Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Free Page A

remains a natural response to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”) at least you can see what it’s all about. And what would be the alternative? Swift’s Struldbrugs in
Gulliver’s Travels
, born to immortality, were condemned to an eternity of senile decay and estrangement from society. They presumably suffered from some genetic derangement; I think we must prefer genetic normality and accept the consequences.
    Society is stuck with us, I’m afraid, and it will get worse. In countries with high life expectancies, a third of today’s children may reach one hundred. In 1961 there were just five hundred and ninety-two people over the age of one hundred in this country; by 2060 there will be four hundred and fifty-five thousand. Consider those figures, and gasp. Old people were of interest in the past simply because there weren’t that many of them – the sage is a pejorative term suggesting that old age necessarily implies wisdom. That view may have changed radically toward the end of the twenty-first century, I’d guess, when the Western world is awash with centenarians. Goodness knows what that will do for attitudes toward the elderly; I’m glad I shan’t be around to find out. I am concerned with here and now, when I can take stock and bear witness.
    *
    One of the few advantages of writing fiction in old age is that you have been there, done it all, experienced every decade. I can remember worrying when I was writing at forty, at fifty, that I didn’t know what it was like to be seventy, eighty, if I wanted to include an older character. Well, I didn’t know what it was like to be a man, either, but you have to stick your neck out – use empathy, imagination, observation, all the novelist’s tools. But it is certainly a help to have acquired that long backwards view; not only do you know (even if it is getting a bit hazy) what it felt like to be in your twenties, or thirties, but you remember also the relative unconcern about what was to come.
    You aren’t going to get old, of course, when you are young. We won’t ever be old, partly because we can’t imagine what it is like to be old, but also because we don’t want to, and – crucially – are not particularly interested. When I was a teenager, I spent much time with my Somerset grandmother, then around seventy. She was a brisk and applied grandmother who was acting effectively as a mother-substitute; I was devoted to her, but I don’t remember ever considering what it could be like to
be
her. She simply
was
; unchangeable, unchanging, in her tweed skirt, her blouse, her Shetland cardigan, her suit for Sunday church, worn with chenille turban, her felt hat for shopping trips. Her opinions that had been honed in the early part of the century; her horror of colors that “clashed;” her love of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Berlioz. I never thought about how it must be to be her; equally, I couldn’t imagine her other than she was, as though she had sprung thus into life, had never been young.
    Old age is forever stereotyped. Years ago, I was a judge for a national children’s writing competition. They had been asked to write about “grandparents;” in every offering the grandparent was a figure with stick and hearing aid, knitting by the fireside or pottering in the garden. The average grandparent would then have been around sixty, and probably still at work. When booking a rail ticket by phone recently, I found myself shifted from the automated voice to a real person when I had said I had a Senior Railcard, presumably on the grounds that I might get muddled and require help – which was kind, I suppose, but I was managing quite well. We are too keen to bundle everyone by category; as a child, I used to be maddened by the assumption that I would get along famously with someone just because we were both eight.
    All that we have in common, we in this new demographic, are our aches and pains and disabilities – and, yes, that high C evoked by