the past. In her interview Whitehorn quotes someone called Jim Fiebig who ironically says ‘If you can look back on your life with contentment, you have one of man’s most precious gifts – a selective memory’. Well, I find the selective process isn’t that easy to control, and although there are wonderful memories, the unwanted ones often get in the way. A friend described herself the other day as contented. Perversely perhaps I am not sure that I want to be like that.

EXPECTATION has to be limited in time and ambition when you are in your 78th. year, but reaching for something more that you have, is part of being human and I am open to that. New experiences (but not too many responsibilities please ) are welcome at this address! ‘I’m looking forward to my 80’s’ Whitehorn says, I have friends and relatives in their 90’s who say it is a fine decade. I’ll report back once I know if they are right’, she concludes.

CELEBRATION is certainly one of the pleasures of being older. So many things that one values and enjoys. Music, art, books (there is a never ending stream of good novels these days), Cinema. Theatre, the countryside, good food, the Church - fallible but still important for the faith it represents. Most of all as the years progress, my friends become increasingly important, and my wife and family precious beyond words. All the others are signs of life, but my family is life itself.

B.R.

Ageing and Change

One of the hardest things about getting older is having to come to terms with the inescapable physical changes that the years inflict on you. There will be all sorts of medical explanations to do with physical deterioration, brain cells coming to the end of their time, bones getting weaker; but the visible effects of ageing can be depressing (if they are your own) and surprising when you see how they effect other people.

I was at a regional meeting of people of my own profession this week and amongst the hundred or so of us, there were quite a few retired people, some of whom were at college at the same time as me. We gravitated towards each other at the lunch break, catching up on news, reflecting on how things had changed since we started out on our work, and all the time doubtless noticing what the ravages of time had done to us!

The thing that interested me was how some people were immediately recognisable, especially their voices, the cadencies of their speech and the things they talked about, reminiscent of fifty years ago when we were sorting out the world in general and the Church in particular. Suddenly we were students again. ‘The years rolled back’, as they say. Of course we were older, our faces lined, some of us with hearing problems, all of us happy to trade stories of what we are doing with our lives as people with few responsibilities now but still with a sense of vocation.

But then there were others who were quite unrecognisable. One of them– cheerfully boasting that he had ‘two new hips and several other additions’ – was like a complete stranger. He knew me (which was encouraging) but even when he told me his name I failed to find any physical connection with the 25 year old I once knew. Perhaps if we had talked for longer the situation would have changed.

I was looking at a video the other day of a holiday we spent last summer and I watched this old man walking around somewhat unsteadily and seeming to be a little outside his group, and realised of course that it was me. Age becomes a sort of costume drama in which you are still you, but are wearing the clothes that belong to someone else. Nothing we can do about it. ‘Mustn’t grumble’ a neighbour said to me today. O.K. But it is a curiosity, this process of ageing .

B.R.

Stereotyping the Seniors

‘The University of The Third Age’ sounds more mind-stretching than it really is. It’s a national organisation in the U.K. and although each branch is answerable to the parent body, local groups do as they wish. In Bath we have a monthly meeting for everyone with a visiting lecturer, and more than thirty seminars meet fortnightly for particular studies. The group I belong to study European issues and Current Affairs. There are social events and visits to places of interest. By such means several hundred older people in our city work at keeping mentally alive!

I see that a U3A group of eight women in Brent, London, have taken part in a nationwide survey looking at how women over 60, are treated by contemporary Cinema. There has been almost no research in this field. The only major work of mainly American films from 1927 to 1995 was published in 2000. The researchers then concluded that most of the films that featured older woman in a leading part presented them in a handful of stereotypes, such as rich dowagers, frustrated spinsters, and housewives and mothers who were either down-trodden, domineering or angelic.

The Brent group concentrated their study on thirteen recent British films. They looked for the physical images representing age, the health of the characters, their relationships with a partner or children and young people in general, and whether they had an occupation outside the home. In eight of the films the plot centred on a rivalry between an older and younger woman. Subtle camera work emphasised this by concentrating on gnarled hands or lined faces in contrast to the smooth beauty of the younger women. In only two of the films was there a supportive relationship between the generations. Widows were eccentric and whereas in one film, the older woman was sexually active, she is condemned by the other characters and humiliated by them.

The research project was small, concentrating on a very specific subject but, it took the group six months of quite intense work to complete, but ‘it was worth it’, they say, and they came to the unsurprising conclusion that whilst there is now less stereotyping, there are few films that reflect older women’s real lives. Their work came to the attention of Dr. Josephine Dolan of the Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England. She convened a Conference to examine the images of ageing women in the media from a woman’s point of view. The Brent group were invited to present the conclusions of their research as part of the conference programme. The British Film Institute worked with the group and has published an on-line guide called ‘Older Women in Feature Films’.

B.R.

" O'rl Right"?

When you move to a new place you have to learn a new local language. It can be more complicated in areas where there is a strong regional tradition. Used to greeting people with ‘hello’, ‘good morning’, sometimes adding a ‘how are you?’, we quickly discovered when we moved to Bath that in our neighbourhood people use a distinctive phrase, which is more a greeting than an inquiry about someone’s health. People say ‘o’rl right?’ without necessarily expecting an answer. It’s a recognition of the other person, and may then go on to a discussion about well-being or the state of he weather, but ‘O.K.’ is more than enough that people expect in response.

In the cardiac rehabilitation sessions I go to a couple of times most weeks, it’s the question we throw at each other as we prepare to engage in the treadmill of exercises that help to keep us fit. But here we expect answers, honest ones that reflect how we are coping as older people who have recovered from some sort of serious heart condition. Often the responses are not about cardiac troubles but many other problems as well, mostly to do with getting older. There’s a shrug of the shoulders as we share an up to date record of our aches and pains!

One of us has had double hip replacements, the last one of which hasn’t worked out as it should. He was having to see a consultant about it two weeks ago and, missing classes last week, I am wondering if he has had bad news about an operation that can leave the patient worse off than they were before. Another friend – one of the few women who are part of the forty or so of us who go to one or other of the four sessions each week- had a serious operation for cancer nine months ago, from which she has recovered remarkably well. Some one else who I know well and with whom we share stories, is arthritic and getting down on the exercise mat for the variety of exercises which normally end each session, is for him a very painful business indeed. But he manages it.

Its one of the penalties of getting older, that you are likely to have not one but a collection of health problems. I try to discipline myself to refrain from making a daily list of them (and wondering what’s going to come next). Mainly it’s fine, and if bits of me begin to wear out, that’s the deal with old age. It’s just rather good sometimes to respond to the question ‘o’rl right?’ by telling a kindly friend, what isn’t right at all, but ‘o’rl wrong’.

B.R.