Fine at seventy
Joan Woollcombe
Now that I am seventy, I am entitled to feel borne on a rising tide of power — there are 8 million of us of retirement age and over; by 1980 there will be 10 or 11 million and every one with a vote.
Age is something that happens to everyone if they don't die first. I'm glad I have not died first, because there are public advantages and personal pleasures. In public life, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are making our demands felt: over 20 million in the United States, where their ' seniors' are demanding better pensions, better housing and better medicare and no geriatric ghettos. Governer Rockefeller, at a conference on ageing, got a taste of their temper when confronted by banners proclaiming "You can't ignore our vote," and at the White House the mood of the audience at the President's conference on ageing was summed up by one small, whitehaired woman who rapped on the floor with her cane and shouted, "We old folks don't want any more hot air, we want action . . "
And here, in Britain? We are not 'old people,' or, worse, 'old folk' but we are senior citizens! Imagine daring to class Baroness Stocks, Lady Diana Cooper or the golfing lady, pushing eighty, who did a hole in one for the second time a short while back — as "old folk "?
We are nearly as militant and nearly as well-organised as our contemporaries across the Atlantic: with our National Federation of Old Age Pensions Associations (1,600 branches and 350,000 members), the Pensioners' Union and the British Association for Retired Persons, with massive support from the trade unions and lipservice from all three political parties.
What is it like to have reached seventy? It is never I who am old, until I'm 'wonderful for my age.' I avoid using mod jargon or apeing my youngers and betters but it is a tricky interim to negotiate. Contemporaries always look older than I feel: those who registered for service in the last war remember the shock of seeing the old creatures of our then age group: 35 and 40 looking really elderly. Not us, of course. But, what now at 60 or 70?
Boasting? You'll do it too, later — when, after 70, you continue to run your flat, cottage or family home singlehanded, drive your car, still keeping your fifty years' licence clean, work in your garden or even sail your boat. You'll boast all right. I do! Like a neighbour of seventy, a retired surgeon, who lives alone and says: "I enjoy being on my own," and does all his own shopping, cleaning and cooking. If you can afford it, you will tend to take friends out to meals but a great deal of entertainment can be clone and had by giving the young a welcome, plenty of plonk and cheese eats and letting them talk.
When they call to see you, as they do, on their way from work, it is not entirely for the drinks you give them that they come. You know things they do not. The revolt of youth in the 'twenties was far more exciting and effective than anybody's ' Lib ' today; and their sometimes dreary struggle to 'live in sin' on a grant can be less exciting than your own mad elopement all those years ago.
And, calling a spade a spade is something you can do: aged as you are, you talk of strikes, not industrial action; of people whom you don't like or who don't like you not as ' withdrawn ' but as tiresome; of children who are damn difficult and not just maladjusted; of being sacked, not just 'made redundant.'
Of course you are fair game.
The telephone: "Gran (or auntie qr mum), can you put me up tonight? I don't want any food and the sofa will clo " Cheerfully you tear open tins and put the sleeping bag on the sofa and you don't ash any questions at all. You never ' talk ' and they know that.
Over' seventy, nostalgia is lethal. We have all come down in the world since politicians thought they were economists and workers that they know better than anyone else. It is good enough that we are alive and fairly healthy to cope with it all. You will earn (and get) the gratitude of your slightly younger friends and relatives who worry about your ex ceeding your powers and asking for trouble. At seventy I try to trim my activities to avoid, the small disasters which handicap one's mobility, so important as independence is cherished.
I would say to those in their thirties, looking forward forty years to their seventies, that they'll find it's well worth while to have lived, despite the difficulties to be battled through. Senior citizens are valuable and just as so many children get on better with grandparents than parents, so the young are kind enough to like their elderly friends.
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